You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
It matters because while the choice of excuse doesn't really matter to the surveilling end, they still need to make the excuse with the fig leaf of plausibility. The worse their excuses look, the easier it is for you to convince other people who don't already agree with you that you're right and they're wrong.
> Kinda like saying "Throwing the British's tea into Boston harbor will only make us subject to harsher terms."
I mean, that it... quite literally did?
Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.
x86 bytecode isn't the native instruction set on any real hardware you're running games on either, just one of the lowest-level publicly exposed interfaces.
if it's the lowest level available, then it's as close to "native" as we can get, so therefore it has to qualify, if we want to consider anything at all to be running "natively"
Isn’t that moving the goalposts? If an API isn’t exposed for native code then maybe we should just accept that we can’t write native code anymore instead of stretching the definition.
Indeed, the Romance cognates of "library" even usually mean bookstore (or maybe bookshelf...etymologically it's just a thing that does something vaguely related to books). Most languages where a cognate of "library" rather than "bibliotheque" means primarily a lending library (which still might be paid) picked it up as a loan from English.
Many original “libraries” ran on the idea that a book is valuable and rarely new - you’d buy your used copy of Plato, read it, and sell it back for almost what you paid for it. This is infinitesimally different from just renting.
> I had a very visceral negative reaction to this story, and found it disappointing that someone would hold that opinion. But I suppose it's a lot easier to take that stance when it's not you or someone you care about being falsely accused and sent to prison.
I have to imagine that from her point of view, it's a lot easier to take the stance that you'd rather see guilty people go free than put an innocent person behind bars when it's not your neighborhood with the dangerous criminal gangs....
I think by the time you're building a system that needs to generate (and persist!) billions of identifiers per millisecond, you're solidly past the point where all your design decisions need to be vetted for whether they make sense on your extremely exotic setup.
But 12 bits is not "billions of identifiers" -- it's 4096. Once you exhaust that counter in the same millisecond, you are still relying on a gamble that your random source will not generate the exact same bit sequence for the previous same counter value. And this thread started out with the OP explaining that random collisions are much more common than we'd like them to be, for various reasons.
People seem to get the weird idea that borrowing against their stock holdings is some special thing rich people get to do with products that the rest of us don't have access to. It's not. Margin loans are widely available to the tune of ff+1%ish or lower, and if your brokerage's publicly offered rates are probably a ripoff, they're almost certainly negotiable. The bar for access to "institutional" rates is basically 100k, the regulatory requirement for portfolio margin.
Yes, there are specialized products catered to billionaires. But those aren't getting them better rates than someone with a $200k portfolio (Zuck is not conventionally a less risky borrower than the Options Clearing Corporation!). They exist to work around the fact that some borrowers can't just casually liquidate their stock on the open market, let alone at face value. By all accounts these products are more expensive than retail.
Mostly this is an expensive (but maybe still less expensive than taxes, depending on the rate environment—it's more of a no-brainer in ZIRPland) way to diversify out of a single-stock portfolio without selling by adding leverage. At Zuck's age, it's still very unlikely to make sense to borrow instead of sell to spend. He's been known to pay real taxes in the past, they just look small relative to his imputed wealth growth because rich people don't spend a lot relative to their wealth growth because they, quite by definition, have a lot of wealth.
I think people take issue with the taxes loophole. They have GAINED from the VALUE of their stocks, but they don't pay taxes on that. It should be law if you realize value from stocks you pay capital gains on those stocks. So if a loan is collateralized by $1,000,000 worth of stock value taxes should be paid on $1,000,000.
The trouble is that a bank is not lending against the nominal value of the stock as collateral. That number is almost entirely fictional. Taxation of capital gains at time of sale is less a loophole than a reflection of the difficulty of assigning a fair price to assets that are not perfectly liquid.
Also, you'd totally gut retail home equity lending as collateral damage, with disastrous social policy consequences.
I’ve never seen it explained as to how it’s different in kind from a home equity loan - you still need income from something to pay the loan back (and if you say you pay it from the loan proceeds you’re just donating to a bank with extra steps).
It's very simple: if the terms are satisfactory and against an agreed upon collateral (e.g. shares) banks will give you a loan that does not require periodic payments. The interest on the loan does accumulate of course, and is just added to the principal that the borrower owes. The bank is happy as long as the value of the collateral is higher than the current outstanding loan. If the loan is in danger of going "under water" the bank can either liquidate the collateral to pay itself, or the borrower can renegotiate the loan and deposit additional shares.
It's similar to a reverse mortgage. Say Fred and Wilma own a house worth $4MM with no mortgage on it. With a reverse mortgage a bank will lend them $2MM. Fred and Wilma make no payments and continue to live in their house, spending the $2MM while the interest on that loan just increases the amount they owe the bank. After both Fred and Wilma have passed away the house is sold and the proceeds are used to pay back the outstanding loan. If there's still money left over, it goes to their heirs. If the sale comes up short, the bank loses money, which is why these reverse mortgages are typically less than 50% of the value of the house and they typically have higher interest rates than conventional mortgages. From Fred and Wilma's point of view, they can use the value of their house now, while continuing to live in it. They essentially spend their children's inheritance.
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