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Counter-counter-claim: The existence of Bitcoin doesn’t reduce the energy use of traditional banks - in fact, it increases it. Bitcoin is not just responsible for the energy used in mining, but also the energy used in its voluminous interactions with traditional finance.

Sometimes clubs get evicted so the building can be turned into condos. This happens in San Francisco too. In a city where building is limited, clubs are often located in “blighted” areas that are ripe for redevelopment with few NIBMYs.

Wall Street underwriters are making tons of money on SPACs: https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacs-rescued-wall-street-from-...

It’s worth mentioning that many props don’t allow the legislature to override them period, even with a unanimous vote. The 7/8ths rule, while unusual, is less extreme than not allowing any vote at all. It’s essentially an “oops we drafted the prop wrong and accidentally banned wages” get out of jail free card.

I think there’s a common misunderstanding about how tax write-offs work. If you donate x dollars, and your marginal tax rate is t, you end up losing x - xt dollars. That means you have less money than if you didn’t donate, even after accounting for the write-off. Arguments that somebody only donated money for the tax write-off usually don’t make sense.

Possibles exceptions to this include hard-to-value assets like art, where someone could potentially exaggerate the value by at least 1/t to defraud the tax authorities, but this doesn’t seem relevant to donating publicly-traded Microsoft stock. Bill Gates would be richer if he didn’t make these donations.

Apple ad revenue projected to be $11 billion in 2025: https://www.google.com/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad...

Why is this hard to believe? Digital content like apps have some of the highest margins out there, and conversion ROI is easy to demonstrate, so the dollars flow easily. It’s a nice business to be in, so it’s not surprising Apple is taking it from Facebook.

We don’t know exactly how much revenue Apple currently gets from ads, because it’s folded into the services category of their financial statements. Apple has set investor expectations that the services will be the main driver of revenue growth going forward, and ads are part of that.

When you go to Apple’s App Store, you see ads for apps. If you click on an ad and install the app, Apple gets paid for that conversion, and that will happen whether or not you’ve opted into “cross-app tracking”. If you see an ad for the same app on Facebook, Facebook will not get paid for that conversion unless you’ve opted in. The market for ads for apps is worth billions, and Apple put this “cross-app tracking” block in place, which will help them capture that market. By using their privileged position as platform owner and setting the default choice, they’ve taken over by fiat instead of through competition. Sounds like an antitrust case to me.

Apple added an opt-in requirement for Facebook’s ad business but not for its own. Users, on average, will stick with the default. How is that not picking winners and losers?

Because enough money is at stake to make it worthwhile to pay the lawyers, I’d imagine.

> Wouldn’t they just let users opt-out of the wanted to?

Users already could opt-out. I imagine the lawsuit will be about Apple’s recent changes, which unevenly apply an opt-in requirement that arguably picks winners and losers (see above).

> In any case, I think we have established that my characterization of facebook’s business was accurate. They wouldn’t be seeking remedies for something that wasn’t important to them.

Your claim is that Facebook is trying to mislead people about the lawsuit, and I don’t think you’ve established that at all.

I expect the lawsuit will be about how Apple is requiring users to opt-in for companies to be able to track ad conversions in some places but not others.

Will require opt-in to track:

Facebook ad conversion to buy an item in Wish’s store

Facebook ad conversion to buy an app from App Store

Won’t require opt-in to track:

Amazon ad conversion to buy an item from a store on Amazon

Apple App Store ad conversion to buy an app from the App Store

Facebook’s proposed remedy might be removing the opt-in requirement, or adding the same requirement uniformly to create a level playing field.

Sure, “tracking without consent” is an easy one.

You said:

> by tracking user behavior without consent so that they. can sell targeted ads, and by keeping users engaged with the ad delivery platform by presenting content algorithmically selected to provoke emotional reactions.

Some things in here are the core business model, others are implementation choices that don’t have to be true (like the sweatshops). I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that the lawsuit should fail because they didn’t lead it with a list of complaints people have about the company (not would I expect Apple to include the same in their response).

You’re just expressing that you have some beef with the company, not making an argument about the lawsuit. You could similarly talk about how Apple depends on sweatshops to increase margins.

Looking at the company’s behavior and incentive structure is definitely more relevant than trying to read the tea leaves of motivations.

Facebook’s business is getting paid by companies to help them sell goods and services to consumers. Facebook is claiming that Apple’s changes make it harder for them to do that. Don’t Facebook’s claims match its incentives here?

One can just as easily say “Apple doesn’t care about the users, they’re just trying to make money selling phones and getting a bigger cut of transactions that happen on the phone”. These sorts of statements are somewhat true, but ultimately not relevant to law or public policy. In reality you’d find that companies are composed of individuals with a diverse range of motivations.

If you find yourself unable to contemplate that the thousands of people at company X as something other than a unified blob of evil, it might be a useful exercise to seek other perspectives and practice some empathy. It’ll make the world easier to understand.

This wasn’t always true years ago when decisions about building these factories were made. Tesla has had a cash crunch more than once in its history.

Of course not, finance people make a bunch of spreadsheets and then the factories poof into existence. The regulatory credits factor into those spreadsheets.

I didn’t interpret the comment that way. If a company is trying to be cash flow neutral, they could (very roughly) consider the net income to be the amount left over for capex.

Maybe you’ve used the “muted words” setting sometime in the last to hide the hashtag?

Is money really the problem for Intel? The world is awash with capital. Intel’s bonds are yielding 3-4%, so they can easily raise more.

This reminds me of the recent attempt to blame TeamCity for the Solarwinds hack, because TeamCity’s CEO is Russian [0]. A disturbing trend in journalism, IMO.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/p...

Tesla’s inflated stock price has already secured the future of the company, allowing it to raise $10 billion in cash with minimal dilution. Somebody will be left holding the bag when it crashes, but at least the company is succeeding at its important mission.

Hours of video watched per month is metric Netflix tries to optimize, because it predicts churn. If a customer is spending decreasing hours on Netflix and watching Disney instead, they are more likely to cancel.

Goodhart's law applies. If a customer is watching more Netflix because they are binging some fantastic new context, that’s great for Netflix. If the customer watching more because the app keeps auto playing something they didn’t ask for and gradually pisses them off, not so good. Netflix might have better ways of measuring customer satisfaction that can tell if these behaviors make the customer more satisfied overall.

They got where they are by raising from investors on the premise they would 10x the money, and also hired top talent with stock options that are only worth anything if the company similarly increases in value. If ambition wasn’t in their DNA, they never would have gotten to the good state you liked in the first place.

The payoff if the growth attempts work is asymmetric, so it’s worth the risk.

I recall reading a similar argument about the miracles of one of the Catholic saints (Joan of Arc, perhaps)?

Where did you get those numbers? I read this comment earlier today, quoted 2.7% to a friend later, then realized I didn’t know what the source was and dug up your comment again.

It’s really messed up that people worried about their privacy are switching from WhatsApp (which has e2e enabled so nobody can read your messages) to Telegram (which generally doesn’t). People whose messages were secure are now going to get exposed when there’s a Telegram breach.

The sticker price is very high but nobody pays it. It’s free even if you are uninsured, and if you are insured Gilead will reimburse you for any copay.

I think the production cost is not that much, so the high price is just a means of extracting profit from the insurance programs.

The problem with “do both”: if you give your control group PrEP, then you won’t be able to get data to support the vaccine’s efficacy. A trial requires enough infections in the control group to show the vaccine is better.

I agree it would be better in the end after it’s approved. I’m thinking about getting the ethics board to allow a trial where you have to give half of the participants a control (and the other half a possibly-ineffective vaccine), when a known-good alternative exists.

The other reply has a solid point. Maybe you can find a country where it’s not possible to distribute daily PrEP, but is possible to vaccinate people and then test them for HIV monthly.