Would this choosing this policy option only affect payments to you the policy holder for an incident where you were at fault? Trying how understand how this works, since your insurance company usually represents you when trying to obtain compensation from others, or compensates others for damage you do.
VW actively deceived regulators in a coordinated manner for months after they started investigating and asking questions about the defeat devices. This is not normal behavior for a car manufacturer or any public company under investigation. They produced tons of fraudulent data, took regulators for fools, and went so far as to stage a recall they knew ahead of time wouldn't solve the problem, all while millions of cars continued spewing cancer-causing diesel fine particulates. It would be shocking if the hammer didn't come down hard in those circumstances.
VW ultimately paid less a lot less in settlement money than the law might have required if no settlement occurred. Furthermore, when negotiating legal settlements with the US government, the level cooperation is a critical factor. VW actively deceived regulators for several months after they started investigating the defeat devices. Domestic companies who cooperate fully frequently receive billion dollar fines, so the scale of the fine VW paid is not out of line.
I mean, compare VW's massive criminal conspiracy to cheat on pollution tests and poison the earth and willfully lie about it when confronted, to Apple negotiating a tax deal with Ireland, and tell me VW's similar payment is unfairly high.
Before the clean diesel lie was uncovered, environmental scientists were mystified as to why European cities had so much fine particulate pollution, which has led to thousands of deaths [1]. So maybe we should be happy that this age of international corporate law enforcement has allowed locally influential multinationals to be held to account.
When you lease an apartment, you agree to a lease term that secured that apartment for a particular amount of time. That's the arrangement. 99 year leases are possible, if that's what you're looking for.
More drivers means faster pickups for riders, and more riders means less downtime for drivers. Drivers doing more rides per hour means they can be paid less per ride, lowering the price of a ride and further increasing demand. Sounds like a network effect to me. Offerings like Lyft Line and Uber Pool multiply both of these effects.
Offerings like Uber Pool and Lyft Line are the future of the business and depend entirely on economies of scale. Putting multiple paying passengers in the car at once and reducing driver downtime completely changes the economics, but only if there is a high density of riders and drivers.
Edit:
There are two possible stories here about Uber and Lyft's losses, and we can't tell which is right from the outside.
1. Uber and Lyft are in a price war death spiral, heavily subsidizing all rides to compete. Their only hope is for all competitors to die, so they can take over the whole market and raise prices. Then vague hopes of lowering costs with self-driving tech and take the surplus as profit. The plan doesn't seem viable, since they have no moat and they can't outspend GM and other self-driving players.
2. Uber and Lyft can actually make a profit in mature markets, but choose to subsidize rides in growing markets, on the theory that growing the market size increases the long term profit opportunity. The data we need to evaluate this idea isn't public, however Uber did a "prove it" quarter in 2016 where they turned the spigots to be profitable in the US. They are now pursuing growth in the US again, expanding to a larger territory and expanding Pool and other offerings like flat-rate passes in mature cities. Under this model, Uber could at any time decide to become profitable, but the revenue growth would stop, placing a cap on the valuation. Notably, there is no "predatory pricing" here.
With internal finances, we could easily tell whether option 2 is valid. You can bet Uber is constantly doing experiments on price elasticity of demand and knows exactly where the truth is. You can bet Softbank has seen numbers we have not. If Uber wants to IPO, I would expect them to provide additional public info, possibly pivoting to profitability again in the US. But doing a pivot like that permanently reduces the size of the opportunity, allowing Lyft to capture that new market instead, so they may be reluctant to do it large scale.
So I buy a future for 1 bitcoin in 10 days with a price of $10k. The future is cash settled, so in 10 days the exchange will give me [price of BTC] - $10k, or I can sell the future before then. Where does the bitcoin come in? Is the exchange required to hold bitcoin = to the net of all futures?
Does this mean that tons of money could be invested in these - let's say a trillion dollars going long on bitcoin via cash settled futures - and the underlying price wouldn't necessarily go up at all? I always thought the play with bitcoin was to wait until the "dumb money" got in via financial institutions. But if the whales are just betting on the real price with cash settled futures, does that mess up my assumptions about supply/demand?
It depends a great deal on your household situation and where you are on the pay scale. If you are an average skilled dev in a single income family with multiple dependants who require separate bedrooms, you are probably going to be worse off in SV. Your housing cost will be a relatively high proportion of your income, so you won't have as much left over.
If you are an above average dev who is decent at negotiating salary and splits housing with other income earners, you have the opportunity to build a ton of wealth. You can save six figures annually and buy a million dollar bungalow if you want.
SV has absolutely huge opportunity for advancement compared to most regions - I think any good software dev should spend some of their early career years here to see if they can make it big, family attachments permitting. Worst case scenario, you don't like it and go home with a stack of cash after your RSUs vest.
The fact that you used BTC for that purchase doesn't matter, you could also have decided to buy BTC instead of anything you bought with another currency.
Although in an environment where the main national currency experiences deflation like bitcoin, you do actually see people responding to the incentive by reducing current purchases, which is bad for economic growth.
"Restricts access to imports" is a really interesting way to put it - weakening a currency of course lowers imports and raises exports. Which can go a long way to fix a depressed economy.
Of course bond investors knew the EU did not intend to pursue monetary policy that would allow distressed economies to adjust. US debt is not a magic special case. Take a look at Japan.
Home prices are reasonable in the US. The ratio of home price to household income is a little high, but much lower than 2007: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CxAYOEkHwSs/WbgZo0mKLBI/AAAAAAAAs...
(these numbers are inflated by growth in a few high-cost regions, where HN readers might perceive a bubble)
The US debt to GDP ratio has increased, but several European countries have experienced the same. Turns out a monetary policy which is tuned to be tight but tolerable for the German economy is a disaster in other parts of the continent. If you are going to increase your debt to GDP ratio, you might as well accomplish something and reduce human suffering. That is, increasing the denominator with stimulus, instead of decreasing it with austerity.
I don't think US policy is perfect - we could have used even more monetary stimulus, and the fiscal stimulus could have been delivered in a more organized and consistent fashion. The incoming corporate tax cuts when the economy is already hot make no sense. We are in a good position to reduce the debt load if policy makers just hold steady.
During the great recession, Europe decided to do austerity instead of Keynesian stimulus. Just like the textbooks say, this has led to weak growth and deflation.
Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?
This whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
I'm not the person you are asking, but I think it means a US shareholder in a US company being taxed both by the state the company is incorporated in, and the state the shareholder resides in. There are a lot of state taxes that Delaware doesn't charge at all, or can be avoided. It's almost like Delaware is a discount seller of corporate residency. Charge a low price and make it up on volume. Smart strategy by the states/countries with the political will to do it.
If you live in a state where you are taxed on your investment earnings, you might feel "double-taxed" if those earnings were already taxed at the corporate level.
