Subjective experience is not a benchmark that you can measure success against. Also, of course new models are better on some set of benchmarks. Why would someone bother releasing a "new" model that is inferior to old ones? (Aside from attributes like more preferable licensing).
This is completely normal, the opposite would be strange.
I think that exclusivities are a huge source of market problems in general. They are often used in these ways to create sorts of monopolies and drive prices artificially high.
Beatport, a service that sells music for DJs, has started doing exactly this sort of nonsense. They now have "exclusive" tracks for twice the price, and I would guess that the artists also get a portion of the increased profits. However, for consumers the only change is less choice and DOUBLE the price. Seems very similar to what ticketmaster is doing. I have no idea if they force artists to make all their tracks exclusive if one is, but no doubt that is the next step.
There has got to be a better solution here as it doesn't seem very reasonable to literally be doubling and tripling prices like this. And at the least, if an artist is going to do that, it should be transparent and not hidden under the guise of an exclusivity.
> Luckey hired an employment lawyer, and together negotiated a payout of at least $100 million, arguing that the company had violated California law for allegedly pressuring the executive to voice support for Johnson and for punishing an employee for political activity
I'm yet to get anyone to pay me $100m for any reason whatsoever.
I remember investing in Palm thinking that they'd eventually be the ones to build something like the iphone. Sadly, they didn't and when apple did that was it for them.
Arguably, what ultimately brought Palm down was their early success and the huge library of existing shareware and freeware tools:
They desperately needed to try something new (Palm OS was just showing its age as a single-threaded, in-RAM, non-virtual-memory-based OS), but couldn't, since it would have alienated long-time fans by stranding their existing software libraries.
They could never work their way through that chicken-and-egg problem (and all of the split ups (OS vs. hardware), forks/spin-offs (Handspring), and re-mergers didn't help either) until it was too late: Cobalt OS never saw any devices, and the Pre was an ambitious new start but would have had a tough time against the iPhone even if it would have launched earlier than that.
Thank you for mentioning it. It makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people talk about how Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. I had a series of Treos starting with the Treo 270: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_270
As somebody who carried a Palm for years, it was so amazing to suddenly have the internet in my pocket. It still is, really.
With the Centro it was pretty amazing when they dropped a maps application later on - as it didn't have GPS. In built up areas they managed pretty impressive accuracy just by cell tower triangulation.
I'm very split about the Centro. I used one for a while, but after years of Symbian phones, I just couldn't get over how poor the hardware and how dated the OS were in comparison, even though having all of my old Palm OS applications on my phone was great.
Nokia's N-series had GPS, Wi-Fi, and good cameras years before that and it was hard to lose all of that; Symbian had proper multitasking, persistent storage, and Unicode support; and between native Symbian and J2ME apps, the software ecosystem wasn't half bad either.
Aesthetically, I'll always be a fan of Palm OS, but I couldn't bring myself to actually use it as a daily driver due to all of these limitations.
Yeah, well people are misinformed. Unless there was something for the Newton that turned it into a phone, IBM was first to market in 1994 [1] The IBM Simon made calls, did data, had a paid 3rd party app, etc.
Besides Palm, Symbian (Mostly from Nokia, but some other companies made Symbian handsets), RIM's Blackberry, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile (with handsets from many OEMs) had established smartphones before Apple. Of course, the iPhone had much better sales, and changed the market in many ways, but the category was 12ish years old when Apple entered. Hardly inventing or first to market.
And, in any case, Japan had tons of what should be considered early smartphones. I was astonished the first time I saw one (and this was obviously before the iPhone). For some reason the iPhone managed to kill off the local Japanese industry though. Japan youngsters (and not only youngsters) are very fashion-oriented, which had more to do with the change than anything else.
The problem was the UI on the Japanese smartphones was completely unusable. Just how to go back to the previous menu differed between the different functions. I was there, I migrated my mother-in-law from her “galakei” to an iPhone. She went from barely even being able to take a picture (there was a dialog after each photo asking where to save it!! Wtf) to instant messaging and playing Pokémon Go.
Speaking of WAP, I actually found Palm.net very interesting.
Unfortunately, the Palm VII was only available in the US, and having to dial up via serial cable or infrared using a mobile phone kind of ruined the spontaneous information lookup aspect of it.
Apple was able to manage this with a much bigger market and a lot more apps (when transitioning to OS X), so while it would be hard, I think Palm could have been able to do that as well.
But as you say, the company structure, market position and a lot more worked against them (same thing with Nokia and Symbian).
I think it was their lack of vertical integration that did it. there were too many pieces that every developer needed to do, that made it really hard to make apps for it. compare that to the app store where Apple just takes a 30% cut, which is steep, but they do things for that 30%. On the consumer end of things, the actually affordable data plan with att at launch, which is more vertical integration, rather than letting the carriers do their thing, is what did it, imo.
Samsung SPH-i300, 7 years before iphone 1, and iphone 1 didn't even have apps.
I loved that thing. Audibl.com player app, 3rd party apps to integrate phone dialer and contacts db, internet... 14.4k internet but internet! email, browser, ssh and irc clients, even a vnc client, thousands of random apps for every little thing like today, color grid icon home screen, touch screen, sdcard, in 2000 or 2001.
I'm going to blame it on Palm's flat refusal to move onto PalmOS 6. Every time a new device came out and it was still on PalmOS 5 the whole community was like "what the fuck are you doing?"
One big problem is that Palm split into PalmSource for software and Palm One for hardware. PalmSource went off to design Linux-based OS, got acquired, and disappeared. Palm One, renamed back to Palm One, made some early smartphones with PalmOS. But PalmOS was pretty obsolete by then, with 16-bit apps running on 32-bit OS.
Then Palm developed webOS, which made some weird hardware decisions and couldn't compete with iPhone and Android. But it could have been a contender, better than Blackberry and Nokia that didn't make jump to capacitive screens.
I think Palm's problem was being too late, but if they hadn't split and made PalmOS successor, they would have missed capacitive smartphones.
I had a Palm Pre, and Treo before that. One problem is that webOS needed resources, and Palm chose limited hardware.
I think webOS could have been the iPhone if Apple didn't exist. I think they could have taken the second spot from Android if had been earlier, open, and released conventional hardware.
I've heard blame partially put on carriers - they initially resisted even carrying the Treo line without putting limits on what Handspring could do with it.
Apple had the iPod - and, crucially, customers - could bring these customers to the carriers, and so they could dictate more.
This is definitely not true. Europes high speed trains are far far faster than driving. For example, Rome to Milan via italo is 3h - 3h 40min while driving is 6h. Even the "normal high speed" train is only ~5h.
Similarly Marseille to Paris is only 3.5h by train while driving is almost 8h. It entirely depends on your source and destination. Between major economic hubs train is usually faster than driving, and as you can see by a significant amount. For other routes the train is similar or slightly slower.
In North America, on the other hand, the train is almost always MUCH MUCH slower than driving, if you can take it at all. Not to mention far more expensive.
The OP said “unless you have exceptionally fast rail” and was talking door to door. When you add in getting to the station, waiting on a train to arrive, and getting from the station to your destination, the average speed of the train does need to be a good deal faster.
The context of this thread is travel between major economic hubs. So if you are in say Rome, it does not take 30 min to get to the station. Also, the OPs wording made it sound rare, especially given his claim that it is rare, but the examples I gave are typical, not rare.
300km/h trains are normal without maglev as well. The record for maglev is faster than regular rail, but the record for regular rail is much faster than any in service maglev. For rail the limit is aerodynamic drag which has nothing to do with the wheels. So that maglev can go faster in ideal situations doesn't matter as in the real world you will run the trains much slower. Around 300km/h seems to be the best compromise of going really fast while still not paying too much for aerodynamic drag. You can run trains faster (and a few do), but the energy costs get out of control.
If 300 km/h isn't good enough, then get on an airplane. The altitude means much lower aerodynamic drag and the distances you are traveling often need airplanes anyway. Trains are good to around 1000km of travel distance. If your trip is longer fly.
Nor is it due to the existence of shell companies. Rather it's due to poor enforcement and loopholes in tax law. You also don't need to make any of the information public to enforce it anymore than it's required to make your personal earning information public to enforce you paying taxes.
It's hard to take that position seriously. The people using the loopholes are the ones that pushed to put them in the law and degraded enforcement budgets. One hand washes the other and it takes place in the dark. Let's put a little sunshine on it and see what happens. We might find some very interesting networks exist...
Yes, privacy. Corporations are often used for trusts and investments. I wouldn't call those nefarious at all, though yes they are mostly only useful for more wealthy individuals. These structures all still pay taxes and are 100% legal. Arguments about tax law being good or bad are really a separate issue, and those should be addressed directly by updating the law, not erasing privacy for wealthy.
As much as the wealthy rightly get shit on for various things, they are still entitled to the same rights as everyone else.
The paying tax and 100% legal is only tested when brought to court, which seems that be chronically underfunded conveniently and I laugh loudly at the belief that 100% of all corporations are in legal compliance.
You said that the rich are entitled to the freedoms as anyone else but shrugs off that only the rich have the effective means to make use of these instruments. They are quite capable of being completely invisible to public scrutiny by holding all their assets as an individual.
They choose to take steps to leverage opaque often intentionally complicated corporate layering schemes to minimize risk, skirt (legally or not) tax, or to layer the sources of bad money.
Whatever the reason for engaging in these games, I believe they are no longer "living life like every citizen deserves privacy" (note your comment spoke of total privacy from oversight which no citizen pretty much anywhere actually has).
I'm at least happy that my home of Canada is starting to chip away the corporate veil.
Everyone who owns shares in a retirement fund benefits from the privacy afforded by these instruments. If every beneficial owner of every corporation had to be publicly registered, that'd be an enormous proportion of the regular public!
Think about what it would mean that anyone could, at any time, look up all the investing choices of anyone in the country.
It would be truly fascinating information but yes in our current level of innovation and maturity, totally bonkers.
It's totally a thing to have trades pegged to US politicians' investment choices, because they often have the knowledge not available to the public to make "better" (financially) decisions.
As per your first comment, this is generally the difference between an active and passive investor which usually works out to someone who owns about 10% of any given company. It's probably a little too high as it isn't hard to imagine a cabal of 11 wealthy tax dodgers playing games with the reporting requirements.
I believe most laws getting enacted which are addressing corporate secrecy are primarily targetting the active owners of companies and usually unnamed beneficiaries who have a benefit to the company/trust who aren't specifically owners, who can reap the benefits of the company's assets without strictly their name of the deed so to speak.
Again, most of this revolves around what is asked by government officials for auditing and less about what information is being dumped into public information.
Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
However, note that the CRAs information collection did not make your personal bank account information public. Would you prefer that it had? I used the example of a blind trust here because "non-blind" trusts are one of the common uses of non-commercial corporate entities.
Also, I never once said "total privacy from oversight", all these corporate entities already supply financial and ownership information to the government, whose job it is to hold them to account. This is not the same and making information public so a rabid mob of people can enact vigilante justice, or whatever people like you hope comes out of it.
>Your home in Canada just recently demanded blind trusts all report their members personal information to the government. Far from engaging only the rich, that demand hit millions of every day citizens with shared bank accounts with their parents or kids. Those are setup for a variety of reasons, one of which is to circumvent probate tax! Yep, by everyday non-rich people!
How does this hurt anyone though? That is not clear at all. The thing you're upset about here is that blind trust members information is reported to the government, but with no clear statement how this hurts anyone, wealthy or not.
Chances are, the information turned over the government has anyway.
If this is a legal mechanism to circumvent probate taxes, then its not a problem. If not, well, even regular people should pay their taxes, no?
Taxes aren't an ethical or moral topic, they are a legal topic. If you can avoid a tax through some legal structure, you are within your rights to do so and you can't judge this as some sort of shady business. Taxes are mostly used to create incentives and collect money, if people are allowed a legal structure to avoid a probate tax, then that might be an incentive on purpose. Just because you did something to pay less taxes does not mean that you are some bad actor exploiting a loophole.
For example, taxes are only paid on profit, so companies are incentivized to spend their money and pay less in taxes. No one sees this as a legal loophole that needs to be fixed, it is very much intentional.
Also you are making the false dichotomy here of "regular people" as something different from "somewhat versed in financial entities people". That's weird.
they already collect enough information that if the goal was to seize wealth they could easily do so, even before this change. I don’t see how this change makes that more imminent.
If someone wants to argue you shouldn’t have to register things with the government I’m all ears but it is no way comparable to what the Nazis did.
Say a couple lives in a house. They have a son, who lives with them.
The wife passes away.
1. Should her husband pay tax on her share of the house when it passes to him? Assuming these are not wealthy people, this may force the sale of the house.
2. Should the house go through probate? Should everyone move out while that happens?
The old man wants to leave the house to his son.
3. Should the son pay tax on the house when his father passes away?
4. Should he move out while the house goes through probate?
It is because of cases like these that we have ways to avoid going through probate.
A tangent, but this is in and of itself completely nuts. One should be able to read the text of the law, as written, and understand what you are and are not permitted to do - end of story. There should be no need to look at precedents. Courts only recourse if a law is unclear should be to send it back to an elected legislature for refinement.
That’s not really less rights though. That’s like saying the rich have fewer rights under progressive taxation.
And no, generally the more rich and/or powerful you are the more rights society provides you. Even countries which strive for more equality simply try to shore up the most egregious instances but there’s always a difference. That’s because not all rights matter equally to everyone.
For example, rich and poor both don’t have the right to sleep on a park bench but in practice that right is only particularly relevant to one party.
Do you mean that fining more for richer people is unfair?
That's an interesting view. One could argue that a flat fine allows rich people to break the law more, because they can afford it. Which IMHO seems pretty unfair.
I'm still not seeing it. What are some specific benefits for hiding the benefitting owner of a company? How would society be worse off if the person or people behind a company could always be known?
If you recently won the lottery. You might fear for your safety should your name and address become public knowledge.
Some states allow you to claim anonymously, while others don't. For those that don't, you may be able to claim under an LLC, with your name and address "hidden".
USA is pretty unique in its inability to separate identity of a person from their address. There's no reason for that to be so, it's just a path dependency you maneuvered yourselves into.
If privacy was the only reason they would allow any company in any country to be anonymous and identifiable when requested with legitimate reasons (like Domain Names) and accessible to journalists.
> As much as the wealthy rightly get shit on for various things, they are still entitled to the same rights as everyone else.
We're not talking about individual assets though here – we're talking about the distribution of resources in our society and the people who own these resources have power over lots of other people.
Essentially - have US$1bn is structurally different to owning US$1 million.
No. You do deserve privacy, however, you cannot expect it in all circumstances. You cannot expect privacy when walking down a sidewalk, you cannot expect to own a company without anyone knowing that.
There is no explicit right to privacy in the Constitution. People have inferred that right from things like the third and fourth amendments.
But in any case, even if privacy was broadly recognized and protected (it isn’t, otherwise the government wouldn’t be allowed to buy your information from data brokers) that still leaves open the question at hand.
> These structures all still pay taxes and are 100% legal
Any offshoring calls that into question.
> they are still entitled to the same rights as everyone else
No, they're entitled to more because they can afford the services of those who can setup shell company structures to hide their wealth and their identities.
It is illegal for both the rich and the poor man to steal a loaf of bread.
The idea that the wealthy could ever have "less rights" than the hoi polloi is an absolutely hilarious thought.
If any billionaire wants all the "extra" rights of being a normal citizen I'd be glad to swap anytime.
A more prescient example might be the fact that both everyday folks and billionaires are free to say whatever they want on social media in their real name. However only one of them needs to worry that medical bills will bankrupt them if they say the wrong thing.
When I was hiring yes it absolutely was something I looked at. If a candidate had only 1-2 year stints at a bunch of places, why would I expect my experience with them to be any different?
And yes, it there is definitely a mindset that jumping companies frequently is the best path to higher salary. There is even some truth to that, people who don't know you may value perceived potential higher than the company that knows you well. That said, if you do it too much you do risk ending up in the "jumps ship too frequently" pool and you'll start to be overlooked.
I wasn't looking for 5-10 years from an employee, I don't think that's realistic today. But somewhere in 2-4 for sure. Jumping after 4 years is pretty common as it's a frequent vesting cliff, even at large companies.
They will share your website with others, post links to it on social media, etc. Websites are all about driving traffic to it. Also, "these people" are also often willing to pay for good content if it's priced right. Substack is a good example of this, even if some of the prices are still too high.
This is completely normal, the opposite would be strange.
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