The part that's indefensible is the illegal and sudden nature of the cuts. You have absolutely no moral obligation to pay for bungee jumping lessons for your friends, but if you cut the cord after he jumps, you're still a murderer.
115 karma · joined December 18, 2025
Three years ago this would have taken a minimum of three college graduates a couple days -- one to know the math, one to know the backend, and one to know the front-end. Maybe two of those could be the same person on a good day -- none of the topics is individually that hard -- but it's a lot together.
Note that from the lender's perspective, the risk is the same and in a perfect-information universe could be mitigated by charging higher interest. The problem for society is the externality that the business's services get worse.
I'm supposed to put out a job advertisement (but the job isn't real) for my employer. If an applicant passes the interview process, I don't have to hire that person (I probably can't - I don't have budget or permission from the organization). But I do have to honestly say if they have all the required skills -- I'm not permitted to say "wouldn't be a culture fit."
Nor do I have to fire my employee. But maybe my employee won't get a green card six years down the road.
1) Do I have any details wrong here? The one time I talked to a law firm about this they more-or-less refused to state the above outright, but answered all questions in this direction. 2) Doesn't this seem disrespectful to, among others, the applicants to the fake job?
Plenty of contracts benefit both parties but are bad for society as a whole, and if the government pre-signals which sorts of those contracts it will refuse to enforce, this is good for society.
It would be flippant to say Div(X) is an answer to your question, since it has nothing to do with geometry at all (we can form the free abelian group on any set). An element of Div(X) looks like \sum n_i P_i where n_i are integers and P_i are points on X, and they "add" in the obvious way. The sum doesn't "mean" anything. But we can get to geometry from it.
Inside Div(X) there is a subgroup, Div^0(X), of formal sums of points such that the set of coefficients is zero. Still nothing to do with geometry.
Inside Div^0(X), there is a very interesting subgroup, which is the set of "divisors of functions." Namely, if f is a rational function on X (meaning it's locally a quotient of polynomials), we get an element of Div^0(X) by taking \sum P_i - \sum Q_i where P_i are the zeroes of f and Q_i are the poles (caveat - you have to count them with multiplicity). This is an element of Div(X) but is not obviously an element of Div^0(X) -- this uses the fact that X is projective. Let's call the subgroup that comes this way Princ(X) (for "principal" divisors).
Now we get an interesting group that does have something to do with geometry, which is called Pic^0(X), by taking the quotient Div^0(X)/Princ(X).
Amazing theorem: there is a natural isomorphism from X to Pic^0(X) if and only if X is of genus one, i.e. an elliptic curve. (In general, Pic^0(X) is an abelian variety whose dimension is the genus of the corresponding curve.) This is why only elliptic curves (among the projective ones) are "naturally" groups. The relationship with the usual picture with the lines is that the intersection locus of the lines is the principal divisor associated with a functional that vanishes along the line.