UCLA has a $10B endowment. I find it bollocks that they and these other academic institutions can't just dip into that for their researchers to (hopefully) ride out the current funding situation at a minimum.
It's not bollocks, the endowments are contributions that have constraints on their spending. They cannot legally redirect much of the endowment towards these researchers in the way you want. Instead, they use the endowment as an investment that produces interest which is spent on operating expenses.
No endowment grows over time to infinity; that's hyperbole (and impossible).
The tax-free status - that's definitely something that could be changed by updating the laws (legislative). That sounds a lot better than the executive division starving UCLA of funds.
- Infinity is not a number. "To infinity" means grows without bounds (under the current underlying system; now I do agree the system will at some point adjust.)
- Politics operates in reality, not ideals. There would never be such a legislation without a forcing function like this.
Maybe Tao cares about the long term health of the university, is against the policies that are hurting it (and the entire country if USA loses its top position as desirable academic hub) and wants to use his fame for something useful
The vast majority of people talking about how big university endowments are don't care what the rules are on it. It's not that people don't know how endowments work; they just find the rules to be bullshit to justify universities continuing the status quo.
I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing
You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.
All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.
I have one which I haven't really used though probably a useful thing to have. But be aware of various other fees like annual state fees. It definitely costs more than I was thinking it would once all the costs are taken into account. For a lot of purposes just using a DBA is probably fine.
Also speaking from similiar experience, ^^^ this is the best combo. Where both parties have a certain degree of humility and self-awareness and understand how their skills, personalities, and personal circumstances (ability to travel, life stage, etc.) compliment one another.
I like the idea as someone working in a regulated environment. We just paid ~$10k to a counsel to help craft our documents, but they are highly bespoke to our needs.
That being said, I don't know how much I'd trust the results without having a human legal review in the loop. Perhaps that could be an up-charge/add-on: partner with a few firm/counsel that has deep experience different niche regulated areas (e.g. FDA), and then say e.g. for an add'l $500, get a stamp of approval on the document from a counsel who is well-versed in the space.
It's perfectly reasonable for a process like this to be initiated by an expert, 80% created according to the input and initiation, with a full review at the end.
The expert could further imbue their expertise in what's created.
It goes without saying that basic generation attempts of text will only return the average of the corpus and not much more.
They were one of the earliest to adopt bitcoin and monero payments--if they didn't convert all those payments immediately to cash, they're probably sitting pretty right now.
They also have a partnership with Tailscale that can't be undersold.
I'm not sure how much it adds to their bottom line for each sale, but my corp was using the Mullvad VPN addition to tailscale to do global testing by our developers.
IE; "is something blocked, do we detect GEOIP properly" etc;
The Tory Party, that was the biggest long running joke ever, I never thought that they'd be able to top the hilarious Boris Johnson but then Liz Truss came out of nowhere and PORK MARKETS'd her way into infamy!
Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).
Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.
Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.
However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.
All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.
Would you say that it indeed means that if ads are banned, the money to support news, tv, youtube, ... will still be there?
I would think that in fact, there would be even more money for news, tv, youtube, ... as the ad company will not take their cut of the money.
Edit:
Now that I'm thinking about it, ad may also work in directing expenses that would have been done anyway. For example, if I have 10 companies A, B, C, D, ... all selling the same kind of product, then it is possible that 1000 persons that want that kind of product will all spend 100£, shared between the 10 companies. So, company A will receive 10000£. But if company A does some advertisement for a cost of 5000£, maybe people will still spend the same amount, but for their brand in majority, so the 1000 persons will still spend the same 100£, but company A will receive 20000£ because some people will buy A instead of B, C, D, ...
I'd say advertising is in good portion what creates the "want" instead of a "need". If we were to rebalance the amount of purchases driven by needs instead of wants, we'd overall reduce the total amount of purchases. Each of them would also not have the extra cost of advertising included in their price.
We’d also benefit from not having unnecessary “wants” generated within us, which so often comes at the cost of our self esteem. So many ads prey on your fear of being too ugly, too lonely, too poor, and they amplify that fear then stick a car on screen masquerading as the solution to these manufactured problems.
