Not exclusively. I am in the US and I believe I consistently put primary stress on the second syllable. Merriam-Webster (an American English oriented dictionary) gives both pronunciations, but lists the first-syllable-stress version first:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anchovy
Yes, and I'll also note that the secondary stress seems to be on the second syllable. That is, the second syllable is not reduced like in the UK. So it's pronounced most commonly in the US more like "Anne Chovy" than "Anchvy"
I did this hike with some friends years ago. It can be wet, but it's a beautiful hike. You can camp on the beach and make fires every night. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a through hike with lots of terrain you can't access except by foot.
I did Carmanah before they closed it and yeah it rained the entire time, we camped on the beach and it was foggy and rainy and the foghorn went all night long... good times!
I did Carmanah after it was closed, this was after I first paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait [1], camping in the forest, avoiding the bears. The track was partially overgrown but doable, the weather was mostly fine with even some sunshine now and then - it is a temperate rainforest so rain is to be expected. Standing there with my tent between those enormous trees after having first hitch-hiked up from Vancouver to Whitehorse, then paddled the Yukon to Alakanuk, then made our way to Haines to take the Alaska Marine Highway to Prince Rupert, from there on the Queen of the North [2] to Port Hardy where we staid with some friends before hitchhiking to somewhere close to Carmanah where we spent a week, then to Vancouver to take our flight back to the Netherlands - or so we thought. We got some breakfast and noticed a television screen in the back showing images of the World Trade Centre in New York with smoke billowing out of it. It was the 11th of September, 2011 and we were not flying out that day... nor that week.
[1] Alakanuk - we met a teacher who invited us to give a presentation at Alakanuk School, if anyone here was there and remembers a Dutchman coming by in 2001: that was me.
Not surprised, Java vm is literally everywhere. From your credit card to sim, if it is a ic card then there is Java vm. It is almost universal language for mini embedded system for some reason I don't understand.
IIUC, it's because it's easier to rigorously prove the VM prevents classes of bugs (i.e. memory safety issues) and then reuse that VM in many places than it is to rigorously prove that many separate embedded systems not relying on the VM have independently avoided those bugs.
I don't know specific details about the correctness of any particular VM, sorry. That was just the explanation I got from another engineer that apparently had experience in developing embedded java things.
Update: This is wrong. Ignore it.
The poison pill is not diluting any individual shareholder disproportionately. What it is doing is issuing the right to buy shares at a steep discount. For example, if shares of Company XYZ are currently trading at $50/share, the board would issue all the company's shareholders the right to buy stock at $25/share. Economically, everyone should exercise their rights since this is a good deal. The issue for the hostile bidder is that it can become quite expensive to actually fund the exercise price to maintain their ownership interest. The company now also has more cash and so purchasing all the remaining stock that the hostile bidder does not own will become more expensive/difficult.
The less technical answer is just that "the board runs the company and they can decide how to allocate new shares". This kind of trick is just one of many reasons why hostile takeovers virtually never work. And that's a good thing, precisely because it prevent disruptive attacks on companies competing in the market.
Remember Musk wasn't ever threatening a hostile takeover anyway. He knows it won't work. He was making an offer to the board to induce them to bless the sale. And the board responded with the poison pill, essentially as a way of saying "no". This is the way this kind of negotiation works.
And from the opposite perspective, arguments like "the board isn't performing its fiduciary duty by accepting Musk's offer" are likewise silly. The board is elected by the shareholders (the actual bureaucracy and process for this varies between corporations, I know nothing about Twitter). The level of oversight needed to ensure fiduciary fidelity is already there. No court is going to view a board trying to oppose a hostile takeover as a breach of fiduciary duty, that's ridiculous.
Hm, but in this concrete example Elon is also a shareholder, so he can buy for 25/share, right? And as more shares are being created the spot price on the market should drop, no?
Also, can the shareholders then sue the company (successfully? :)) for decreasing the price? ("everything is securities fraud" after all.)
>Hm, but in this concrete example Elon is also a shareholder, so he can buy for 25/share, right?
Nope. The poison pill allows everyone but the one who triggered the provision to buy shares at a discount. From Twitter's press release:
>In the event that the rights become exercisable due to the triggering ownership threshold being crossed, each right will entitle its holder (other than the person, entity or group triggering the Rights Plan, whose rights will become void and will not be exercisable) to purchase, at the then-current exercise price, additional shares of common stock having a then-current market value of twice the exercise price of the right.
Yes, but presumably enough of the other members with smaller purchasing power will still be each marginally incentivized to buy enough more such that it will dwarf Musk's motivation to outbuy any of them individually. At least that's how I understand it.
When it came out, PageRank was a really innovative way to order search results that cut through most of the "SEO" at the time, which was webpages doing lots of unsophisticated things to range well for a given topic (e.g., putting that topic in the <title> many times).
Yeah. PageRank worked because web site owners were linking to each other as a service to the "Surfers", signaling what they think are high quality sites. There is an incentive to keep sites high quality or it'll risk being delinked.
When people stopped "surfing" and starting "searching", the whole mechanism broke down. Plus Google started using other metrics for ranking sites these days.
The district heating in Brno here in Czech Republic is in the process of converting from steam to hot water, mainly due to cost savings. Modern isolated hot water pipes loose a negligible ammount of heat in transfer while there was green grass growing on top of the old buried steam pipes even in winter.
That and the old textile industry that directly used steam no longer exists.
Downtown Ottawa has a similar steam system too, although I think it's mostly government buildings instead of private, commercial buildings that are hooked up to it.
As I noted in an adjacent comment, there is a $4 flat fee, and it is reasonable to assume the lender has expenses to pay, such as payroll and profit seeking investors, so there must be a cost to using their financing.
Regardless of what the marketing says, nothing is ever “free”. Typically, these types of small time lending operations for retail purchases with no collateral depend on people without impulse control control and poor cash flow management buying things they should not and then collecting a slow drip of money from some portion of them who will not be able to pay it off for a long time.
Not that I think it should be illegal, but it is generally considered to be a bottom feeder business, one that the esteemed people who work at Microsoft might be above. But apparently, they are not, and hence it is on Hacker News as a controversy.
I was curious how it compared to a credit card, since if you wanted a 4 payment over 6 week plan you could simply use a credit card and make an immediate payment of 1/4th to your card, and then 3 more payments of that amount over the next 6 weeks.
A quick internet search says that the average US credit card currently has an interest rate of 16%.
Paying off your credit card on the aforementioned schedule at that interest rate, assuming a monthly billing cycle that starts right before your purchase, you'll pay under $4 in interest if the purchase was under $487. If the purchase is over that, Zip is cheaper.
If your purchase comes in the middle of a billing cycle, the breakeven is $811.
(Both of those are assuming that you have nothing else on that card, so that the billing cycle in which you pay off the 4th payment will end with a 0 balance, and so there will be no interest for that cycle).
(Also I'm assuming you aren't using a rewards card. I'm using a card with 5% cash back on online purchases, making it quite a bit harder for Zip to beat the card).
Interestingly, I just noticed a Zip Pay option here on a UK retailer's site, and in this case there doesn't appear to be any flat fee involved; the 4 payments add up to exactly the standard retail price of the product. I guess this probably varies depending on local credit-issuing regulations.
(Checking the T&Cs shows that they do have a steep fee for any missed/late payments, in addition to whatever cut they're taking from the merchant. But it looks like here, the few weeks of credit really would be "free" to the customer provided payments are made on time. Not that I'd consider using them; my cashflow isn't so constrained that I need the service -- and if it was, I'd be more concerned about the risk of being late with a payment and getting stung for extra fees.)
> it is reasonable to assume the lender has expenses to pay, such as payroll and profit seeking investors, so there must be a cost to using their financing.
>Regardless of what the marketing says, nothing is ever “free”
In a world of low-interest rates, plentiful venture capital, and penetration pricing, things are often better than free.
Sometimes, but I do not see how it is possible in this case. That type of thing is done temporarily to gain a monopoly via network effects and then establish pricing power. If you cannot achieve that, then it is giving away money.
As well as the $4 fee mentioned, Zip and co also charge the merchant - in my country, 30 cents per transaction and 4-6% commission. Late payment interest is probably just gravy.
With schemes like these, all customers ultimately end up paying for this regardless if you use the service or not as merchants will have to add the costs to their prices.
