Very few poor people drive into lower Manhattan. And people whose work requires them to drive in that area (delivery drivers, plumbers, etc.) come out ahead. One of the first NYT stories after congestion pricing was rolled out had multiple quotes from tradesmen reporting that they're saving an hour or more a day and prefer the new system.
There was also an endless parade of NY Post stories about how Manhattan restaurants would suffer because their customers couldn't just drive in from Long Island and New Jersey.
Well, the market decides where the optimum is *in response to* the price set by the government. So the government can decide at least approximately where they want things to end up by setting a higher or lower price.
Right. It finds an economic optimum limited to what people are willing to pay and their perceived value from that. That optimum doesn't naturally weight more complex factors like for the trade-off for the smog generated from your travel.
CZ was not convicted of fraud or even money laundering. There's a reason the sentence was only 4 months. His charge was the first ever prosecution of a platform/bank poorly implementing KYC and not doing enough surveillance of its users to comply with the letter of AML regulations. The case relied on the theoretical possibility of US citizen users placing trades that are matched by people from sanctioned countries - it did not even find cases of such trades. Big banks routinely pay fines for this, and never face imprisonment.
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
> A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.
My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:
1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.
2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.
3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?
Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.
My local library had books 1-3 and 5-6 of a series I was reading by an author who I own all of her later books. I even tried to find a copy at the local used shop, thinking I would read it and then donate it, but due to her rising star they had printed new editions in a completely different style, and size. I ended up pirating a copy of that book instead. Then bought the audio book for a book I already owned as penance.
I suspect when there are gaps that either the counterfeiters win or nobody wins.
What I'd like to know is: has anyone ever sued Amazon for this? There seems to be plenty of evidence for a massive class action suit. They are knowingly and intentionally screwing sellers and customers alike.
Anyone can have an Apple Account whether or not they own an Apple Device.
In this case, too, you can create Invites on icloud.com on non-Apple devices. Including the webpage seems nicely responsive and can probably make them in an Android Chrome tab if you wanted.
The only remaining obstacle is that it isn't a free feature of an Apple Account, but requires an iCloud+ subscription. But that's useful for Apple Music and Apple TV+ and other products, too, many of which work just fine on non-Apple devices as well.
A company creating a useful tool that encourages people to buy their product is incredibly boring, typical, and not at all controversial until it's Apple doing it.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with the concentration of mobile devs and FOSS types here, along with people who really can't understand that not everyone wants their phone to be something other than "Working out of the box."
Ah yes the classic false dichotomy, that it either has to be closed/proprietary/locked down and "just works" or it can be open but unusable. In reality the two are completely orthogonal. There's nothing magical about publishing the source that suddenly changes the code or the product and breaks it. If Apple open sourced ever line of code they have tonight, would iPhones suddenly stop working?
So, what's stopping you from becoming Apple's competition? If a significant number of people crave your idea of FOSS and you have ideas to make a superior product, I'm sure the market will reward you.
Did you ever see any Linux laptop in a store? They do have some market share but never existed to the ordinary people.
Also, GNU/Linux phones exist (Librem 5 is my daily driver). However without Apple's budgets, you can't create the same smooth experience. You just can't compete with the duopoly.
So what you're saying is that alternatives do exist, but they aren't popular... that doesn't sound like a "duopoly" exists, it just sounds like Android and Apple cover the needs of the vast majority of people. I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.
> I'm sure it's difficult to be part of a niche, but that doesn't mean that there's some conspiracy against you.
Yes, it does: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/. Purism tried to created their own smartphone not relying on Apple and Google and it was almost impossible to find the necessary chips. Nobody wanted to share the schematics or open the drivers. People are just locked-in into the duopoly. It's impossible to use popular apps without it, like Whatsapp or even Signal (!).
I think that's preferable to them being totally unable to RSVP but you're still going to be the friend that can't make the invite. It's comparable to iMessage. You can still talk to Android users but it's a notably worse experience.
Non-Apple users cant contribute to the playlist. No mention on the impact to the shared photo album. If its just a normal shared Photos.app album, non-apple users are locked out there, too.
But in Germany you need an actual address. If you are homeless, you almost legally don't exist. You are prohibited from opening a bank account, for example, or having a job, because you do not exist.
You’re wrong, you have a legal right to a bank account (Basiskonto) if you live in the EU, even if you don’t have a fixed address. The bank literally can’t deny you ( https://www.bafin.de/DE/Verbraucher/Bank/Produkte/Basiskonto... ). You need to give them an address to send mail to, but that can be any address where you can get access to the mail (friends, family, homeless shelter…). Do you have a source for the claim?
I'm not seeing what the "catastrophic" issue is. A site can include a link to install an app from a third-party marketplace and, when the user affirmatively acts to proceed with the install, that marketplace can see which site the install request came from.
It looks like they basically created an immutable identifier that gets exposed. Sort of like a persistent third party cookie, but with fewer access controls as it isn’t domain bound.
That’s just my read of the article, I haven’t reviewed the code myself.
However, I will say that the way SV companies tend to operate is they refuse to do any compliance work until forced by circumstance, then they have to do a rush job and a bunch of stuff gets fucked up that would have been fine if they planned ahead based on statutory requirement.
So from a human/corporate behavior perspective this is exactly what I’d expect.
Likewise, Apple in particular has a holier than thou attitude, especially in regards to privacy, so I think there’s a bit of them being blinded by their own arrogance in this case.
Sweet, UE can now legitimately take 4% of Apple’s global income for uniquely identifying all users on Earth, having undeletable cookies and not having the cookie banter and thus, breaking GDPR.
Having worked in this sector for a very long time I just don’t think GDPR is an effective regulatory tool. Primarily because Ireland is a regulatory/tax haven for American companies and they have to enforce GDPR…and they refuse to.
Whereas DMA was written to totally avoid that problem; so I think a DMA action is WAY more likely as the Irish can’t block it.
Where do you get "affirmatively acts to proceed with the install"? The original advisory suggests that any website can fire off these marketplace requests in response to any user action.
According to the advisory the user can click on a button and the event handler issues the request. There isn't a link. The user has no indication of what's going to happen beyond whatever the page chooses to tell them.
Have you seen the queries an ORM generates? Pretty sure they have data engineers beat in query volume, and there's more web developers using ORMs than data engineers.
