Short answer: Publishers were too weak individually to challenge Amazon's ebook business model (the wholesale version). If all the publishers colluded to stop selling to Amazon, that would be a violation of the anti-trust act. Apple comes along and writes contracts with each publisher such that in aggregate the contracts provide the cover to do exactly what the publishers could not do on their own.
The harm in the short term was to Amazon - under threat of being cut off by every publisher, it would have forced Amazon to move to a different model of pricing. The follow on effect would be to raise prices for all consumers.
There is inequality in city-services, whether private or public. The underlying economics of delivering water or transportation don't change because of ownership. It's just that inequality manifests itself differently. I actually skimmed through the report. Example after example shows how poor people are gouged by fees piling up, onerous interest rates and so forth. That has nothing to with privatization - there are just as many examples of public sector asset forfeitures.
Most cities and municipalities have huge budget deficits - primarily due to excessive labor and pension costs. As a result, services have to be cut or rationed. In a public ownership setting, services just happen to be cut where they are least politically problematic. Private ownership, faced with the same problem, might cut services as well as raise prices. Citizens expect services, and don't want to pay too much for it. Funding solutions typically lie with those that don't have political voices, and those that can't just get up and leave.
If it's only an opinion about diversity at the dinner table, then it's not hubris. But if the search for an optimal mix comes from a govt. or quasi-govt. institution then it's no longer an opinion, is it?
"You've also got a top marginal personal income tax rate approaching 60% which is nearly twice that of the US and political suicide."
That's only true if you count Federal Income Taxes alone. By the time you're done with Social Security, Medicare, state and city taxes (esp in NY, CA), the top marginal tax rate here approaches 50%.
I disagree. The problem was that all journalists (Fox News included) used the polling as an excuse to not actually get out and do journalism. Polls should have been but one input. Instead, because most polls said what all of them wanted to believe, the effects of anchoring and confirmation biases were amplified. Anything to the contrary was dismissed as nonsense.
The subtitle of the article is:
"Democrats' last-minute rulemakings could be easily reversed once GOP takes over."
That's the problem with executive rule making - changes in the executive lead to changes to the rules. If the rule was not made by consensus, why expect its repeal to be by consensus either?
Leaving a loophole will only invite more abuse. If the equity is worth $0 (which it is for all illiquid startups big and small), then it shouldn't count for anything.
His structural remedy is to remove government from the mix and let the market dictate the price of bandwidth. One thought is that the last-mile problem becomes irrelevant when mobile providers are offering high-speed internet.
Whether you agree with that sentiment is largely dependent on how you view the world.
Both articles state that the researchers were arrested for stealing (or taking possession of) a voting machine. Quote from the Wired article: "Halderman says the researchers believe the person who gave them the voting machine had legal access to it and provided it in the interest of transparency and scientific study."
That's a little different than being arrested for finding bugs in the software or hardware. Prima-facie, it does seem like stealing government property without proper written authorization. Arrest still seems excessive, but the circumstances seem to be a bit more nuanced.
The H1 visa prohibits all paid work except for the sponsoring employer. This lock-in is precisely what makes these visas lucrative to TCS etc. Removing the lack of mobility will remove a big perverse incentive.
The Capital Market is more than just the stock market. The Bond market - the place where orders of magnitude more $$ volumes are traded is also a capital market. Both are allocating and reallocating capital to daily, and the price signals are just as important to future capital decisions of all participants.
The NY Post has a well known conservative bias, but that doesn't make their reporting illegitimate. You can disagree with their opinion pieces, but the factual reporting (in this case - that there's a lawsuit against Twitter) can be objectively checked.
Also as NYC'er, my take is that a lot of their opinions are quite accurate and correct.
100%. True experience with ACL surgery in New York: It's an assembly line with the junior surgeons cutting open and patching up. The main guy goes OT to OT and does the most critical part and then moves on to the next one. They schedule 6-7 surgeries at once; the whole process is quite impressive.
Exactly the same process for my mom's knee replacement in India. By the time the actual knee guy walks in, patient is knocked out, opened up and ready for the heavy hitter.
Exactly this. I remember in 2007 being able to process TBs of data on commodity hardware with Hadoop. You got decent throughput, decent fault tolerance out of the box wrapped in Java that many average software developers (yours truly included) were comfortable with. You could scale data and people.
It dramatically reduced the cost of entry for many ad-tech applications.
This may not translate to London etc., but remember that NYC is a lot larger than Manhattan. There are large parts of NYC that are not serviced by trains/subways, and the only option is a bus.
My wife would take a train to a train to a bus to get from one part of Queens to another. 90 minutes on a good day. Driving - 25 mins including finding parking.
Parent comment asked: Why does someone living in NYC, Chicago, London, Paris need a car to get to work? There are some very rare cases yes, but the vast vast majority don't need a car, they want a car.
I'm positing that the assertion that the vast majority don't "need a car" is incorrect, certainly in NYC.
There was just one catch to landing that deal: It (the startup hoping to do business with Netflix) had to hire the streaming company’s vice president of IT operations, Michael Kail, as a consultant and an advisor, and pay him with fees and stock options.
That's "pay-to-play"; you don't hire me as an "advisor", you don't get the Netflix contract.
It's just as illegal there if you're a government employee. If you're an elected official, general principle still applies but rules are a bit different.
Kali didn't go on to the advisory board on behalf of Netflix - that would be perfectly rational.
Instead, the startup had to do 2 deals: One with Kali directly for "advice", and then a second with Netflix that Kali, in his capacity as a VP there, would sign.
Besides being unethical; this is now a clear conflict of interest. Netflix (and shareholders of Netflix by extension) may have signed up for a crappy product from the startup only because startup had a side deal with Kali.
That price was for a global deal, not just the UK. 50.5M is likely higher than Giphy's UK revenues for a year. It does seem punitive.
TFA also says that Austria fined FB ~10M for the same deal.
It might all have been priced into the deal as some other comments have pointed out. If the goal is to truly deter, then the CMA should perhaps make FB unwind the deal at least in the UK.
That may be true, but you only need a ~10% share of the market to want a privacy-first (i.e. dumb) TV, and that'll at least keep the others in line. Sort of like the role Mozilla ought to play in the browser market.
Agreed. For advertisers with larger budgets, marketing mix models are still the only way to understand the relative performance of FB, Google, TV etc. - each of which is a "walled garden" that doesn't exchange data with others.
FB marketing is effective, question is at what price. If those prices drop, ad dollars will flow back. It will take a few quarterly modeling cycles to reflect this though.
The contra-contrarian view is this: FB, Google have an unusual mix of large, medium and small advertisers all bidding for the same inventory. That's what makes FB and Google somewhat immune to large advertiser pricing pressures (and issue of the day spend bans). However, only the larger advertisers have budgets for complicated cross-publisher modeling. If organic FB tools show higher CPAs, it will drive the smaller marketers to other platforms causing some interesting feedback loops.
The US is not noticeably better or worse than other countries supplying data; certainly in the same ballpark as the UK, Canada and Sweden. The US is much larger than those countries in absolute population, so the raw # is larger.
"After questioning by the college officials, one official reportedly said that he had a skin-coloured micro Bluetooth device fixed in his ear by an ENT surgeon, reported Hindustan Times."
This happened in India. The student was caught with a mobile phone, which in turn led to further questioning.
The article is documenting reaction to the banning; which is to create a parallel set of products.
Personally, this is no different than people setting up a rival newspaper or magazine that caters to a different POV. Eventually, the dominant platforms on both sides will regress to the content/banning mean.
Sibling comments hit the nail on the head with "fair share".
Here's a video from 2013, that outlines exactly how much tax Warren Buffet is paying. You can disagree with Schiff on his other ideas, but this particular analysis is spot on.
It's not a dupoloy at all. Fox cable handily beats CNN and MSNBC in daily ratings. Only thing beating Fox is the mainline broadcast networks' evening news.
"The thing I find interesting with Netflix is how much they spend on content and what a terrible rate of return it has."
Bingo - that's the real reason for the long term (or secular ) decline we're seeing. With 0% interest rates, it didn't matter what the payoff time horizon for Netflix was. With 4% interest rates, longer horizons are gone. Couple that with Netflix being a discretionary expense, and we see the compounding effects of inflation.
Two things will happen - we'll see the real value of Netflix's library content. Do people really value that at $12 per month.
And we'll also likely see an appreciation in the value of the library content from legacy studios like Paramount/NBCU etc. - who have complained for the longest time that this is undervalued relative to Netflix.
Parent comment about "men" not being a protected category is absolutely incorrect.
Here's Google's EEOC statement: "Google does not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), or any other basis protected by law.".
Man, Woman (or something else) is an enumeration of gender. It's very much a protected category, and looking up any number of Title IX cases winding through the courts will show that discrimination against men is an active area of litigation.
Not really. China and India grew even during the 1990s when $ interest rates were not 0 and quite high. Single largest removal of poverty in the world.
Growth in both those countries was due to them opening up economies to internal and external entrepreneurialism and capital.
Exactly right! An unintended side effect of the artificially low cost of capital was that labor seemed expensive. All the long shot ideas that tried to "improve productivity" - whether by replacing drivers with driverless cars, or robots flipping burgers are entirely uneconomical when cost of capital goes up.
Now, capital has become more expensive and labor is also more expensive. It's a perfect shitstorm for a lot of projects.
Hacking is capitalism at it's best. If someone else can do the same thing faster/better/cheaper, then they should! No one owes your business anything - certainly not patronage for bad ideas.
It's a good hunch. Another good hunch is that delayed diagnostic testing will take more lives in the coming years because cancers and heart ailments went uncured.
These hunches are usually not proven or disproven until much later when the initial dust-up has settled and more excess mortality data is available.
Copper is a well known bacteria killer in water. Typically Pex is used for most plumbing with copper ends. Older construction will have all copper indoor piping
Yes. Part of the reason is that lower courts have a very lenient attitude towards no-shows that encourages continual postponement of cases. Any random excuse like "my lawyer has a stomach ache" will delay the hearing to the next date. It's then not a surprise that many folks use this to delay out of malice.
The harm in the short term was to Amazon - under threat of being cut off by every publisher, it would have forced Amazon to move to a different model of pricing. The follow on effect would be to raise prices for all consumers.