bhangi

Disclaimer - I used to work at eBay but my work was not in any way connected with policies on counterfeits or Paypal. So the following is my speculation only.

While this specific case does sound awful, I'd bet that eBay/Paypal's draconian policies towards counterfeits is a result of number of lawsuits that designer labels have filed in the past against eBay. It would likely be impossible for eBay/Paypal to physically examine every item that is claimed to be counterfeit, so the blanket policy which lets them claim in court that they are doing everything reasonable to prevent counterfeit items being traded on eBay. Again, this particular case does suck, but honestly I think the real villains are the Louis Vittons of the world.

Indeed TP did not have any linking step. I still recall trying to fruitlessly find "Link" on the menu for quite some time until it hit me -- oh, no linking needed. But TP did include a run-time with each of the generated executable. This run-time was part of the compiler and it was approximately 10K (from memory, so I could be wrong). That makes the compiler about 22Kbytes worth of code, which is even more impressive.

It is useful to distinguish between two issues -- the usefulness of a college education and the cost of said education. The costs of a college education in the US today are completely unjustifiable IMHO and I agree with those who say that there surely must be better use for your money. On the other hand, it seems that dismissing college education itself qua education is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Let's leave aside the question of whether a college education improves your critical thinking -- I claim that a good college education properly trains you in the fundamentals that you need to master before going on to doing greater things. The obvious caveat is that there are a whole bunch of vocations for which such training has little or no value -- I get that. But do we really want to create a society where a whole generation has little or no training to invent, for example, the next breakthrough transistor technology?

From what I could make out of the prospectus, the revenue number is the sum of the face value of all coupons sold. Since Groupon has to pay the merchants a predetermined percentage of the face value, I'm having a tough time understanding why the entire face value should be considered as revenue. To take an analogy, this would be like Visa claiming the total value of transactions as revenue instead of the fees it charges the merchants for said transactions. Am I missing something?

Whenever I see these kind of articles, two words run through my mind: survivor bias.

I'm also unconvinced by the John Galt argument that if Steve Jobs had not taken calligraphy courses, we would not have nice typefaces on computers today. After all, typography predates the Mac and it would have been only a matter of time before someone else figured it out. If you don't believe this, look at practically every major discovery / invention in the past few centuries -- in almost every case more than one researcher / scientist / dilletante was working on something similar. The lucky one was the one who got there first.

Note that the "inequality" here is strictly age related -- in other words, if you live according to prescription, then you too will have that amount of wealth at a particular point in your life. In other words, everyone has the same opportunity for upward economic mobility. When most commentators talk about inequality they're really talking about the lack of upward economic mobility.