That's an interesting thought, and it wouldn't surprise me if a landlord eventually tries to pull that act on commercial property via an inventive reading of the lease.
This is pretty much how McDonalds franchising works: they pick the location for you, they buy the real estate, and then they lease it to you on the condition that you pay them franchise fees, rent, and so on on top of that.
It's also how most "incubators" and "accelerators" operate: they give you a location to work in exchange for an equity cut. The only real difference to the Sony scenario is that Sony wouldn't give them that cut, because Sony isn't a cash-strapped startup.
Most people renting housing are actually cash strapped, since if they weren't, they'd own instead of renting; living in an area to "make your nut" so you can retire to some other (cheaper) location is really an exception, unless you are in Silicon Valley or some other location on an H1-B from a country where the cost of living is generally much lower, and you can make the necessary cash reserves within the visa time restrictions.
The problem with this story, however, is that they are trying to ex post facto establish a covenant on the lease for subletting which wasn't prohibited in the original lease, based on expectation of use -- without changing the use to which the property is being put. By doing this, they are tacitly approving the use to which their tenant is putting the property.
If this went forward (hence my original move directly to a reductio ad absurdum argument), then there wold be no reason that a mortgage lender could not demand a similar cut... and not just from private residences.
Consider that if Melon Bank (for example), held the mortgage on a Marriott Residence Inn complex, and decided that they wanted a cut of the income derived from guests renting from Marriott, how that would go over.
The only difference, between that case and the AirBNB rental case, is in who has the deep pockets for a legal fight, and who doesn't.
CompStak is the CRE (Commercial Real Estate) company that leases the 2207 Bridgepointe Pkwy, San Mateo, CA building to Sony Entertainment for the production of software for the Sony PlayStation, including their FreeBSD based operating systems development.
They are upset that their renters are making money through their least of their property, and have decided they want a cut of the revenues that result from the business done by their lessees.
Just like the landlords of properties their lessees are occasionally renting out via Airbnb.
"Participants will be involved in the design of the Initiative and will have the opportunity to contribute diverse sources of data—including medical records; profiles of the patient’s genes, metabolites (chemical makeup), and microorganisms in and on the body; environmental and lifestyle data; patient-generated information; and personal device and sensor data."
They're looking for a million volunteers to give away all their health related and lifestyle data, to the tune of $215M. Does not seem cool. I expect that this will turn into something like "volunteer your data, or you'll be paying an extra $50/month for your health insurance, compared to someone who *does* "volunteer".
They're also reviving the National Children’s Study to the tune of $165M ("Someone *is* thinking of the children!"), to follow 100,000 children "from the womb to age 21", to determine environmental factors affecting their health. This is the same program the NIH cancelled last December as "infeasible".
"Q: How will this be different from the original NCS?
A: We are going to be leveraging existing cohorts. That way, a good deal of the infrastructure will already be in place with regard to identification and enrollment of potential participants. It will allow us to ask very targeted questions where appropriate."
Again -- not a good feeling about this' they want to centralize existing, theoretically double blind data into a central, non-blind database, so that they can reuse existing cohorts that volunteered for other studies -- but didn't volunteer for this one (but thank you for your participation anyway!).
They also made the so-called R&D tax credit permanent -- not sure how I feel about than one, either, since the National Association of Manufacturers is behind it, and as well all know, most manufacturing happens in China. This should bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. but it's looking like most of that R&D (which amounts to $7B/year in tax exemptions for industry) is going to be to implementation automation so that can happen, rather than employing people.
On the NASA front, it's mostly harmless; Representative John Culberson (R–TX) will be happy, since the robotic mission to Europa (wasn't that the only place the monolith told us *wasn't* ours?!?) is back on, since most of the work is happening in his district.
Overall: medium amount of pork, and some invasion of privacy issues with regard to the NIH: so SSDD...
Corporations have a dark side, too, like the inability to fire incompetent people, valuing seniority over ability, creating artificial scarcity, etc.
Fixed that for you.
You didn't fix it very well. Most corporations look at seniority as a liability, in terms of the premium they end up paying for it.
There's a reason the average age at many Silicon Valley companies is far lower than the average age of Silicon Valley CEOs. Google and other tech companies run at an average age of about 29 years old. Larry Page, on the other hand, is 42. The median age of U.S. workers across all industries is 42.4. The average age of a Facebook employee is 26; Zuckerberg is currently 31. Apple is slightly higher, with an average age of 33; Tim Cook is 55.
In other words, there's a bias *against* seniority; for seniority to be meaningful, you pretty much have to be in a union job, at a higher grade than apprentice or journeyman.
Corporations generally have a fiduciary responsibility to get rid of incompetent people. Unlike, for example, the unionized Muni drivers who show up to their job reeking of alcohol, or the bad teachers you can't get rid of, or the bad cops that immediately call their union rep, etc., etc..
While I agree that corporations may in fact create artificial scarcity, that's usually a scarcity of product, rather than of service. For example, Apple is well known to do hold backs on new product releases, so that demand outstrips supply, and therefore people are willing to pay a premium; on the other hand, if you walk into an Apple store, and go to the "genius bar", you pretty much get helped, and they sales associates on the floor tend to not approach you first, or push any particular product, they are there to answer questions and take payment in exchange for goods. Good service is just good business.
Nobody calls the guy selling random junk on ebay an employee or a contractor, do they?
And yet eBay does the same thing as Uber, in terms of rating sellers, which is what people are claiming results in Uber's contractors supposedly being employees.
Personally, were I in charge at Uber, it would cost only a few million dollars to set up either franchise operations, or set up each driver as a corporation, and then contract with the corporation on a 1099 basis, instead of with the driver themselves.
We really know that there are two issues here: (1) The taxi companies have historically held a medallion/lease monopoly, and so were able to give shitty service when they were called to locations they didn't really want to go, and (2) it's a lot easier for a government agency to collect taxes if they only have one business entity to deal with, and can manage it as an unfunded mandate on the business, rather than having to collect from each individual contractor.
The second reason is the same one that causes most government agencies to make it really, really miserable to get licensed as a 1099 contractor as a massage therapist, or a nail salon worker, or a hair stylist, all of which are typical 1099 contractor jobs.
What business model. You mean the one that avoids laws....
How is that not *all* business models?
You thread the maze of twisty passages set up by the regulators, in an effort to get the most income with the least outlay. That's kind of the entire game plan for all businesses. You avoid the laws by (1) not running afoul of them, and (2) design your business model such that the fewest laws possible are applicable to your model. Occasionally, you purchase (or rent; they're contractors, after all) a legislator.
"On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird as paying a tax on Firefox and said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does."
Eric Jackson has been peeing on Yahoo for 7 years.
He advises people on How to be an activist investor, and it mostly comes down to making a lot of noise, even when you only own about 0.2% of the stock -- which is what his fund owns of Yahoo.
And when "whomever" amounts to the "poorest, most repressive, and most war-torn countries in the world," as the article mentions, what recourse does one have?
Ending the repression and the combat would seem to be one option.
It is more correct to say that a theory either has to be falsifiable, or there has to be no other falsifiable explanations for describing what we verifiably observe.
At which point the theory that wins its way to be the working hypothesis is the simplest one that fits the facts.
I think that if you are comparing philosophers and PhD's in physics, you kind of have to go back and acknowledge that "PhD" means "Doctor of Philosophy", and thus philosophers who specialize in physics are more likely to be correct than philosophers who specialize in, for example, comparative religion.
So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
As soon as you go past a point at which your story is falsifiable through any conceivable experiment, it's just a story: it's no longer a scientific theory. Theories must be falsifiable, or they are invalid.
We know the scientific method is valid because we have empirical evidence that says it works!/sarcasm
Well... we have light bulbs.
How many years before the industrial revolution did the Catholic Church have to come up with revealed knowledge that would enable them to create working light bulbs? How long following the industrial revolution and wide adoption of the scientific method did it take someone to come up with working light bulbs?
Because NASA plans to piss in the punch bowl by deorbiting the thing, instead of letting someone else have it?
Why wouldn't a "successor space station" be exactly the same size, because it's the same station, only new and improved, with all the NASA cleaned out of it?
Seems a little asshole-y, given that they didn't pay for the whole thing, and didn't even orbit all of the modules.
And if they end up with squatters? Guess what: develop an orbital capability of your own and fly up and post an eviction notice, but if you are going to abandon the property, don't expect it to stay vacant, just because you happen to be the bank that holds the mortgage, and want to keep other people from using the thing because they won't pay you enough rent.
FWIW, I think Joan Daemen might object to your classification of him as a famous woman (unless you were going for the minority designation with him as someone from Belgium).
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting thought, and it wouldn't surprise me if a landlord eventually tries to pull that act on commercial property via an inventive reading of the lease.
This is pretty much how McDonalds franchising works: they pick the location for you, they buy the real estate, and then they lease it to you on the condition that you pay them franchise fees, rent, and so on on top of that.
It's also how most "incubators" and "accelerators" operate: they give you a location to work in exchange for an equity cut. The only real difference to the Sony scenario is that Sony wouldn't give them that cut, because Sony isn't a cash-strapped startup.
Most people renting housing are actually cash strapped, since if they weren't, they'd own instead of renting; living in an area to "make your nut" so you can retire to some other (cheaper) location is really an exception, unless you are in Silicon Valley or some other location on an H1-B from a country where the cost of living is generally much lower, and you can make the necessary cash reserves within the visa time restrictions.
The problem with this story, however, is that they are trying to ex post facto establish a covenant on the lease for subletting which wasn't prohibited in the original lease, based on expectation of use -- without changing the use to which the property is being put. By doing this, they are tacitly approving the use to which their tenant is putting the property.
If this went forward (hence my original move directly to a reductio ad absurdum argument), then there wold be no reason that a mortgage lender could not demand a similar cut ... and not just from private residences.
Consider that if Melon Bank (for example), held the mortgage on a Marriott Residence Inn complex, and decided that they wanted a cut of the income derived from guests renting from Marriott, how that would go over.
The only difference, between that case and the AirBNB rental case, is in who has the deep pockets for a legal fight, and who doesn't.
"... trust providers to accurately track ..."
Provider solution:
Bill both customers for the usage. Problem solved. There's even precedent (Netflix extortion, etc.).
In related news...
CompStak wants a share of PlayStation revenues.
CompStak is the CRE (Commercial Real Estate) company that leases the 2207 Bridgepointe Pkwy, San Mateo, CA building to Sony Entertainment for the production of software for the Sony PlayStation, including their FreeBSD based operating systems development.
They are upset that their renters are making money through their least of their property, and have decided they want a cut of the revenues that result from the business done by their lessees.
Just like the landlords of properties their lessees are occasionally renting out via Airbnb.
Oh wait.
Now both demands seem ridiculous...
And another data point for the misanthropy of the Space Nutter.
*They* kill 14 people and injure 24 more... and *I'm* misanthropic?
I think you need to check your dictionary...
Not too happy about Precision Health Initiative.
"Participants will be involved in the design of the Initiative and will have the opportunity to contribute diverse sources of data—including medical records; profiles of the patient’s genes, metabolites (chemical makeup), and microorganisms in and on the body; environmental and lifestyle data; patient-generated information; and personal device and sensor data."
They're looking for a million volunteers to give away all their health related and lifestyle data, to the tune of $215M. Does not seem cool. I expect that this will turn into something like "volunteer your data, or you'll be paying an extra $50/month for your health insurance, compared to someone who *does* "volunteer".
They're also reviving the National Children’s Study to the tune of $165M ("Someone *is* thinking of the children!"), to follow 100,000 children "from the womb to age 21", to determine environmental factors affecting their health. This is the same program the NIH cancelled last December as "infeasible".
"Q: How will this be different from the original NCS?
A: We are going to be leveraging existing cohorts. That way, a good deal of the infrastructure will already be in place with regard to identification and enrollment of potential participants. It will allow us to ask very targeted questions where appropriate."
Again -- not a good feeling about this' they want to centralize existing, theoretically double blind data into a central, non-blind database, so that they can reuse existing cohorts that volunteered for other studies -- but didn't volunteer for this one (but thank you for your participation anyway!).
They also made the so-called R&D tax credit permanent -- not sure how I feel about than one, either, since the National Association of Manufacturers is behind it, and as well all know, most manufacturing happens in China. This should bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. but it's looking like most of that R&D (which amounts to $7B/year in tax exemptions for industry) is going to be to implementation automation so that can happen, rather than employing people.
On the NASA front, it's mostly harmless; Representative John Culberson (R–TX) will be happy, since the robotic mission to Europa (wasn't that the only place the monolith told us *wasn't* ours?!?) is back on, since most of the work is happening in his district.
Overall: medium amount of pork, and some invasion of privacy issues with regard to the NIH: so SSDD...
But here we are talking about deleterius conditions, not simply "risky".
More deleterious than going to Christmas parties in San Bernardino?
Personally, I'm all for the "abandon ship" option; the assholes on Earth are getting near enough to a comparable risk, don't you think?
So basically: still lower than driving age without parental supervision, in most of Europe.
Corporations have a dark side, too, like the inability to fire incompetent people, valuing seniority over ability, creating artificial scarcity, etc.
Fixed that for you.
You didn't fix it very well. Most corporations look at seniority as a liability, in terms of the premium they end up paying for it.
There's a reason the average age at many Silicon Valley companies is far lower than the average age of Silicon Valley CEOs. Google and other tech companies run at an average age of about 29 years old. Larry Page, on the other hand, is 42. The median age of U.S. workers across all industries is 42.4. The average age of a Facebook employee is 26; Zuckerberg is currently 31. Apple is slightly higher, with an average age of 33; Tim Cook is 55.
In other words, there's a bias *against* seniority; for seniority to be meaningful, you pretty much have to be in a union job, at a higher grade than apprentice or journeyman.
Corporations generally have a fiduciary responsibility to get rid of incompetent people. Unlike, for example, the unionized Muni drivers who show up to their job reeking of alcohol, or the bad teachers you can't get rid of, or the bad cops that immediately call their union rep, etc., etc..
While I agree that corporations may in fact create artificial scarcity, that's usually a scarcity of product, rather than of service. For example, Apple is well known to do hold backs on new product releases, so that demand outstrips supply, and therefore people are willing to pay a premium; on the other hand, if you walk into an Apple store, and go to the "genius bar", you pretty much get helped, and they sales associates on the floor tend to not approach you first, or push any particular product, they are there to answer questions and take payment in exchange for goods. Good service is just good business.
Nobody calls the guy selling random junk on ebay an employee or a contractor, do they?
And yet eBay does the same thing as Uber, in terms of rating sellers, which is what people are claiming results in Uber's contractors supposedly being employees.
Personally, were I in charge at Uber, it would cost only a few million dollars to set up either franchise operations, or set up each driver as a corporation, and then contract with the corporation on a 1099 basis, instead of with the driver themselves.
We really know that there are two issues here: (1) The taxi companies have historically held a medallion/lease monopoly, and so were able to give shitty service when they were called to locations they didn't really want to go, and (2) it's a lot easier for a government agency to collect taxes if they only have one business entity to deal with, and can manage it as an unfunded mandate on the business, rather than having to collect from each individual contractor.
The second reason is the same one that causes most government agencies to make it really, really miserable to get licensed as a 1099 contractor as a massage therapist, or a nail salon worker, or a hair stylist, all of which are typical 1099 contractor jobs.
You are out of touch. Think of all the uneducated and under employed people that are getting squeezed out by automation.
A thing of beauty, isn't it?!?
Eventually, we'll have a Universal Basic Income, and humans can stop doing drudge work better handled by automation, altogether.
Pretty sure that's what Plato meant by "Utopia"...
What business model. You mean the one that avoids laws....
How is that not *all* business models?
You thread the maze of twisty passages set up by the regulators, in an effort to get the most income with the least outlay. That's kind of the entire game plan for all businesses. You avoid the laws by (1) not running afoul of them, and (2) design your business model such that the fewest laws possible are applicable to your model. Occasionally, you purchase (or rent; they're contractors, after all) a legislator.
Here is the objection to Thunderbird:
"On December 1, 2015, Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker announced in a company-wide memo that Thunderbird needs to be uncoupled from Firefox. She referred to Thunderbird as paying a tax on Firefox and said that she does not believe Thunderbird has the potential for "industry-wide impact" that Firefox does."
Eric Jackson has been peeing on Yahoo for 7 years.
He advises people on How to be an activist investor, and it mostly comes down to making a lot of noise, even when you only own about 0.2% of the stock -- which is what his fund owns of Yahoo.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ho...
http://recode.net/2014/08/12/a...
http://greenbackd.com/tag/dr-e...
His dream (now all but kaput, thanks to the financial crisis in China) was to have Alibaba flush with cash, spending it on acquiring Yahoo.
She sucked at her last 2 CEO jobs as well. Why did anyone expect anything different?
She's only been the CEO of one company, and that's Yahoo.
And when "whomever" amounts to the "poorest, most repressive, and most war-torn countries in the world," as the article mentions, what recourse does one have?
Ending the repression and the combat would seem to be one option.
Perhaps it's worth considering doing that?
It is more correct to say that a theory either has to be falsifiable, or there has to be no other falsifiable explanations for describing what we verifiably observe.
At which point the theory that wins its way to be the working hypothesis is the simplest one that fits the facts.
I think that if you are comparing philosophers and PhD's in physics, you kind of have to go back and acknowledge that "PhD" means "Doctor of Philosophy", and thus philosophers who specialize in physics are more likely to be correct than philosophers who specialize in, for example, comparative religion.
So, for that reason the string theorists and philosophers may have a point.
As soon as you go past a point at which your story is falsifiable through any conceivable experiment, it's just a story: it's no longer a scientific theory. Theories must be falsifiable, or they are invalid.
We know the scientific method is valid because we have empirical evidence that says it works! /sarcasm
Well... we have light bulbs.
How many years before the industrial revolution did the Catholic Church have to come up with revealed knowledge that would enable them to create working light bulbs? How long following the industrial revolution and wide adoption of the scientific method did it take someone to come up with working light bulbs?
So yeah... light bulbs.
I suspect that you heard of a band called "woosh"? Just making double-sure?
I already saw your "woosh", and I will raise you one...
Sounds like a musical dead-end to me.
They'll be considered a classic. All it will take is 50 more years.
Some obvious workarounds...
"2.42 times more likely to die during the study"
These people can avoid dying during the study by not participating in the study.
"4.23 times more likely die by the time the study ended"
These people could be saved by continuing the study indefinitely.
Problems solved!
Quadruple everyone's bandwidth. It will drop from 70% to 70% / 4 ...or just 17.5%.
Problem solved!
They are not serious about it.
A red alert is never serious, unless there's also a "Bridge Lurch, left" accompanying it.
successor space station ... will be far smaller...
Because NASA plans to piss in the punch bowl by deorbiting the thing, instead of letting someone else have it?
Why wouldn't a "successor space station" be exactly the same size, because it's the same station, only new and improved, with all the NASA cleaned out of it?
Seems a little asshole-y, given that they didn't pay for the whole thing, and didn't even orbit all of the modules.
And if they end up with squatters? Guess what: develop an orbital capability of your own and fly up and post an eviction notice, but if you are going to abandon the property, don't expect it to stay vacant, just because you happen to be the bank that holds the mortgage, and want to keep other people from using the thing because they won't pay you enough rent.
FWIW, I think Joan Daemen might object to your classification of him as a famous woman (unless you were going for the minority designation with him as someone from Belgium).
Whoops!
Guess I'm more gender blind than the OP!
The others are correct (reverified).