The discussion around this on other platforms is turning into a case against Diversity&Inclusion policies when it should be strictly seen as poor leadership.
I'm curious how long a local small business used car dealership could last if it was unprofitable. This seems like another example of how technology doesn't 'disrupt' markets via savvy new ways of operating, so much as injecting venture capital and loss leading disrupts markets. I know car dealers that were struggling to maintain inventory during the pandemic because Carvana was driving up the price of cars at the auctions. It's a shame because it's big investors taking that inventory out of the hands of small businesses only to turn around and sell the car at a loss.
Most small businesses are unprofitable for years after they get started. Running a small business successfully is pretty darn hard. It's a lot harder than just working 40 hr/week for The Man.
Running a small business is a 24/7 operation. You don't get no vacation nor sick leave nor any sort of benefits. Everyone has their hand out to you, usually thinking that since you're a businessman you've got lots of money they can squeeze out of you.
I'm playing the world's tiniest violin for car dealers who have spent the last two years gouging consumers with "additional dealer markup" as their value-add. At least Carvana bidding up the price of used cars benefited consumers selling their car. Carvana aside, the dominant players in used cars are publicly-traded dealership groups like CarMax, AutoNation, and Penske which certainly don't qualify as small businesses.
No, there is no loss. No one is selling at a loss, NADA book values increased because of more buyers, more demand from pandemic and increased marketing channels with the news saying production stopped, etc. Then the "chips" stopping production as well.
A dealership, small pop or carvana does not go into used car auctions to overbid, to sell at a loss. Car Dealerships also operate trade in strategies to grab cars to resell at below market price.
If a small dealership has higb fixed costs and they only turn a small profit per car, and don't sell enough volume they are operating at a loss. Sure each car might not be a loss, but if you can't keep the lights on then what's the point?
Carvana is losing money. In one year their losses for q3 increased by 200 million. You can apply all the fancy metrics you want about how much profit each car generates, but you still have a company that shouldn't be able to continue business without huge investor backing.
A business can be EBITDA positive but cashflow negative, or vice versa. However healthly your margin is, it is game over if you are unable to service your debts (including employee salary) before you receive cash from customers/investors.
On the other hand, if you are operating at a loss, you will be able to continue doing so indefinitely via continuous cash infusion by investors (which might include the public in case of a public company)... until the cash does run out.
I see a lot of commenters here talking about how they have no sympathy for the kid. I think it's important to remember that it's hard out there these days. A life of crime may not be the only option available, but it becomes more and more appealing as access to education or training gets more difficult to afford, inflation increase outpaces wage increases, workers rights aren't expanded.
Dehumanizing criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world.
What we have here is a child who was failed by society.
> I think it's important to remember that it's hard out there these days. A life of crime may not be the only option available, but it becomes more and more appealing as access to education or training gets more difficult to afford
No, no. It is a very discriminatory view.
Many very rich people are criminals.
I'm from a very poor neighborhood, from a third world country.
Many of my friends got into crime and died. Many more are hardworking, in my experience it is easier to find a criminal who was born rich than a criminal who was born poor .
I don't have much formal education. But using books that was going to waste, I learned programming, etc.
And Today it is much easier to learn ANYTHING.
> Dehumanizing criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world.
What we have here is a child who was failed by society.
It's not Dehumanization. Someone works hard, buys something after years of work and gets robbed overnight. When someone defends the criminal in the first place, he is ignoring the guy who suffered without doing absolutely anything to deserve it. It's normal to hate the criminal.
And the poor hate criminals. Defending criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world.
I am not a favor to kill criminals, etc. But sometimes when you get what you're looking for. And defending very bad behavior is not good for anyone, neither the boy nor society.
Flip that around. In a very real sense the criminal either chose to dehumanize his victims, or ignore the suffering he was causing (arguably worse). "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
Also, some people are just shitheads, and I don't think we can say with any degree of certainty where Foreshadow sits.
There's a lot of shitheads out there for sure and when one commits crimes in which there are victims one makes a moral decision to inflict some kind of harm.
Even with that, you can never truly know another person and categorizing who committed crime out of necessity and who is morally devoid is near impossible. I think we tend to judge our peers harsher than we judge our corporate overlords.
Imo this type of crime is a symptom of our broken society more than a symptom of a broken person.
Copaganda and western hero-villain stories teach us from a young age that there has to be a bad guy who needs to suffer for their actions.
The net is that a criminal like this is someone who makes a conscious decision that other person's life or property (which is also in most cases life via time spent working) don't matter, the only thing that matters is that they want something, be it money in this case, or sex/power/... in case of violent crime. In this case the only possible excuse is that it's a kid whose brain maybe sorta is not fully formed. On the other hand, while for some crimes you could argue about making bad snap judgments, etc., and for other cases you could argue that your victims are far removed and abstract so you don't grok the above decision as well (shoplifting from a chain store is a good example for both); for something like SIM swapping, with extreme level of planning and foresight, aimed at a specific individual, I personally accord a person continuously making this decision zero moral value.
Yeah there's obvious reasons why organized crime is dangerous, but it's designed to lure people in with quick money/protection/sense of identity and then trap them.
The same goes for any behavior where one knows adverse consequences beforehand. I remember I bummed my first cigarette from a stranger one day when I was stressed out as a teenager. When I got hooked on the addictive properties and irreversibility damaged my lungs should there have been no room for empathy?
I'm not saying choosing to view this kid as a victim solves anything or that people should share my view. I want more voices spreading it so people can see there's another way to see the world.
And fwiw like most people my attitude flips 180 when I'm the victim of a crime. I am after all, only human.
You seem to be asserting all this as fact when I think it's mostly conjecture or opinion. I find it far more dehumanizing to think of people just as the product of society.
Sure, some criminals are people who make “mistakes”. It was an error in judgement, they feel remorse and won’t do it again.
But many criminals know what they are doing is hurting others, their attitude is “who cares”? It’s a risk they take, if they get caught it’s just “the cost of doing business”. These are people who take your sympathy and use it against you.
Especially, when you do something that hurts people, there are ways to rationalize it. "If I didn't do it, someone else would", "they'll get it back from insurance or something, it won't inconvenience them too much", or just plain trying not to think about them at all.
But none of those options really work for the kind of identity theft where you take up loans in someone else's name, try to extort them with private information etc. The people who do that know perfectly well what kind of Kafkaesque hellhole they're sending their victims into. About the only thing they can do to justify themselves to themselves, is pick a victim they already hate for some reason.
I think part of the challenge is increasing tech literacy in America. Most of my friends and family have trouble understanding password managers or hardware 2fa.
I think you're overestimating the problem. Here in the UK, banks send out physical 2FA devices (card readers, little calculator style devices, etc) for those who don't want something eg linked a smart phone app. They're easy enough to use for anyone who can use online banking, and those who don't need or want online banking don't need them.
Which banks still send these? Former HSBC USA sent me one before they shut down their consumer products but it was very poorly implemented in their web interface
We got credit cards with chips way after Europe. We don't have anything close to GDPR because enough voters don't understand data privacy (and ofc regulatory capture).
> We got credit cards with chips way after Europe.
That was largely due to POS terminals in gas pumps — we have LOTS of gas pumps and the POS devices in them aren't uniform or inexpensive. When I worked on payment systems the resistance was from the merchants, not the consumers.
Where research (and experience) has shown some degree of consumer dissatisfaction is with entering PINs, which is why chip-and-PIN credit cards aren't commonly seen in the US. Even in countries where it's commonly used, you generally only require the PIN over a merchant-set amount.
I think the article presents a few different ways that this technology is concerning: the budget aspect (which seems to be neutrally aligned), the concern for privacy of US Citizen's near the border (also not a left aligned concept), and the regard for human life regardless of immigration status (something that I imagine isn't unique to the far left).
Regardless of one's take on immigration law, or characterization of undocumented immigrants as criminals: the practices of CBP absolutely should be under scrutiny given the unparalleled power they wield.
Legislation has actually taken us in the opposite direction. With FOSTA/SESTA online platforms were required to make an effort to go through user content.
I think a better analogy to use is these platforms being like bars or cafes. You don't expect the wait staff or bartender to snoop on your conversations, but if law enforcement asks what they know they might be forced to comply. If a bar notices you pimping and doesn't act, they could be liable.
Not sure what is supposed to be controversial about balut. The article reads like an American boy experiencing another culture as a gross thing you do on a dare with some wikipedia bits mangled in.
The only thing that would concern me is whether it's spoiled --"rotten" and things are coalescing and not fully formed yet.
That said, US-based people I've know that are from the Philippines also think it's a bit odd and do not consume it and they treat it as a joke to shock "the American".
That said, It's not too much different from raw oysters, which I also will not eat.
Living in Florida my experience has been somewhat different. Sure, it’s mentioned jokingly for being unusual, but I’ve had it while visiting Vietnamese friends here and we all like it. Though my first time did give me an allergic reaction for some reason.
No? I cringed reading it. Eating whole animals instead of individual muscles is one thing, getting to them mid-gestation is a whole other level of body horror for me.
Poultry is regularly prepared whole. Thanksgiving turkey, Peking duck, and simple roast chicken. A Cornish hen can easily be polished off by one person. Chicken eggs are regularly consumed. There isn't anything weird about Balut, just that it's unique.
You'd carve the meat off the turkey, after removing its innards. The bones might be used for broth later, they certainly wouldn't be eaten at the same time.
It's not typical to eat the bones, muscle, and offal together.
Oysters are just as slimy and all over the place, but they are what they're supposed to be. Everything is in the right place. They're complete. Fetuses are a whole other ball game. I'd rather eat those whole French songbirds or whole octopi or insects before I got anywhere near a half-gestated anything.
These were great machines. I would wait till they were 4 years old and then buy them super cheap as my daily driver. 3:2 aspect ratio screens and solid build quality, great battery life from their second device onwards. I got a 2013 pixel in 2017, a 2015 pixel in 2019, and last year I got the 2017 pixelbook. It's a shame that even as a fan of the product I wasn't willing to support it at MSRP or in any way that would have contributed to its success.
If you need your apple watch to keep from getting lost in the mountains: you probably shouldn't be in the mountains. If you need your apple watch is helping you scuba dive: you probably shouldn't be diving.
I can see a rugged, smartwatch with tactile buttons and a bigger crown being useful in a lot of construction applications, but I don't think most construction workers or contractors are rocking iphones and $799 smart watches.
