> And it could potentially have been even worse. Had their few competitors also gone down, literally all electronic payments would have broken at once.
This... is not true. As noted by another comment here, a vast majority of the value transferred (82%) is ACH in the US.
> What's wrong with just saying that it's their platform and they have the right to set the rules?
That would be a major shift in strategy for the site. It has always been billed a freewheeling place that belonged to the users, with the company that owns it being something of a benevolent overlord that keeps the lights on. That is what attracts users and content.
But of course that version of the web is dead. Any website that relies on advertisers for revenue will necessarily be limited in its tolerance for controversy.
In the end, though, I doubt it matters too much for the site’s revenue. Reddit has been dying for years according to many of the posters and yet it sees growth YoY.
> Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder why people keep using social media at all.
I also wonder this. I know this is a common theme on this board, but I haven’t posted anything under my own name since 2015, when I left Facebook during the run up to the 2016 election.
I am careful with my words when I post. I try to avoid sarcasm, try to mean what I say and say what I mean. But I am not confident that a poorly worded question or statement won’t resurface in a few years and make me look like an asshole.
So I choose not to post under my real name, and even then I don’t dip into anything controversial. I don’t post pictures of myself on the Internet at all. I advise everyone to do the same.
It’s very difficult to make the sort of comparison you are making because it ignores the key difference between the two societies. That is, one is based in Confucianism, which values social harmony, while the other is based on the the protection of individual liberty.
It’s certainly the case that China has less “social discord” because of censorship. To what degree it would have been self-enforced without that censorship is another question entirely.
Consider Japan. Japan is a de facto totalitarian state with individuals and groups enforcing cultural norms independent of government backing. It has censored media, but not nearly to the extent that China does. It has very little social discord, despite an economy that has been stagnating for more than a generation.
I certainly wouldn't call Musk a careful communicator, but it sounds like the notice these workers received was the clarification. The headline may be a bit misleading: the article says these weren't unconditional pink slips, and HR gave the workers the option of setting a date to return to work.
Yes, upon more careful reading, especially this part, I see what might be the issue:
>The workers... said they both received the notices last week from Tesla's human resources department citing their apparent failure to show up and the company's inability to reach them. The workers provided evidence of their continuing correspondence with managers.
Communicating directly with managers is not the same as communicating with HR; it seems like HR opened up a big list of people who hadn't clocked in in x days and sent them all termination-unless-you-say-otherwise notices.
The question I don't see answered in this article: Did HR communicate an end to the unpaid leave arrangement? I won't contend that that should have been clear from the start, since the situation changes by the day; but at least a little bit of "We're starting to wind down the unpaid leave program based on guidance from county authorities about the safety of ... etc, please arrange to resume your work by $Date,"
Great! Housing shouldn't be an investment anyway. There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
> There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
Japan has a declining population, which means that rural housing actually can have zero buyers for it, where the population is lower than the number of houses. One in seven buildings in Japan is actually vacant [0].
If their population was increasing faster than housing construction, then housing would actually increase in cost.
Rent is cheap even in Tokyo compared to virtually any American city. I'm living in a city of 800,000 and early 30s families have no trouble buying a new house if they want to. It was this way even before the population started to decline. People tell me all the time that rent is so expensive in Tokyo, because it's... about $100 more a month. Prices are fairly uniform here.
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.
All real estate is sold in a market. The fact that prices may be too high in some places in the U.S., right now, do not change that Japan and America are both subject to supply / demand mechanisms. Foreign investment in U.S. real estate is much, much more common than Japanese real estate.
Japan, is also no stranger to real estate bubbles, having experienced perhaps the worst real estate bubble in modern history in the 90s:
"At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California."
Yes, all housing markets are subject to supply and demand. The point I was making was that declining population has zero effect on Japan's non-rising home prices, since home prices have remained stable for decades now and even when the population was still rising. The main regulator is that there's almost zero demand for used homes, and it drops to actual zero as the years go on. The real value is in the land its on, which if you're planning on buying property in somewhere like Roppongi, it's still going to be insanely expensive. But for renting or buying elsewhere, it's not.
Your evidence is one poorly-written newspaper article, a reddit disaster-porn post, and some random picture of Caracas?
Authenticity of the reddit post aside, do you have the slightest knowledge of urban development in the Soviet Union, or like, anywhere, or do you just regurgitate links?
A lotta shit got built 'cause you need to house a lot of people after your country's major urban centers got basically raized to the ground, the surrounding countryside along with it, alongside continuing rural->urban migration. Ain't particularly easy to do that well while also trying to recover your economy from a massive fucking brutal invasion.
Yes, Khrushchevkas aren't exactly marvels of architectural longevity; they were never intended to be. They were supposed to last maybe 30-40 years at best, and they're still standing. Sure, they're shoddy and they look like shit now, the countries that built them lacked the capital to replace them as intended--that's another history lesson, but whatever. You mock them for carrying on shambling well past their intended use? They should be lauded for lasting as long as they have, with what limited resources and tight constraints under which they were originally built.
Point is, you want the government to cheap housing and fund it as such, it does so, and the output sometimes ends up surpassing your original goals! You put funding into producing good housing and government can do that too! You ever been to Singapore? You ever hear about the sprawling abject rotten slums of Singapore, that dominate the whole of the nation? No? Curious that.
Would be really fucking strange to hear that a government could build a lot of good housing for its populace and still succeed economically, I suppose, but hey, they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
I suppose if you've been sitting on the sidelines since 1971 to see if this whole "e-mail thing" was a fad or not, and currently don't have an email address, a 14 day trial with some rando address might be just what you're looking for. Now if only you had some one to email...
> And it could potentially have been even worse. Had their few competitors also gone down, literally all electronic payments would have broken at once.
This... is not true. As noted by another comment here, a vast majority of the value transferred (82%) is ACH in the US.