My experience is that one-off human costs tend to be extreme for exceptions at big organizations.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.
Even without the crisis, what upside does the UK have over the EU proper?
I feel like the UK was competitive when it was competing with European countries. Competing with countries in the EU? I just have no idea why anyone would invest in businesses there. It just feels like an inferior option, unless labor costs fall like a rock.
I think over time, the deals the UK gets will get worse and worse, not just on investment, but on everything.
It doesn't help that China still thinks of opium wars when the UK comes up, India things of the British Empire, and much of the rest of the world feels the same way. The UK was always respected, but never loved. If that respect goes away...
I don't care about "legally." I care about whether we live in a society where we have diverse opinions, and people feel free to express themselves. If we have a system where:
- Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;
- Market forces drive everyone to work under draconian NDAs; and
- Market forces drive companies not to hire people who engage in WrongThink
We've got a broken system where no one has free speech, no matter what the laws say.
And no, you can't successfully start a competing company, because market forces mean that companies which optimize to market forces win.
I don't care about conservatives, liberals, or victim complexes. I care about having reason discourse, civic debate, and free speech. If a social, political, and economic system doesn't allow that, we've got a broken system. As a footnote, every conservative I've spoken to thinks I'm a leftwing nutjob, and every liberal, a rightwing nutjob. If you disagree with either party line on anything (even not in the opposing direction), that's how you're viewed. The polarization and stereotyping is crazy.
If it's just AI, you separate them with actual human oversight.
From what I understand, they moved less because of demonetization, and more because of the chilling effect it had on free speech. They needed to be super-careful in script writing to make sure they didn't anger the YouTube algorithm.
I'll also mention another darker side of this: Google is almost entirely liberal inside. If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering. AIs are not neutral, and Google's reflects the biases of the people who keep tweaking it.
These aren't wackos. These are mostly serious scholars, tired of a serious problem with Google. I'm giving this as an example; this has been a problem for a lot of people for a long time.
As much as I'm offended by many of the things Ron Paul does and stands for, I'm glad he's there. There's a lot of divergent thinking there. Outliers are good. I'd be terrified of a congress with a dozen Ron Pauls, but one is good to have around.
If I had my druthers, we'd have one of him in Congress. And one of each other extremist point of view, left-wing, right-wing, or just off in another direction.
* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site.
* There's nothing about who is doing this or why.
* There's no way to actually pay that I could find.
* There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money.
It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help.
And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.
Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.
That's an interesting hypothesis: The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.
Without commenting on China specifically, a few facts:
- The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections
- Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself.
- Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying can "buy" hundreds of millions in corrupt (but usually legal) profits.
- The checks-and-balances put in 250 years ago aren't adequate to defend democracy.
As a footnote: The second-cheapest way is through asymmetric attacks, such as cyberattacks, and increasingly, bioattacks. I don't want a debate about COVID19 origins, vaccines, or what-not (please don't), but the fact of the matter is that engineering a virus like COVID19 is within the grasp of most nation-states. That vulnerability went from theoretical to very, very visible. Genetic engineering will only get better. It's not implausible that soon we'll be able to engineer viruses which lead to long-term disability, decrease the IQ of a nation, or are at least somewhat selective by ethnicity (of course, once released, all bets are off). It's definitely possible to have vaccine-in-hand when releasing a bioweapon.
I say charge company B, but I disagree with your analysis of where the money will come from. Companies charge to maximize future profits.
If company B tries to charge customers an extra $500, they'll be more expensive than company A, and customers will go to company A. They'll exactly go bankrupt. If they could have charged customers $500 extra and kept it, they would have done that from the get-go. The money won't come from customers, at least in a market with any competition.
Where will it come from? Well, the money will ultimately come from company B's investors. There are several mechanisms by which this can happen:
- Company B has a billion dollars in the bank. It spends $500 million on damages. It now has $500 million in the bank, and is worth $500 million less.
- Company B has zero dollars in the bank, but an otherwise solid business. It issues new equity, diluting existing equity, to raise $500 million. Existing shares are worth $500 million less.
- Company B has zero dollars in the bank, and a negative net worth. It files for bankruptcy. A court reorganizes it to pay the debtors (e.g. the customers). Old shares are worth $0, and the company is now owned by its debtors -- it's customers. The shares aren't quite worth $500 each, but customers get as much as possible, and the business keeps chugging along. No one loses their job.
Once investors notice, they'll start to include data security into company valuations. Insurance companies will do likewise. Keeping poor security will decrease profits, and security will improve. On the other hand, I don't think many companies will fold -- in the sense of letting customers and employees down -- based on this.
You're assuming perfect market transparency. That's a false assumption.
Company A has good security, which adds $5 in your costs.
Company B has poor security, which doesn't, which will lead to $500 down-the-line from a security breach and identity theft. It charges $2.50 less and otherwise has an identical product.
You have no way to know that. You will go with company B, and you will split the $5 gain, where you save $2.50 and they take $2.50 more in profit.
Company B externalizes costs onto the customer. Company A's customers have higher initial costs, but they wouldn't be defined as 'externalized.'
And a corporate dissolution isn't the outcome. The outcome is that T-Mobile goes into bankruptcy, with its customers as the debtors. The outcome of that is that a bankruptcy court divides up the assets to maximize payout to you.
Most likely, this means:
- T-Mobile, as an entity continues to exist, as-is..
- Shareholder value is wiped out...
- And handed to customers, as the customers become shareholders.
T-Mobile has a 180B market cap, which probably means you acquire stock worth a grand or so.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.