Public libraries pay a different, greater license fee for ebooks they can lend vs physical books . The licenses also come with restrictions about number of lends, time limits, etc.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenduffer/2019/01/30/librarie...

The problem is that without transparency you can easily be manipulated into thinking that you are getting a good deal. Maybe in your example everybody else is getting a $30 deal but you will never know.

I am pretty young and have never bought any insurance, but am currently shopping for some.

Since I hear relatively many "insurer didn't pay" stories (often because of a weird detail), I don't have much trust in insurance and do place a lot of value on actually understanding what will be covered.

I'm still a fan of a good deal, but confidence in reliability is a pretty important part of the features, no?

I always read my insurance policies to see what's covered, to be honest insurance policies are very readable and fairly easy for the lay person to understand.

I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.

I'm pretty sure the "no harm no foul" defense doesn't hold water in a fraud case. A Ponzi scheme is illegal the entire time (because it's fraudulent) even though the early investors receive returns.

I'm pretty sure it does. A ponzi scheme absolutely does harm people through fraud, namely everyone left holding the potato. Sure, it doesn't harm everyone involved, but many people are harmed because of fraud.

In Shkreli's case, he didn't actually harm anyone through fraud, because although he committed fraud, he got them their money back through entirely legal, non-fraudulent means.

Getting money back is just one point in the probabilistic set of possible outcomes. Investment is all about risk, therefore you really cannot ignore that part.

Completely over the top illustrative example: you give me money for ten years to invest in real estate, because your investment portfolio is lacking in that sector. I blow it all on cocaine and hookers, then when the money is due I get nervous, buy lottery tickets and win. You get your money back, with a nice profit attached in the upper parts of what could be expected by a real estate investment. Was I a faithful manager of your money? Hell no! If you wanted lottery tickets you would have bought them yourself.

Yeah, except Shkreli's handling of the HF money was not fraudulent (he didn't blow people's money on cocaine and hookers, or blow it on anything really, the hedge fund just did poorly).

A coverup is a coverup. If he cannot stand up to his investments doing poorly he has no place in the institutional investment business. If you fake (or hustle) good results to lure in the next batch of investors, yes, that is fraud. It would be an entirely different case if he would have let his funds tank but compensated the losses of his investors with large put nominally unrelated personal donations (assuming that the investors are the actual owners of the money invested, not some middlemen fiduciaries). The illustrative purpose of my example was not how bad cocaine is, it was how bad being deceptive about the nature of an investment could be even when it turns out to be successful.

What would be so bad about at&t offering a service that banned fraudsters from calling you? Or if the USPS refused to deliver mail that said "URGENT TIME SENSITIVE" on the envelope unless the sender could prove it really was urgent?

As someone with elderly relatives who've fallen for scams over email (which major email providers already do block, automatically), I would celebrate both of those outcomes.

> What would be so bad about at&t offering a service that banned fraudsters from calling you?

That isn't what we're talking about, now is it?

Labeling something "misinformation" is not an objective act, period.

Facebook will be engaging in censorship if they pursue this.

Objectivity is literally about things being factual regardless of subjective opinions.

There's nuance in the world, but if someone says "The earth is flat", it's not dystopian for a newspaper or online newsfeed to editorialize and minimize those claims.

its impossible to label an article presenting a theory or perspective as non-factual. no one ever said it was fact. anyone trying to claim it is fact is a fool.

Facts are things like:

I have 20$ in my pocket

Creationism isnt misinformation, even if it is lacking in evidence.

Id love to agree with this but my experience differs on modern stacks. We so often mock or stub APIs, use a web driver that's pinned to a certain version of WebKit, test against virtual dom, etc that it's hard to get real reliable test results that don't break all the time.

But I suppose that's the problem; we don't have the time to fix bugs related to the environment that crop up when no code changes so we insulate our tests from the environment by design.

This reminds me of when Urban Airship shut down their free transactional push notification service a while back. It turns out theres so much more money in the marketing side than the transactional side (profit center vs cost center), and if you're going to run a marketing company it doesn't make sense to give away a service to people who will never become the type of customer you want.

We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're coming from in this change.

Firing people is risky for the person potentially being fired, not for the owners of the firm. Growing and shrinking over time is part and parcel of running a consultancy. That's why you see it all the time, and I'll bet if you look closer at the ownership during layoffs you'll find that they very rarely miss a paycheck and usually escape unharmed.

The fact that it's an unpleasant reality doesn't make it any more risky than e.g. having to pay taxes.

I agree with what you're saying, and this is probably why I don't hold a management position anywhere.

This also mirrors my experience with startups. I've been lied to about money many times to get me to keep working. The only things the owners care about is how they look to investors.

The problem is that while they charge a flat rate monthly, that doesn't include repairs and one-off charges which get passed on to the landlord. Maybe doing a combination of property management and home warranty would be valuable, but neither industry has the best reputation IMO.

I think we as a group tend to underrate the power of marketing because it doesn't make s lot of analytical sense, but marketing is hugely important as anyone who had founded a business learns very, very quickly. This is just more anecdotal evidence, but the effect the hunger games movie/books have had on female enrollment in archery clubs is staggering: http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-ar...

Here's another article that purports the rise (and now domination) of women in forensic biology to be predicated on the media's portrayal of the career and the large number of female role models in the field.

There is nothing special or innately "male" about video games, and I think the real thesis of the article is that player demographics are much more evenly split than we think; we just assume video games are for boys because the video games that girls play (candy crush, the Sims, etc) aren't marketed as being "video games" at all

You have to admit the two types of games are very very different, though.