likpok

It would still get tied up in litigation. The “takings” doctrine that requires compensation is based on the fifth amendment: “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

I believe regulatory changes similar to what you propose have been ruled takings in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the state would lose, but this supreme court doesn’t seem particularly amenable.

Why do you project 10% growth over the next 6 months? Looking at the other metrics on that page which have history (total unique likers, posters, followers), the numbers are flat or declining.

That shape doesn’t seem great for a social media company.

Modern shareholder law is definitely a strange business. People have successfully brought suits for a variety of bad-but-not-illegal causes. There were a lot of lawsuits about sexual harassment and climate change, I believe the theory being that “bad thing will make the stock go down, and the company didn’t disclose that they might do the bad thing”. Then more recently a lawsuit against target proceeded (I don’t see whether it’s completed yet) despite target having disclosed the risk (in this case of their DEI activity).

The claim in the suit is notably that the company failed to disclose the behavior, not that they did the behavior (Target notwithstanding), which mostly agrees with your line of questioning.

Eh, doorbell cams aren’t that controversial (ad aside). A lot of people have them already, both from ring (with the concomitant privacy issues) or from other providers (with different but similar issues).

They’re controversial on hacker news but I don’t think people in the “real world” care all that much.

How that connects to the meta glasses is certainly up for debate —- the doorbells provide a lot of value to the user (know who is at the door remotely!), the glasses are more of a mixed bag.

The article goes into detail about how this level of morphine in the breastmilk could not have given the baby a lethal (or even clinically effective) dose.

Furthermore, Koren lied about what the tests showed the stomach contents to be: he omitted codeine entirely. Codeine (per the article) would not be expected to be transferred by breastmilk -- it's metabolized into morphine to be effective.

The article clearly lays out that the answer is yes. It points to specific ways the researcher adjusted their reporting to mislead readers. I think the key here is where Koren attempts to specifically account for the stomach content explanation: he misrepresents the lab results and claimed they showed the opposite of what they did.

One of the minigames in the game is "upvote post". Your username is the username of the post. I have no idea what the content of the post is, it went by too quickly for me to read it.

The varroa mite has been pretty effective at removing them so far. Today honeybees are essentially livestock, to the point where any given bee you see is very likely owned by someone.

The pipes are pressurized, so I would expect there to be limited avenue for infiltration. (Also, for sewage exposure, you’d need two leaks close together. Not impossible or anything, but much less likely.

VR is immersive, but it’s hard to fit in to life and there’s a limited array of content available. You can easily use a computer, watch TV or play video games while still being somewhat present with the people around you in reality. VR makes that impossible: you cannot see them, and they cannot see what you see (so even the experience of watching someone play is gone). Furthermore, this makes the experience hard to share — sharing it requires doing that as a whole activity, an activity which only one person can participate in.

Compare with setting up a home theater and having people over to watch a movie, or split screen gaming.

After all that you run into the limited content availability and, as you noted, the high price.

I do wonder why Meta hasn’t done something like license Skyrim or GTA for the quest. It shouldn’t be too expensive compared with the other investments, and would bring over some solidly popular (and big!) content.

The soft cap thing seems like exactly this kind of penny-foolish behavior though. I’ve seen people spend hours trying to optimize their travel to hit the cap — or dealing with flight changes, etc that come from the “expense the flight later” model.

All this at my company would be a call or chat to the travel agent (which, sure, kind of a pain, but they also paid for dedicated agents so wait time was generally good).

That’s super annoying, but it is still straightforward to sideload books in a way that works with Amazon sync, via either the email address or uploading through Amazon.

You don't need to require same-order initialization, but allowing people to do different orders will be confusing when actions are reordered behind the scenes. Especially imagine if there are dependencies between the objects you're passing in.

  struct A {
    B one;
    C two;
  };
  struct B {
    B() {
      cout << "init B" << endl;
    }
  }
  struct C {
    C() {
      cout << "init C" << endl;
    }
  }

Mixing up the order is confusing:

  A{.two=B(),.one=A()}

since `two` is initialized after `one` despite coming before (the comma operator <expr a>, <expr b> usually means `expr a` happens before `expr b`.

This case is a little contrived, but run the evolution forward: you can have members that depend on each other, or have complex initialization logic of their own. There, debugging the specific order of events is important.

China has blocked US social media for years (decades perhaps?). I don't know if they've explicitly said all the reasons, but "social stability" is a big one.

As an aside, TikTok itself is banned in China.

Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more.

If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).

Landlords will raise the rent but can only raise the rent to what the market will bear (which presumably they’re doing anyway). They then have incentive to ensure the broker is worth the fee.

Previously landlords would require renters to work with (and pay) the broker, so there was no incentive to choose a cheaper broker.

It’s all fits together in a very nice way. It’s very much a space archaeology game — if you like exploring the game universe and understanding how it works, you’ll like it, but that exploration is the bulk of what it has going on.

Is it tax-advantaged? My impression is that RSU costs count as cash at grant time, which is a good deal (for the company) when the stock is going down but a bad deal when the stock is going up. The RSUs you get are counted as ordinary income when they vest.

Whether this is a good deal for the employee is a bit complicated: you're effectively holding stock for 4 years but taxed at ordinary income rates (as opposed to long term capital gains). On the other hand, if the stock goes up you've locked in being paid substantially above market. During the hot market times this effectively was an option: if they stayed they got stock granted at a low price, but they could leave if a different company was paying more.

Private companies can offer ISOs which do have a nice tax treatment, but this is all predicated on public company buybacks where that doesn't apply.

Another aspect is that insurance companies can make money on the float, and this can potentially let them be profitable while paying out more in claims than they take in (or at least netting out to paying out what they take in). That’s assuming that they can effectively invest the premiums.

Buffett successfully applied this strategy with geico.

The UK is redirecting a number of asylum seekers to Rwanda rather than letting them settle locally.

It's been known to not do a whole lot for at least a decade, it just took until recently for the FDA to catch up and say "no you can't sell it".

Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog post (36 million at 274/share).

That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could. LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).

Less market concentration. Lina Khan, the current head of the FTC, argued before she got the job that market concentration and not consumer harm was a better target for antitrust enforcement.

Amazon does exercise a fair amount of their market power. FBA policies are generous to the consumer and to amazon, taking it out of the third party sellers. The other classic example was IIRC diapers.com which was a sharp competitor until Amazon bought it and raised diaper prices. It's possible this was all a ZIRP fad, and diapers.com was burning through investor cash, but still a pretty clear-cut case of consolidating market power (at the time the FTC did not consider it illegal).

ATT, where apple hobbled other ad networks running on iOS. It used to be that DTC companies could use the fine-grained targeting offered by FB and Google to reach consumers without needing to go through a major distributor. Since the targeting is much less effective it's more expensive (potentially uneconomically so) to reach people. As a result, sellers are forced back to Amazon.

The trouble with this argument (which gets made a lot) is that this is basically every large retailer. Walmart has great value, Safeway has safeway select, Target has good and gather. In all of these cases large retailers take well-performing products (i.e. look at their sales data to see what is selling well) and creates mimics.

They put the generics right next to the original products, and then charge the original seller for better shelf placement (as well as for various other things -- getting a product in a retail store requires a fair amount of payola in some form or another).

All of this adds up to basically the same thing: amazon copies a product and ranks it highly unless you pay for better placement.

You can say that this is bad, which sure, but it seems hard to make the argument that this is specifically illegal for amazon when it's widely practiced in the industry.

Your link sort of hints at the reason, I think. There's enough posted to make a serious run at replicating it, and it seems to be simple enough that you can do it in a kitchen. At the same time, it's not so easy that people have cleanly demonstrated it -- the constant rollercoaster of "we're so back" and "it's so over" I think drives some of the hype.

It also seems like it has at least pretty strong diamagnetism, which while not a demonstration of superconductivity is both somewhat interesting and gives a vivid demonstration that's amenable to social media.

Yeah, without new stock the house price falls based on the mortgage affordability. So the nominal price is lower but the overall price is the same. Works well if you’re paying cash, I guess.

But of course most people don’t have to sell. They may sit on the property to avoid taking a loss. That makes inventory tight, and means prices won’t fall as much as they otherwise would.

There’s lots of chemicals that are extremely lethal to pests with apparently limited ability to develop resistance. There’re no bleach resistant bacteria, for example, and no fire-resistant moths.

Surfactants attack the waxy layer that insects use to breathe, they’ve been very effective at killing them for a long time. The classic fruit fly trap of soap in vinegar uses this effect.

There’s a lot of soaps with a long history of being used in the environment, but like they do have a mechanical effect. Probably not great to douse plants with them.

The biggest challenge I see is they’re not really persistent like permethrin — you need to spray the mosquitoes with the surfactant. That limits application as people will complain about like a fogger truck that makes them a little soapy.

Yeah I mean if it happens once or twice I’m gonna switch to a different default card. The .5% extra cash back isn’t that much, especially for something that’s all about convenience.

Mostly the Apple Card was a novelty for me: 100% of my usages is via Apple Pay.

Maybe. I think Amex is still the leading corporate card — hard to find a less price sensitive bunch than people spending someone else’s money. That was part of why Amex was accepted in many places: high potential for big orders.

If my Apple Card switched to Amex I might switch the default tap to pay card to something else. Right now it’s very convenient for everywhere that takes tap-to-pay, but… who wants to deal with it sometimes not working?