Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).
It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.
The distinction is not as clear nor as useful as some make it sound. For example, is my pickup truck "personal" or "private"? Or is it personal as long as I drive myself and my stuff around, but as soon as I offer to sell moving services to others, it becomes private? Or is it still personal as long as I don't scale the business to more trucks? What if my brother and I want to pool two trucks? What if I contribute the truck and he contributes the driving skill, but we are both part owners in the business? What if he doesn't want to take the risk of capital ownership and instead wants a steady wage? At what point does the truck stop being personal property?
My personal view of this is that Marxism doesn't really have much to say about organizations below a certain scale, and what it has to say about larger scale orgs is that they are icky/alienating. Everything else is more about trying to verbalize the ickyness than to explain anything substantial about the org mechanics.
I first heard about black owner appraisal discrimination almost a year ago, and I tried to find studies of this phenomenon. The closest thing I could find was this study by Brookings (https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...) which found that homes in black neighborhoods are appraised at lower values than structurally comparable homes in non-black neighborhoods. I have not seen a study of the situation described in this article, where the owner swaps family photos and asks a non-black friend to meet the appraiser.
Does anyone know of a study? I am interested in whether this effect is real and any attempts to quantify its magnitude.
There have been numerous articles like this one, but I fear that they suffer from publication bias (no one prints the article where the black owner received the same or higher appraisal), and the presented sample size is always small.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...) thinks there are 10^80 atoms in the observable universe, which is approximately 2^240. If you only need to assign a unique ID to each atom, then you need a counter with approximately 240 bits.
But if you needed to store even one bit of information per atom (e.g. whether it is hydrogen or not), then don't you need 2^240 bits uncompressed?
MA specifically addresses his education in this interview. He says that he learned most of what he knows via independent reading, that his high school was not high quality (his computer class teacher being a lucky accident that he almost missed), and that he identifies as part of the Midwestern farmer/tinker culture (e.g. Bob Noyce).
How big a problem is the possible breakage of C extensions for new code? Is there currently some standard "future proofed for multi-thread" way of writing them that will reduce the odds of the C extension breaking? And maybe also being compatible with PyPy? Or do developers today need to write a separate version for each interpreter that they want to support?
If they were evicted and living on the streets, then they would not have accrued a rent liability for those months. So the total liability now would be less.
You could argue that the current state of large accrued rent liabilities is better than the alternative world of smaller liabilities, more homeless, more deaths, etc, but the OP is not making the inverse claim.
Further, IIRC the moratorium relied on self-reported hardship. Is it so hard to imagine that people who could have actually afforded their rent decided to game the system a bit and accrue (rather than pay) their liability? Such behavior would also cause the current liabilities to be higher.
Here, I think some lawmakers probably thought (a) "if someone can use this tool that well, then more power to him", or (b) I don't like it, but it is so unlikely, and I can probably live with it.
I don't think it was a scenario of someone failing to "consider the case."
Sure, if you can reproduce the input and if you agree that it is misuse. This is a scenario where we don't know the formula to create $5B, and and there is no consensus that it ("making an extremely successful investment in a tax shelter") is misuse.
> Is it in the interest of the US to pay Thiel to put his money in a Roth? How much should the US pay? How many of your tax dollars would you want to go to funding tax breaks for Thiel?
I submit that yes, it is in the interest of the US to do this, provided that Thiel is creating value for the US (and to some extent the world) with that money. $5B is approximately one day of US government spending (maybe less now). Letting Thiel invest $5B may not be the best investment decision that the USG has ever made (e.g. Internet funding, Telsa support), but it is way higher than the mean decision.
When you create a tax shelter, someone always asks "what if someone uses this to create an enormous amount of wealth"? This is not just true for the US tax code, but has been true for probably every tax code in history. When that question is raised, the first thing to contemplate is how likely it is to occur. And if it is not considered likely, then this risk is accepted.
Fuzzing may be a good analogy. Fuzzing can be used to test POST request processing when the logic is too complicated to validate via more formal means. We try a large sample of inputs. If they pass, then the test passes, even though we cannot be confident that the code will handle every input string correctly.
I disagree with ProPublica's take. If it was as simple as "pay just fractions of a penny per share... watch as all the gains..." then we would all do it. Not just with Roth IRAs, but with our entire portfolios. The reason we don't all do this is because startups are very very risky. Some people will succeed and walk away with windfalls. Other people will lose their shirts. If there was arbitrage, there would be a an "app for that" and there would be more billionaires walking around.
If they intended something else, then why didn't they write the rules to reflect "else"? The truth is that they didn't think that any Roth IRA investor would be as successful as Thiel. He showed that he can be. Good for him.
I can think of two reasons:
(1) It was not his own company when the IRA made the investment. That is, the IRA invests alongside other investors at the founding. Anyone who wants to buy shares at 0.01 is able to do so. He is not dictating some special price that only he gets.
(2) If some investors create an SPV to invest in PayPal (e.g. to limit liability), then his IRA becomes an investor in that SPV. He loses management control over that portion of the investment, but when the SPV sells its PayPal shares, it distributes the cash to all investors, including to the IRA.
Does anyone know whether this kind of tax planning is available to today's startup investors? Are there any administrators which support this kind of illiquid investment?
The NFT here seems to be a publicity stunt to both raise money directly from the auction and also to raise awareness about the charity. I had never heard of this charity before this stunt, and I probably would not have heard of them without it. It certainly seems plausible that "using an NFT" here is a net good, even if there is some carbon cost.
You could argue against the stunt, but it requires more work that just stating "carbon costs." You'd have to check whether valueOfSavedLife * moneyRaised / 1235 + carbonCost < 0. And it looks like the auction is structured so that moneyRaised will be at least 2.5M, so the carbonCost would need to be pretty negative to make the sum negative. What is carbonCost?