“ This issue was initially discovered in 2016 by a RedHat kernel developer and disclosed in a public email thread, but the Linux kernel community did not patch the issue until it was re-reported in 2021.”
Side note but I take offense reading things like this: "The company bet big on formalizing its program of worker misclassification, teaming up with Lyft and other gig-work companies to spend $225m to pass California's Proposition 22, which would allow the company to abuse its drivers with impunity."
Both the left and the right tend to claim that election results are rigged, but of course only when they don't like it.
Prop 22 was directly voted by the people of California with a relatively huge margin for a Proposition - 58%. Yes Uber etc spend a lot of money promoting it but many other Props with big money support have failed. Treating voters like sheep that vote on whatever is being advertised is naive and dangerous.
The right will do the same thing, usually not claiming money influence but rather using the fact that big media is mostly left leaning.
Both sides have to trust the voters may know what they want and perhaps it wasn't the money or the articles that drove the election results, but policies.
So let me see if I get this. Uber has been struggling to become profitable and this blog has gone to town many times making fun of Uber for not being really profitable. Finally, Uber does the only thing that can get it profitable: raise prices and control costs. And this blog finds a way to complain again, saying that it " Uber transferred $2.8b from its drivers to its shareholders".
Of course, any company that makes any profit could instead, in theory, give that money to its employees/contractors. But then no company would ever be profitable. In addition, the blog says that the main reason for profitability is higher consumer prices, but then calls the profits a transfer from labor.
The post itself says Uber investors have spent 32B and hasn't seen any returns. So yes, profits have to come from consumers spending more money than labor takes in. Revenue minus expenses. It's math.
Don't get me wrong, Uber is very very far from a perfect company. But taking a communist point of view on everything a company does, just to stir anger and resentment, is not helpful.
most people find one of the most high paying jobs they can, then adjust their lifestyle to that income, then if they miss the mark ('lowball offer') they have to keep looking.
lifestyle regression is exceptionally hard for humans, especially if your friends/neighbors don't have to go through the same thing (e.g. there's no war raging in your country).
the best thing to do would be to keep your spend way below your means. this maximizes your options and gives you choice. but who does that?
When are we going to admit that DeFi is a regression, not progress, versus the status quo financial system?
Crypto is all about disintermediation. But that doesn't work when people's money / savings are on the line.
So we can easily tell exactly where this leads: Once enough pain has been sustained through errors like this, DeFi code bugs, fraudulent transfers, etc... a whole industry of HUMANS will pop up that will (a) become an intermediary in crypto/DeFi transactions to ensure that fraud, errors, etc are prevented; (b) introduce mechanisms to revert transactions (controlled by said HUMANS); (c) perform the massive paperwork on compliance (KYC, register big transaction, check against blacklists, etc)
Is there really a different outcome?
Crypto fans claim finance is an overbloated industry and they are here to disrupt it. In reality all they are doing is recreating exactly the same system but with one more layer of indirection (instead of transferring dollars you transfer a stablecoin that points to a dollar).
Will there be exciting use cases for crypto at the edges? maybe. Will it 'disrupt' the broader financial system, in the sense that it will make it better/faster/cheaper? I don't see it.
Olympic sports medals is a vain metric that all it does is hide the fact that authoriterian regimes are destroying their countries and pressing their people.
In the Ancient Greek times the Olympic Games were an opportunities for friends an enemies to come together and have FUN!
It wasn't about who won the most medals. Can you imagine if Sparta and Athens were competing for the highest number of golds? Pathetic. But that's what's happening today.
Crypto bros say it's worth tolerating 100x cost (technical cost, energy wasted, etc) and 100x more complexity (as one example, we are 7 years in and ETH is about to be 'reborn' the right way, with the transition to proof of stake) in exchange for what?
For a small but key piece of the 'decentralized' Web3 infrastructure to be controlled by a random stranger due to random events?
Like another comment here mentioned, housing is complicated. People don't want to live in a random house in the middle of nowhere ('roof over your head'). Some people prefer to be homeless on the street versus getting to a roof over their head that they don't like.
People want to live where they want to live (near family, jobs, culture etc)
Take NYC for instance. Politicians try to address the NYC housing crisis from a demand/cost perspective. Rent is too high? Let's just screw the property owner and cap the rent. Or let's just raise minimum wage to make it easier for people to live in those properties.
The result in both cases: you didn't have enough housing before, you don't have enough housing now. You give more money to people, rents will just go up. You cap the rent, there's still a huge number of people that can't live where they want and you make it impossible for existing tenants to move (or for new/more development to be built, for that matter)
So, what instead? You want to build more housing in NYC? Great, that should work. But you have to make it cheap. Deregulate construction, get rid of unions, prioritize developer rights over tenant or homeowner rights. What? You don't think these are good things? Okay, but then you'll have to sit back and watch new construction trickle in and result in 'luxury' housing because that's the only way a developer can recoup their enormous land acquisition, regulation and construction costs.
So the challenge with housing is that it requires fundamentally difficult decisions. To pretend that you can just spend 100 billion (or even a trillion) and the problem will be solved and people will be happy, is an illusion.
"Let’s say you want to make a $100 payment to a merchant. Using your credit card would cost the merchant $3, which is then passed along to you via hidden costs. "
You also get 1-3 credit card points, which for you is extra money that you wouldn't get if you were to pay for this with Bitcoin or, for that matter, cash.
Also if the merchant screws you and sends you the wrong or a broken item, you can dispute the charge and real humans from American Express or Chase will spend their valuable time to help you resolve the dispute.
And, of course, if someone makes an outright fraudulent transaction with your card then the CC company will return your funds no questions asked. With bitcoin, your funds are lost for ever whether it was a mistake or a fraud.
These services are necessary (to build trust or for regulation reasons). If that was not the case we'd have seen a lot more real world adoption of crypto by now.
Does this remind anyone else of FileMaker Pro? I remember I used FileMaker in my teen years (mid 90s) to build an application to help my parents manage my condo building expenses. Very simiilar concept but of course the world has changed since then, so today you'd need what retool offers (connectivity to cloud databases, building web app vs macos apps, etc). But it's funny how after 20 years old ideas become new again.
Insane.