It's not possible to become a billionaire with a B without fucking over a lot of people, but for a billionaire he isn't so bad. If we can't get rid of billionaires the next best thing is to hope they are more like Buffett and less like Musk or Thiel or Trump...
Profit is not an appropriate measure of how well a business is operated. I'm sure they have been prioritizing growth because the whole point of the platform is to introduce competition to Steam. Keeping the margins low (or even negative) is smart when the primary goal is not to make profit but to insure the parent company against monopolistic behavior.
Corruption and nepotism does not get much more blatant than this. The president's son is involved in one of the American drone companies that stand to gain the most from this policy. Their investor presentation boasts about regulations as the first bullet point under the title "Our competitive advantage".
That's an optimistic take, a more pessimistic take is that this is a tactic to lock marketshare for Wing, Zipline, Amazon and stall investment in drone delivery services while production catches up.
edit: I'm speculating here that the supply chain wasn't already state-side for these players without knowing much about their business model
> If they are enemy combatants you are allowed to follow up and ensure they have been killed
Not true. Launching an attack on shipwrecked enemy is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. [1, Chapter II Article 12] It's also prohibited by DoD's own guidelines. [2, page 1071, section 17.14]
It's not a question of whether or not what happened was illegal, it's a textbook example of a war crime. It's a matter of whether or not the justice system still has enough power to identify who is responsible and hold them accountable.
* The expressive syntax helps keep the solutions short.
* It has extensive standard library with tons of handy methods for AoC style problems: Enumerable#each_cons, Enumerable#each_slice, Array#transpose, Array#permutation, ...
* The bundled "prime" gem (for generating primes, checking primality, and prime factorization) comes in handy for at least a few of problems each year.
* The tools for parsing inputs and string manipulation are a bit more ergonomic than what you get even in Python: first class regular expression syntax, String#scan, String#[], Regexp::union, ...
* You can easily build your solution step-by-step by chaining method calls. I would typically start with `p File.readlines("input.txt")` and keep executing the script after adding each new method call so I can inspect the intermediate results.
Haven't used prime stuff, since not so versed in algorithms I guess, but other than that totally agree. So far have enjoyed it the most. Though I remember doing those really elongated Go solutions consisting of long for loops over and over... When they were ready and ran, they were very fast even with brute force solutions.
The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).
Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].
The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.
> No? It’s not just crime, it’s harassment, antisocial behavior, and other things that are not strictly crimes but you don’t want to be around. A lot of crimes are crimes of opportunity where someone strikes because they’re in the same place as you and see an opening. The more time they’re in the place, the more opportunities for those crimes.
Isolating people from each other is a really dystopian "solution" to reduce crime and antisocial behavior. Things naturally tend to happen more when people come together – in both good and bad. The good usually outweighs the bad by a wide margin.
The article misses the most important factor: the customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more. The higher prices could just as well be for completely unrelated reasons (greed, inefficiency, ...). No one is going around measuring and documenting every single difference between products and services, and, even if someone did, almost no one has time to do such thorough research for every purchase. It is increasingly difficult to find objective information about any commercial product. Any attempt at providing impartial information gets drowned in an ocean of marketing content, sponsored reviews, astroturfing, and brand tribalism.
Consequence of the above is that marketing and anecdotal evidence are much more influential factors in purchase decisions than quality of the product. Using marketing campaigns to brainwash people is significantly easier (and cheaper) than improving a product enough for them to notice – especially if the product already has a zombie customer base that chooses a familiar brand out of habit rather than merit. We have built a world where money is valued over value, and making better products is often a terrible business strategy.
> Customers have no way of knowing they would be getting a better product or extra 25 millimeters of leg room if they paid 3% more.
If you search on Google Flights, the seat pitch is clearly displayed, or you can use third party tools like Seatmaps.
But many people use airline sites directly, don't understand or care, or as the article correctly asserts, care more about the price than anything else.
Or maybe consumers do not want to (because it doesn't make economic sense for them, or because they don't want to spend every second of their free time optimizing) spend a significant amount of their time doing this kind of research before every purchase decision? I have never understood this argument that as long as information is technically available companies should be absolved of meeting some minimum level of baseline quality. You're also describing an industry that's unusually transparent (in part because there are not that many models of planes); for a lot of online goods there is absolutely no reasonable way you can know what a particular brand will be like before you buy.
If they don't want to look at the relevant column in Google Flights they don't have to. But money and time are the units of caring. If someone isn't willing to take 60 seconds to research or spend $5, I just don't believe it matters that much to them.
Flights in my mind are already a very high quality product offered at a very reasonable price. I can pay $250 and get across the country faster and more safely than any other means of transportation. I don't necessarily think that extra legroom is part of a "baseline level of quality" we should expect everyone to know you feel is worth the money and automatically provide to you
Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.
The 'zombie customer base'explains much of everything wrong in today's society packed to the brim by stupid people. If you find yourself in the 98th percentile, prepare to be disappointed by just about everything available in today's society.
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