Well, I guess in the same way that the Bonneville Power Administration paid Bill Gates to write Microsoft Basic, or McDonald's paid for the creation of Amazon, as in, no it was not paid for by Republicans.
The Washington Free Beacon paid Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Donald Trump, along with other Republican candidates. When Donald trump clinched the Republican nomination, WFB discontinued their relationship with Fusion GPS. After WFB ended their relationship with Fusion GPS and stopped funding their opposition research, Fusion GPS was hired to do opposition research by the Hillary Clinton Campaign/DNC. Once Fusion GPS was hired by Hillary's Campaign, they hired Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele compiled the dossier. Since Christopher Steele was not working for Fusion GPS when the Republicans were paying Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele is the creator of the dossier it is disingenuous, and wrong, to say that Republicans first paid for the dossier.
Up to this point it still appears that Russia bought some ads to try to sway the vote. There is no evidence that they hacked any voting machines. There appears to be no evidence of the Russians hacking anyone's email either.
You forgot the evidence that the Russian government cooperated with the Clinton Campaign in the compilation of the "Steele dossier".
The dossier was NOT "first commissioned by Republicans". Christopher Steele was not hired by Fusion GPS until AFTER the Republicans in question stopped paying Fusion GPS for opposition research on Donald Trump and the Clinton Campaign/DNC started paying Fusion GPS for it. Which makes it seem as if the opposition research which Fusion GPS was able to obtain using techniques which the Republicans who hired them would sanction was considered to be of no value by the Democrats who thus wanted something more salacious.
The interesting thing is that, in order to compile the "Steele dossier," cooperation was sought from members of the Russian government. In other words, it was the Hillary Clinton campaign which colluded with the Russian government to "hack" the election.
You have read about the high level FBI agent who texted that they needed and insurance plan against the remote chance that Trump might win the election, didn't you?
This was the same agent who was assigned to be part of interviewing Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Flynn...all of them lied during those interviews, only one was charged. I think that and other similar revelations might have something to do with why Trump would trust ANYONE more than he trusted the heads of those agencies.
That is not faith in the American system...it is faith in the greed of trial lawyers. If there is a company providing archived arrest records as the basis for employment background checks, sooner or later some trial lawyer will become aware of this fact (and I would bet on sooner). When that happens they will file a class action lawsuit against that company, and their clients. Such a lawsuit would be easy money for the lawyers.
I am quite confident that if there is a background check company in the U.S. which is using records archived by a non-government organization (for more than an vanishingly short period of time) to provide employers with arrest record information they are currently facing, or will soon be facing, a class action lawsuit for Civil Rights violations. They are also likely being investigated by, or soon to be investigated by both the federal Civil Rights Commission and various state equivalents.
Perhaps you are unaware of the controversy around companies using criminal records as a basis for declining to employ someone, but there are places in the U.S. where it is illegal for an employer to ask if a prospective employee has been convicted of a crime because this disproportionately affects African American applicants. If refusing to hire someone who has been convicted of a crime is considered racist in some jurisdictions, think how they would react to an employer refusing to hire someone because they had been arrested without being convicted. And while employers might be able to avoid being a target, someone would notice the company providing the background checks with that information (and any reasonably competent attorney could write court filings which would shut them down almost immediately).
The article's author should have trusted you to reach that conclusion by just presenting you with the facts, rather than try to slant their article to make you reach that conclusion. Here is how I would have worded that: "There is no evidence that Uber broke any laws with this data collection. However, they have been accused of/lost a lawsuit over..." (I do not remember what the specific wrongdoing Uber was guilty of and am not willing to spend the time looking it up, but I remember that they were caught doing something which was illegal, and several other things which may not have broken the letter of the law but certainly broke the spirit of the law).
Possibly, but the writers of the article have no evidence that such is the case.
Basically, they want you to think that Uber is evil for doing this and will manipulate the way they report the story in order to encourage you to think that way. Since they do not trust their readers to come to the same conclusion they did from a presentation of the facts, it makes me think there is a lot less to this story than is presented.
Here is the key line from the article: "It’s possible Uber’s data gathering did not violate any laws..."
Tanslation: We have no evidence that Uber did anything illegal in regards to its data gathering, but we want you to assume that they did while maintaining a defense against libel.
I do not "absolve" the GOP of not passing a "net neutrality" law. I praise them for not expanding government power to "fix" a problem created by the misuse of government power.
That is because he expended all of his political capital with the American people on the ACA and Dodd-Frank. Instead of passing laws that the voters wanted he jammed through the ACA, which cost him the Democratic majority in Congress. When Obama had a majority in Congress he made no effort to reach across the aisle and peal off a couple of Republican votes. That was because he was convinced that the ACA would be popular once it was passed.
Actually, the scalper is indeed providing a useful service to the market. If the manufacturer is genuinely only able to produce 5 widgets when the demand is for 10 at their standard price, scalpers teach them what price point stabilizes demand to supply. That allows the manufacturer to know if it is worth building greater capacity to meet demand.
Artificial scarcity on an occasional product in their product line allows the company to keep the prices up on the entire line because it feeds the impression that there is high demand for that product line. One of the techniques they will use is to make the initial product run smaller than their low estimate of demand, ensuring that the initial release will sell out before everyone gets one. They follow this with a release intended to just barely fill the remaining demand. Of course, if things have worked according to plan, demand is slightly higher than their estimate. The result of this is that demand is higher for their next year's product as well.
While it may mean leaving a few dollars on the table at any one time, it has been proven to keep long term demand for a company's product high because, "their stuff is always so popular they cannot keep up with demand."
You are correct that it is an inefficient market, but the actors who created the inefficiency are the ones who pay the price. Of course the key thing you are missing is that the scarcity was not created by the scalpers. The manufacturer did that in the first place by producing fewer of the product than the anticipated demand. They did this because they knew that the scarcity would drive up demand, both for the scarce product and for related products. The manufacturer is actually counting on the scalpers to drive demand for their product.
Scalpers disrupt that function be creating an artificial scarcity and then taking advantage of it.
Others have addressed some of the flaws in your argument, but none of them have correctly addressed this one. Scalpers do not create scarcity, they take advantage of it. The term as first coined applied to ticket sales where the scarcity is a result of venue size and is not artificial. However, in the cases discussed in this article, the scarcity is intentionally created by the manufacturer by knowingly producing fewer than the expected demand. If the manufacturers did not approve of what the scalpers are doing they have several options available to them to put them out of business. They could A} charge more for these scarce products in the first place or B)secretly reserve a significant number of these products and flood the market with them just before Christmas (or when the scalping price rises above a certain level). After a year or two of B, people who wanted the "scarce" item would continue to look for the item at retail, knowing that eventually it would be there. If scalpers tried to keep supply scarce, they would bankrupt themselves by buying more of the item than they could sell. There are other strategies the manufacturers could implement as well. However, the manufacturers like the scalpers because it increases demand for their product (even some of the other items they sell which they have not artificially limited).
Umm, yeah, I really want the people in the ER checking against state records to determine if someone has filed a proper DNR form, or not, BEFORE they attempt to resuscitate that person when they arrive in the ER unconscious.
That would make sense, except for the fact that my company has such a rule. However, we have someone who was hired as a temp in Accounting. She cleaned up many problems the accounting department had had, but, despite having an open permanent position in accounting, they will not hire her for that position because she does not have a college degree. So, the temp has proven both the ability to stick with it and to do the job better than the college graduates they had doing the job previously, but they will not make her permanent because she does not have a degree.
If you had read the summary you would have known that the article was only talking about elite sports where left handers appear to have some sort of advantage (because they are over represented in the top levels of the sport). Hence the summary says, "why lefties are overrepresented in some elite sports but not others." Further a contextual examination would indicate that when the article speaks of "elite sports" it is referring to the top levels of a sport (professional, Olympics, World or National Championship competition).
You hit on one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that, in many companies, the data which Excel is used to analyze is a moving target. What I mean is that there are a lot of business side people who massage the data in Excel in order to identify what is causing a particular problem. Shortly after they have finished tweaking the Excel spreadsheets to tell them how to track the problem, they have fixed that problem and now have another problem, which is analyzed from the same data set (or one similar enough to start tweaking from what you ended up with on the last problem), which requires sorting the same data in a completely different way..
Actually, there is a really more basic explanation than yours, one which is backed up by actual numbers rather than conjecture. If you adjust for children raised by both parents who are still married to each other the economic differences between blacks and whites disappear. Interestingly enough, so do the differences in rate of arrests.
Except that I don't know anyone who is impressed. The problem is that there is no way for someone to campaign on getting rid of the TSA in a sound bite that cannot be made to seem like they want to do away with all airline security.
Actually, now that I have thought about it, maybe you could. It would have to be about using the TSA as an example of something larger. "Elect me to root out the government agencies which spend lots of money but fail to accomplish what they are there for. Look at the TSA, we all know that they don't make us any safer, but they spend a lot of money and make life miserable for anyone who flies."
You would need to go into more detail about your plan, but that might work. Personally, I have always felt that the TSA should have been set up as an auditing authority with airport screening left in the hands of the airlines. The TSA would then employ agents who would try to smuggle things on to flights. Different airlines could handle security in different ways and the TSA could be set up to handle getting things through security in a couple of different ways. First, they could regularly publicize which airlines were most secure and which were least secure, with the potential liability those less secure airlines would be subject to in case of an incident. Or it could fine those airlines which fell below a certain standard. Or some combination of the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess in the same way that the Bonneville Power Administration paid Bill Gates to write Microsoft Basic, or McDonald's paid for the creation of Amazon, as in, no it was not paid for by Republicans.
The Washington Free Beacon paid Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Donald Trump, along with other Republican candidates. When Donald trump clinched the Republican nomination, WFB discontinued their relationship with Fusion GPS. After WFB ended their relationship with Fusion GPS and stopped funding their opposition research, Fusion GPS was hired to do opposition research by the Hillary Clinton Campaign/DNC. Once Fusion GPS was hired by Hillary's Campaign, they hired Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele compiled the dossier. Since Christopher Steele was not working for Fusion GPS when the Republicans were paying Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele is the creator of the dossier it is disingenuous, and wrong, to say that Republicans first paid for the dossier.
Up to this point it still appears that Russia bought some ads to try to sway the vote. There is no evidence that they hacked any voting machines. There appears to be no evidence of the Russians hacking anyone's email either.
You forgot the evidence that the Russian government cooperated with the Clinton Campaign in the compilation of the "Steele dossier".
The dossier was NOT "first commissioned by Republicans". Christopher Steele was not hired by Fusion GPS until AFTER the Republicans in question stopped paying Fusion GPS for opposition research on Donald Trump and the Clinton Campaign/DNC started paying Fusion GPS for it. Which makes it seem as if the opposition research which Fusion GPS was able to obtain using techniques which the Republicans who hired them would sanction was considered to be of no value by the Democrats who thus wanted something more salacious.
The interesting thing is that, in order to compile the "Steele dossier," cooperation was sought from members of the Russian government. In other words, it was the Hillary Clinton campaign which colluded with the Russian government to "hack" the election.
You have read about the high level FBI agent who texted that they needed and insurance plan against the remote chance that Trump might win the election, didn't you?
This was the same agent who was assigned to be part of interviewing Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Flynn...all of them lied during those interviews, only one was charged. I think that and other similar revelations might have something to do with why Trump would trust ANYONE more than he trusted the heads of those agencies.
That is not faith in the American system...it is faith in the greed of trial lawyers. If there is a company providing archived arrest records as the basis for employment background checks, sooner or later some trial lawyer will become aware of this fact (and I would bet on sooner). When that happens they will file a class action lawsuit against that company, and their clients. Such a lawsuit would be easy money for the lawyers.
I am quite confident that if there is a background check company in the U.S. which is using records archived by a non-government organization (for more than an vanishingly short period of time) to provide employers with arrest record information they are currently facing, or will soon be facing, a class action lawsuit for Civil Rights violations. They are also likely being investigated by, or soon to be investigated by both the federal Civil Rights Commission and various state equivalents.
Perhaps you are unaware of the controversy around companies using criminal records as a basis for declining to employ someone, but there are places in the U.S. where it is illegal for an employer to ask if a prospective employee has been convicted of a crime because this disproportionately affects African American applicants. If refusing to hire someone who has been convicted of a crime is considered racist in some jurisdictions, think how they would react to an employer refusing to hire someone because they had been arrested without being convicted. And while employers might be able to avoid being a target, someone would notice the company providing the background checks with that information (and any reasonably competent attorney could write court filings which would shut them down almost immediately).
The article's author should have trusted you to reach that conclusion by just presenting you with the facts, rather than try to slant their article to make you reach that conclusion. Here is how I would have worded that: "There is no evidence that Uber broke any laws with this data collection. However, they have been accused of/lost a lawsuit over ..." (I do not remember what the specific wrongdoing Uber was guilty of and am not willing to spend the time looking it up, but I remember that they were caught doing something which was illegal, and several other things which may not have broken the letter of the law but certainly broke the spirit of the law).
Possibly, but the writers of the article have no evidence that such is the case. Basically, they want you to think that Uber is evil for doing this and will manipulate the way they report the story in order to encourage you to think that way. Since they do not trust their readers to come to the same conclusion they did from a presentation of the facts, it makes me think there is a lot less to this story than is presented.
Here is the key line from the article: "It’s possible Uber’s data gathering did not violate any laws..."
Tanslation: We have no evidence that Uber did anything illegal in regards to its data gathering, but we want you to assume that they did while maintaining a defense against libel.
I do not "absolve" the GOP of not passing a "net neutrality" law. I praise them for not expanding government power to "fix" a problem created by the misuse of government power.
That is because he expended all of his political capital with the American people on the ACA and Dodd-Frank. Instead of passing laws that the voters wanted he jammed through the ACA, which cost him the Democratic majority in Congress. When Obama had a majority in Congress he made no effort to reach across the aisle and peal off a couple of Republican votes. That was because he was convinced that the ACA would be popular once it was passed.
North Korea is unlikely to have the icebreaking capability to send fishing boats to this area.
Actually, the scalper is indeed providing a useful service to the market. If the manufacturer is genuinely only able to produce 5 widgets when the demand is for 10 at their standard price, scalpers teach them what price point stabilizes demand to supply. That allows the manufacturer to know if it is worth building greater capacity to meet demand.
Artificial scarcity on an occasional product in their product line allows the company to keep the prices up on the entire line because it feeds the impression that there is high demand for that product line. One of the techniques they will use is to make the initial product run smaller than their low estimate of demand, ensuring that the initial release will sell out before everyone gets one. They follow this with a release intended to just barely fill the remaining demand. Of course, if things have worked according to plan, demand is slightly higher than their estimate. The result of this is that demand is higher for their next year's product as well.
While it may mean leaving a few dollars on the table at any one time, it has been proven to keep long term demand for a company's product high because, "their stuff is always so popular they cannot keep up with demand."
You are correct that it is an inefficient market, but the actors who created the inefficiency are the ones who pay the price. Of course the key thing you are missing is that the scarcity was not created by the scalpers. The manufacturer did that in the first place by producing fewer of the product than the anticipated demand. They did this because they knew that the scarcity would drive up demand, both for the scarce product and for related products. The manufacturer is actually counting on the scalpers to drive demand for their product.
Scalpers disrupt that function be creating an artificial scarcity and then taking advantage of it.
Others have addressed some of the flaws in your argument, but none of them have correctly addressed this one. Scalpers do not create scarcity, they take advantage of it. The term as first coined applied to ticket sales where the scarcity is a result of venue size and is not artificial. However, in the cases discussed in this article, the scarcity is intentionally created by the manufacturer by knowingly producing fewer than the expected demand. If the manufacturers did not approve of what the scalpers are doing they have several options available to them to put them out of business. They could A} charge more for these scarce products in the first place or B)secretly reserve a significant number of these products and flood the market with them just before Christmas (or when the scalping price rises above a certain level). After a year or two of B, people who wanted the "scarce" item would continue to look for the item at retail, knowing that eventually it would be there. If scalpers tried to keep supply scarce, they would bankrupt themselves by buying more of the item than they could sell. There are other strategies the manufacturers could implement as well. However, the manufacturers like the scalpers because it increases demand for their product (even some of the other items they sell which they have not artificially limited).
There is no "alt-left". The term you are looking for is "ctrl-left".
The "scam" is that Uber is not getting their cut.
Umm, yeah, I really want the people in the ER checking against state records to determine if someone has filed a proper DNR form, or not, BEFORE they attempt to resuscitate that person when they arrive in the ER unconscious.
That would be a VERY bad idea considering the several frat members currently on trial because someone died at their frat during hazing.
That would make sense, except for the fact that my company has such a rule. However, we have someone who was hired as a temp in Accounting. She cleaned up many problems the accounting department had had, but, despite having an open permanent position in accounting, they will not hire her for that position because she does not have a college degree. So, the temp has proven both the ability to stick with it and to do the job better than the college graduates they had doing the job previously, but they will not make her permanent because she does not have a degree.
If you had read the summary you would have known that the article was only talking about elite sports where left handers appear to have some sort of advantage (because they are over represented in the top levels of the sport). Hence the summary says, "why lefties are overrepresented in some elite sports but not others." Further a contextual examination would indicate that when the article speaks of "elite sports" it is referring to the top levels of a sport (professional, Olympics, World or National Championship competition).
You hit on one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that, in many companies, the data which Excel is used to analyze is a moving target. What I mean is that there are a lot of business side people who massage the data in Excel in order to identify what is causing a particular problem. Shortly after they have finished tweaking the Excel spreadsheets to tell them how to track the problem, they have fixed that problem and now have another problem, which is analyzed from the same data set (or one similar enough to start tweaking from what you ended up with on the last problem), which requires sorting the same data in a completely different way..
Actually, there is a really more basic explanation than yours, one which is backed up by actual numbers rather than conjecture. If you adjust for children raised by both parents who are still married to each other the economic differences between blacks and whites disappear. Interestingly enough, so do the differences in rate of arrests.
Except that I don't know anyone who is impressed. The problem is that there is no way for someone to campaign on getting rid of the TSA in a sound bite that cannot be made to seem like they want to do away with all airline security.
Actually, now that I have thought about it, maybe you could. It would have to be about using the TSA as an example of something larger. "Elect me to root out the government agencies which spend lots of money but fail to accomplish what they are there for. Look at the TSA, we all know that they don't make us any safer, but they spend a lot of money and make life miserable for anyone who flies."
You would need to go into more detail about your plan, but that might work. Personally, I have always felt that the TSA should have been set up as an auditing authority with airport screening left in the hands of the airlines. The TSA would then employ agents who would try to smuggle things on to flights. Different airlines could handle security in different ways and the TSA could be set up to handle getting things through security in a couple of different ways. First, they could regularly publicize which airlines were most secure and which were least secure, with the potential liability those less secure airlines would be subject to in case of an incident. Or it could fine those airlines which fell below a certain standard. Or some combination of the two.