Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.
Article 25, clause 1:
> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.
These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.
They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.
I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
>They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
It also means enterprising prosecutors and regulators can use it as a cudgel against their opponents. As others have mentioned, the checkmark already meant very little when it came to whether the poster was trustworthy or not. It's like fining Chrome and Firefox for accepting letsencrypt certificates, because previously there was a $10 cost to having a lock appear on your site, and letsencrypt making it free misleads users.
It does. I don't think this example is as good as you think, though. You used to have to give out your full legal name and address and have them verified to get an SSL certificate and the lock icon. When any random website could get the lock icon, this did indeed lead to more people typing their passwords into phishing sites, thinking they were real because they had the lock icon, and this was indeed a real problem.
They could have chosen to only show the lock for EV certificates, and show something else, or no icon, for DV certificates, but instead they made a choice that was misleading. Google probably should have been fined for that, but not very much, because it wasn't foreseen. I think Mozilla was still a non-profit at the time.
The distinction is not as clear nor as useful as some make it sound. For example, is my pickup truck "personal" or "private"? Or is it personal as long as I drive myself and my stuff around, but as soon as I offer to sell moving services to others, it becomes private? Or is it still personal as long as I don't scale the business to more trucks? What if my brother and I want to pool two trucks? What if I contribute the truck and he contributes the driving skill, but we are both part owners in the business? What if he doesn't want to take the risk of capital ownership and instead wants a steady wage? At what point does the truck stop being personal property?
My personal view of this is that Marxism doesn't really have much to say about organizations below a certain scale, and what it has to say about larger scale orgs is that they are icky/alienating. Everything else is more about trying to verbalize the ickyness than to explain anything substantial about the org mechanics.
I first heard about black owner appraisal discrimination almost a year ago, and I tried to find studies of this phenomenon. The closest thing I could find was this study by Brookings (https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...) which found that homes in black neighborhoods are appraised at lower values than structurally comparable homes in non-black neighborhoods. I have not seen a study of the situation described in this article, where the owner swaps family photos and asks a non-black friend to meet the appraiser.
Does anyone know of a study? I am interested in whether this effect is real and any attempts to quantify its magnitude.
There have been numerous articles like this one, but I fear that they suffer from publication bias (no one prints the article where the black owner received the same or higher appraisal), and the presented sample size is always small.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...) thinks there are 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, which is approximately 2^240. If you only need to assign a unique ID to each atom, then you need a counter with approximately 240 bits.
But if you needed to store even one bit of information per atom (e.g. whether it is hydrogen or not), then don't you need 2^240 bits uncompressed?
MA specifically addresses his education in this interview. He says that he learned most of what he knows via independent reading, that his high school was not high quality (his computer class teacher being a lucky accident that he almost missed), and that he identifies as part of the Midwestern farmer/tinker culture (e.g. Bob Noyce).
How big a problem is the possible breakage of C extensions for new code? Is there currently some standard "future proofed for multi-thread" way of writing them that will reduce the odds of the C extension breaking? And maybe also being compatible with PyPy? Or do developers today need to write a separate version for each interpreter that they want to support?
There are projects[1] that are abstracting away the C extension interface in order to standardize C extensions across implementations and prevent breaking changes.
If they were evicted and living on the streets, then they would not have accrued a rent liability for those months. So the total liability now would be less.
You could argue that the current state of large accrued rent liabilities is better than the alternative world of smaller liabilities, more homeless, more deaths, etc, but the OP is not making the inverse claim.
Further, IIRC the moratorium relied on self-reported hardship. Is it so hard to imagine that people who could have actually afforded their rent decided to game the system a bit and accrue (rather than pay) their liability? Such behavior would also cause the current liabilities to be higher.
Almost all people who are evicted find a cheaper place to live. They do not live on the streets. That is why there is a large range of places in this country with a large range of rents. They may need to move in with friends or family, they may need to move out of SF and into Oakland, or even out of California and to Arizona, etc, but they can find some place.
This idea that if you can't afford a meal in a restaurant then you must immediately go begging for food is just odd. People have agency. They plan out their lives according to what they can afford.
One drawback of trying to keep people who experience an income loss from living within their new (lower) means is that it prevents more rental units from coming online and thus rental prices from falling. A unit occupied by someone not paying rent is one taken out of the market, propping up prices for those that remain, and thus making it more expensive for the household to find a cheaper place to live. Many of the business that shut down during covid aren't coming back. They will be replaced by other businesses, and at some point you have to recognize that life has knocked you down a bit and it might take some time to get back to your previous spending level. When that happens, you don't move to the streets, you move to a place you can afford. The last thing you want to do is tell everyone to keep living in their old place and pretending as if nothing has changed.
But during a pandemic when lots of businesses were impacted, lots of jobs were lost. Many companies had hiring freezes, even in sectors that didn't care( e.g. Google).
If someone lost their job due to this, and gets evicted, there was no guarantee they would be able to find any job, anywhere. So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
I find it weird that Americans still argue about the eviction moratoriums and the money given to people to avoid mass homelessness and hopefulness. Nobody in France is arguing against the "partial unemployment" scheme that was implemented here that allowed employers to not lay off people and instead the government paid their salary( to an extent of course), or eviction moratoriums.
If anything, the criticism was that many people fell through the cracks.
> there was no guarantee they would be able to find any job,
Yes, there are no guarantees - ever.
> So moving to a cheaper place wasn't really an option.
Woah. How does that follow, now? While it's true that there are no guarantees in life, you always have options. But living in a place that you can't afford is not really one of them. Life is full of all sorts of crazy things that happen to you unexpectedly, and absolutely none of them entitle you to live beyond your means once your savings are exhausted. Now there are safety nets for income like unemployment insurance or SS disability, and with covid additional tax refunds were given, but none of these income insurance programs will be enough to make up for a lost job, so if you are one of those who lost their job due to covid, then your means will be reduced. And whatever those lower means are, you need to be able to pay rent from those means. It doesn't matter whether your means were reduced by covid or foreign competition or rising interest rates or going through a divorce.
Moreover the alternative view, that you don't need to pay your bills because covid happened, is a truly toxic form of entitlement.
If you have no revenues and don't know when you'll have any, moving to a cheaper place is a temporary "fix" you don't know for how long you could afford.
Landlords almost never "settle" with the renter in this way, they keep the deposit and if they are a corporate landlord they sell off the debt to a collection agency and move on to the next tenant. If they are an individual landlord, then it really depends -- California has a lot of accidental landlords holding onto property because of Prop 13, and they can themselves be pretty incompetent in running their business. Negotiating with them is worth a try.
Part of the reason it doesn't happen is that if a tenant is not savvy enough to move to a cheaper unit when their income declines, they are unlikely to be savvy enough to try to negotiate with the landlord for a reduced debt obligation in exchange for quickly vacating.
The responsible tenants move out promptly to a place they can afford (or move in with family) and the irresponsible ones wait to be evicted. Unfortunately there isn't much middle ground.
I honestly can't tell if you're just being pedantic or have a point. At the time that a landlord sends the debt to collections, they are no longer expecting to recoup 100%. As a degenerate example, say the renter offers to pay money owed minus one dollar, prior to sending to collections. Any rational landlord will accept this offer - which is settling for less than 100%. So alright yea, a landlord may not settle directly, but sending to collections is conceptually the same thing as settling, inasmuch as it means the debt will be resolved with the landlord receiving less than 100% and the debtor paying less than 100%.
I disagree with ProPublica's take. If it was as simple as "pay just fractions of a penny per share... watch as all the gains..." then we would all do it. Not just with Roth IRAs, but with our entire portfolios. The reason we don't all do this is because startups are very very risky. Some people will succeed and walk away with windfalls. Other people will lose their shirts. If there was arbitrage, there would be a an "app for that" and there would be more billionaires walking around.
What they seem to be suggesting is that a fair valuation (well reasoned given all information) of the shares would have put the investment at millions of dollars, but due to a peculiarity of historical accounting, they could be put at worth $2K because that was the creation price and the last print.
For instance, it might be that a funding round was about to happen. This is never a sure thing, so you could claim that the shares are not worth the full price (and in any case the only trade was at 2K), while privately thinking "hmm, my shares are now worth x millions".
You then sell the shares to the Roth, thinking yourself that you're putting x millions in the vehicle while reporting 2K.
Doesn't sound illegal to me, but it also doesn't sound like things are supposed to work this way.
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.