The longer I spend on social media the more I have learned that the only differences between men and women is that men are terrible and women are awesome. Right?
This is my recollection as well. I was at a big Solaris shop when I cared enough about DBs to dig in this deep, but there were many, many discussions with the ops folks about whether this bypass was a good thing, and in the end the performance metrics were judged 'better', for values of better I don't accurately recall.
There is a reason that there is a difference. The bank vault situation is a case of illegal taking. The person in that case is likely someplace that they aren't legally allowed to be or are using force (or threat thereof) to extract the money. There is no chance that this was an accident. The employment case is a failure to pay money that is owed. That is sometimes just a contractual failure and can be the result of malice or incompetence. Many states have recognized that the failure to pay lawful wages is greater than a simple contractual failure and have added double or treble damages to the awards to penalize employers in this situation. Still, it is generally recognized that we don't want to be throwing people in jail for just failing to live up to a civil contract. Imagine if we started throwing people in jail for failing to pay rent.
Fair enough, although his sentence seemed to be based on being a habitual offender with armed robbery and domestic violence convictions. It's similar to how people in this thread think that repeat violators of wage theft should face higher penalties.
How do you see that happening? Part of the reason for the pricing on the APIs was to ensure that more people saw the ads. I know I never see them when I use BaconReader.
Monetizing something like Reddit is always going to be a struggle, especially since the Reddit crowd is more tech-savvy than the Twitter and Facebook users, thus more likely to use ad-blockers.
I honestly don't know of a way that a social networking system can ever have a near-universal scale and still make money. Sure, a niche community that relies on contributions from its members to offset development and hosting could work, but not Reddit or Twitter with they way they're going. FB is still going pretty strong, but last I checked, 70% of the main feed content I saw were ads.
Let's put this in context, Reddit has somewhere in the region of 1.2 Billion users a month and supposedly earn somewhere in the region of $350Million a year in advertising revenue. This is a very good business and something that could easily be profitable.
The issue is they took in VC investment at a $10Billion+ valuation and for that $350M is not enough they need to probably triple it to get somewhere close to that valuation.
So let's not confuse on paper profitability with desired profitability at current VC valuation.
Looking at it from a nationwide perspective, there were two watershed moments in mental health treatment in the late 20th century.
The first was in the 60's when JFK (whose sister had been savaged by the mental health institutions) signed legislation changing the requirements for commitment to be "posing a danger to oneself or others." This was a change from the metric of "mentally unfit to live independently in society."
The second was in the 80's when Reagan and the Democratic-majority congress defunded and shuttered many of the state-owned mental health facilities. This was a bi-partisan effort by the Republicans, who hated spending money, and the Democrats, who hated how poorly run the facilities were. Nobody has had a really good solution for mental health care in the US since those happened and, as the parent post points out, it is unfair to paint this as "Reagan defunded mental health care."
The money the government spends or forgives still goes on the balance sheet and will either come due at some point, or will result in the default of the US Treasury. That would be like me saying that spending crazy amounts of money on a new sports car doesn't matter because I have a huge line of credit. Eventually, that money for the car needs to be repaid.
You can absolutely see examples of this in city and state governments in the US that have failed to make pension payments. Kicking the can down the road will eventually catch up with someone.
