Would this choosing this policy option only affect payments to you the policy holder for an incident where you were at fault? Trying how understand how this works, since your insurance company usually represents you when trying to obtain compensation from others, or compensates others for damage you do.
I think most people have the same thought as you: They don't see how an agreement with their own insurer could stop them from suing someone else (or their insurer), but that's how Limited Tort works. You sign away your right to sue someone else if they injure you in an accident unless those injuries are extremely severe (loss of limb, death, permanent disability, etc.).
You can look up info on "piercing the tort threshold" if you're curious about specific injuries that are severe enough.
VW actively deceived regulators in a coordinated manner for months after they started investigating and asking questions about the defeat devices. This is not normal behavior for a car manufacturer or any public company under investigation. They produced tons of fraudulent data, took regulators for fools, and went so far as to stage a recall they knew ahead of time wouldn't solve the problem, all while millions of cars continued spewing cancer-causing diesel fine particulates. It would be shocking if the hammer didn't come down hard in those circumstances.
VW ultimately paid less a lot less in settlement money than the law might have required if no settlement occurred. Furthermore, when negotiating legal settlements with the US government, the level cooperation is a critical factor. VW actively deceived regulators for several months after they started investigating the defeat devices. Domestic companies who cooperate fully frequently receive billion dollar fines, so the scale of the fine VW paid is not out of line.
I mean, compare VW's massive criminal conspiracy to cheat on pollution tests and poison the earth and willfully lie about it when confronted, to Apple negotiating a tax deal with Ireland, and tell me VW's similar payment is unfairly high.
Before the clean diesel lie was uncovered, environmental scientists were mystified as to why European cities had so much fine particulate pollution, which has led to thousands of deaths [1]. So maybe we should be happy that this age of international corporate law enforcement has allowed locally influential multinationals to be held to account.
When you lease an apartment, you agree to a lease term that secured that apartment for a particular amount of time. That's the arrangement. 99 year leases are possible, if that's what you're looking for.
It appears flagged to me but I was able to see it before. Maybe it took a while to show up, so the user edited the comment to complain about Marxist moderation, unaware that it had not been removed by mods, causing the mods to remove it..?
Why are you still here? Your profile says you left, and your comment history indicates that you're convinced everyone here is wrong (but you, of course), and/or actively silencing you. I really don't understand that kind of behavior!
I don't really, but lots of comments in same thread. Its probably really hard to moderate at hn scale, they brought on a new guy not too long ago who afaik still mods under dangs alias. Have you sent them an email to ask for an unban?
Offerings like Uber Pool and Lyft Line are the future of the business and depend entirely on economies of scale. Putting multiple paying passengers in the car at once and reducing driver downtime completely changes the economics, but only if there is a high density of riders and drivers.
Edit:
There are two possible stories here about Uber and Lyft's losses, and we can't tell which is right from the outside.
1. Uber and Lyft are in a price war death spiral, heavily subsidizing all rides to compete. Their only hope is for all competitors to die, so they can take over the whole market and raise prices. Then vague hopes of lowering costs with self-driving tech and take the surplus as profit. The plan doesn't seem viable, since they have no moat and they can't outspend GM and other self-driving players.
2. Uber and Lyft can actually make a profit in mature markets, but choose to subsidize rides in growing markets, on the theory that growing the market size increases the long term profit opportunity. The data we need to evaluate this idea isn't public, however Uber did a "prove it" quarter in 2016 where they turned the spigots to be profitable in the US. They are now pursuing growth in the US again, expanding to a larger territory and expanding Pool and other offerings like flat-rate passes in mature cities. Under this model, Uber could at any time decide to become profitable, but the revenue growth would stop, placing a cap on the valuation. Notably, there is no "predatory pricing" here.
With internal finances, we could easily tell whether option 2 is valid. You can bet Uber is constantly doing experiments on price elasticity of demand and knows exactly where the truth is. You can bet Softbank has seen numbers we have not. If Uber wants to IPO, I would expect them to provide additional public info, possibly pivoting to profitability again in the US. But doing a pivot like that permanently reduces the size of the opportunity, allowing Lyft to capture that new market instead, so they may be reluctant to do it large scale.
True, but that doesn't necessarily make a company hard to start. There are a zillion niches in transport that could be profitable places to get traction. Uber Pool and Lyft Line might be the future of cheap transport, but as Uber itself shows, you can have a decent business just at the high end of the market. There are several companies in the rides-for-kids department. Taxis do a significant business in hospital-specific transport, both of patients and of urgent medical delivery.
To start a rideshare company, you only need to do reasonably well in one segment in one geographic market. Then you have a basis for expansion into other areas, other segments. Contrast this with a search engine, where people really expect you to be good for everything and covering the entire internet.
The problem though is that they led the way by breaking down all the regulatory barrier to entries. Whats to stop anyone from starting a ridesharing company tomorrow?
I would argue there isn't really a network effect for lyft or uber or any ride-sharing company for that matter. There might be brand and price effects for the companies to battle over amidst both riders and drivers.
I'd say there is a network effect for ride-sharing in aggregate, neither Lyft nor Ueber has been good at locking drivers and riders in with loyalty programs to try to keep people solely on their platform.
More drivers means faster pickups for riders, and more riders means less downtime for drivers. Drivers doing more rides per hour means they can be paid less per ride, lowering the price of a ride and further increasing demand. Sounds like a network effect to me. Offerings like Lyft Line and Uber Pool multiply both of these effects.
Yes, and which were started after 2013 or even as early as 2013?
The truth is that all the viable competitors are likely already out there and it's going to be very very difficult to replicate what these incumbents have without burning ridiculous amounts of capital.
If the Softbank deal closes, we'll likely see a wave of consolidation with Softbank orchestrating acquisitions by Uber. It's very common for relatively young markets to consolidate over time.
No one in their right mind would start a new company to compete with the existing TNCs in 2017.
Just looking at the ones active in Austin, Fasten, Chariot, and InstaRyde were started in 2014; Fare in 2015; Ride Austin in 2016.
Ride sharing is essentially a local business with very low barriers to entry. You don't need to replicate what the incumbents have right away. You just need a modest number of drivers (who can also be driving for the incumbents) and a modest number of customers.
Some were listed by local news as the leading rideshare companies.
That seems sufficient to me. It's hard to name any company started in the last few years that is a major market player when then have a bunch of competitors. New businesses take time to grow.
The discussion here is about whether Uber has a moat. The point being made is that it's pretty easy to start a rideshare company. Which it is. That one hasn't become major yet isn't proof that one can't become so. As long as there's room for new companies to start and be sustainable at modest scale, then Uber can't extract monopoly rents.
Sorry, I'm not interested in playing "bring me a rock" with you. You can do your own research. If you discover something important, let me know. But until then, I stand by my opinion that the rideshare market has low barriers to entry.
Does this mean that tons of money could be invested in these - let's say a trillion dollars going long on bitcoin via cash settled futures - and the underlying price wouldn't necessarily go up at all? I always thought the play with bitcoin was to wait until the "dumb money" got in via financial institutions. But if the whales are just betting on the real price with cash settled futures, does that mess up my assumptions about supply/demand?
Let’s say the price of bitcoin is $10000. You want to go long using futures, so you start buying contracts. A few people will want to sell futures at $10000, but not for a trillion dollars. If you want to buy more futures, you will have to pay more. If you offer $11000 there will be more people willing to take the other side of the bet. And if the price of the underlying is still $10000 arbitrage is possible. I could buy one bitcoin for $10000 and sell you the future for $11000, pocketing $1000 no matter what the future price of bitcoin may be. That creates demand for bitcoin if there is huge demand for futures, pushing prices up.
So I buy a future for 1 bitcoin in 10 days with a price of $10k. The future is cash settled, so in 10 days the exchange will give me [price of BTC] - $10k, or I can sell the future before then. Where does the bitcoin come in? Is the exchange required to hold bitcoin = to the net of all futures?
For CME (and perhaps NASDAQ) they are doing cash settlement instead of physical settlement of the Bitcoin since it would introduce significant overhead. They are going to use a reference rate called their "Bitcoin Reference Rate" which has a collection of exchanges that it uses to determine the spot price.
It depends a great deal on your household situation and where you are on the pay scale. If you are an average skilled dev in a single income family with multiple dependants who require separate bedrooms, you are probably going to be worse off in SV. Your housing cost will be a relatively high proportion of your income, so you won't have as much left over.
If you are an above average dev who is decent at negotiating salary and splits housing with other income earners, you have the opportunity to build a ton of wealth. You can save six figures annually and buy a million dollar bungalow if you want.
SV has absolutely huge opportunity for advancement compared to most regions - I think any good software dev should spend some of their early career years here to see if they can make it big, family attachments permitting. Worst case scenario, you don't like it and go home with a stack of cash after your RSUs vest.
