477 karma · joined September 26, 2012
That's indeed how it works in my experience. Thay's also why, as a seller, you want to invest a lot of time making sure that the due diligence scoresheet will be as clean as possible - because then, there can be no mechanical way for a prospective buyer to lower the price: only their belief against that of other prospective buyers...
The only thing not subject to interpretation is cash, but you have kind of the reverse problem: most of the time, it's difficult to intepret anything from it... of course, that's why modern accounting was invented. As we say in French: c'est le serpent qui se mord la queue (the snake's biting its own tail).
Are there not procedures like double/triple validation of sensitive changes (like "creating new global admin account") by accredited humans?
I mean, in my line of work (finance), this is something that is enforced in multiple sensitive contexts such as money transfers - at certain thresholds, even the highest privileged person in the organisation cannot single-handedly authorise the operation.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21937607
* Extrisic quality: does it sound "better" as a production, autotune, analog vs digital recording and play-back means, etc. -- I personnaly have mixed feelings about this one, as autotune and programmable drums are probably the worst thing that happened to contemporary music by taking away their human components (but that's mostly an unsubtantiated opinion), and on the other hand, so much progress in the recording and play-back hardware/software that reduce the gap between live and recorded performances
* Intrisic quality: is the music "better" in an absolute sense, covering mostly philosophical questions such as the nature of musical beauty, its objectiveness or subjectiveness, the existence of music as abstract compositions, etc. -- I'm firmly of the opinion that there are such things as 'beautiful musical compositions' and 'well-written music', and though I'm barely able to describe what that means in words, I can certainly say that I have heard less and less such pieces in mainstream music as years have passed, and that in non-mainstream music, most attempts to create original things end up in pieces that may be well thought but rarely in 'beautiful musical compositions'.
* Discovery bias: a topic that is well covered by the OP
* Acquired taste: despite everyone claiming that they look for something new and exciting and original, tastes do become ingrained with age, and I believe this is all the more true with music given the kind of physical feelings that it generates, which can sometimes be very powerful -- the 'feedback loop' that also ends up in the discovery bias above is probably reinforced by the fact that our tastes in music vary little after a certain age, and that we rarely seek something that is 'that much' different from what we like.
- authenticating using a 'client number' (different from your 'account number', sent to you once by a physical mail you lost long ago) combined with a 4-to-6 digit (numeric-only) passcode that you have to input on a virtual keyboard
- confirming web-initiated transactions via their app on your phone... but when it's app-initiated, well, you don't have to confirm anything other than just retype your passcode
- in the end, introducing some awfully long delays between some actions e.g. creating a new beneficiary and being able to send money to her... because 'it's for your own protection that we degrade your client experience'
This just bugs me.
On the other hand, while I do indeed believe that the "ROI" from Performance Advertising is something between just false and deliberately misleading, the bigger picture that I'm interested in is marketshare. Because when looking at market share, it's not a question of incrementality anymore, but whether you're growing slower/faster than your competitors, and your cost of doing that, and at what point you're OK to 'buy' marketshare, in the sense of losing money in the pursuit of growth, and how much. And then, OK, let's talk about ROI on that basis - most of the time, achieving this will indeed require tools from the Performance Adversiting toolbox, which allow you to conveniently track the amount of marketshare (i.e. sales) you bought.
Always been a geek, used to code, love to think in terms of systems / data / interfaces... kind of missed that natural "tech" path in my career, went to a top business school out of what you'd call laziness (achieving a top business school in France is much easier than achieving a top engineering school)... so reading HN in a way is a way of fulfilling my passion for tech and my curiosity for all those geeky areas from engineering to physics to maths to whatever you'll find on HN any given day.
I have to add, carrer-wise, that being able to have an educated opinion on IT matters when you're not the IT guy in the room is actually extremely valuable, and one good excuse to keep reading!
I find this to be very true independently of this case: in general, I think people are a lot too much protected from consequences of their actions because they are supposedly acting on behalf of an employer, all the way to the top, until you reach the infamous 'legal personality' of corporations, at which point you've deflected all liability to a very powerful body that can just throw away a few million dollars to get out of jail free. Of course there are details to be worked out, but in general I believe individuals who make decisions should be made personally liable of the consequences, regardless of the organization they work for (and this of course is not exclusive of prosecuting that organization in its own right).
Is the "per-stream" measure a result to try and have a comparable basis between the various actors, or is it really the only underlying factor in the calculation (beside the country which is mentionned as another factor)?
My guess would be that services would pay per minute-stream, not per stream. Otherwise, artists that tend to have longer form would not be willing to participate (I'm a big fan of Keith Jarrett, for instance, whose solo concerts mostly consist of tracks of around 40 minutes). You could also imagine hybrid models with bounds that de-linearize certain factors.
Looking at a very aggregate average is a recipe for erroneous conclusions...
Only if someone can prove the data was there in the first place.
Exactly! If I had anything to hide, I'd make sure to give them the 'correct" password that will wipe out selected data from the device.
I'd rather call it blatantly opinionated... taking to its full conclusion the logic of considering commitments (i.e. money alloted) through the way energy is consumed instead of the way energy is produced (the fuel you put into the plane's reactors was not produced by the plane, was it?), you may as well say that any natalist policy is a commitment towards fossil fuels because humans in the end consume fossil fuels. Tautology at its best.
I see many reasons why, the first of which is just that most of the time the damage is already done by the time it goes to court, assuming you can find the real name behind the usernames that professed lies, and I'm not even talking about bots.
That's why the liability has to rest on platforms -- and that's in addition to the publisher's liability.
Edit: formatting
OK to call someone an incompetent, not OK to call someone a child abuser, or even just a sexist or a liar, except if you're making a stand as a media organization (which the accused individual may then sue under libel laws)
Penalty for platforms: $10k per offense -- 100 bad tweets published: $1m risk.
I'm probably not technical enough, but I'm always left wondering how no one created a 'bettergoogle.com' that makes a query to google from the client side and applies an array of filters to google's output, starting by removing the ads and the results from any known bad actors. Could also be a browser extension but that makes it difficult on mobile.
On the left hand, you make design choices with the goal of limiting the life expectancy of the product, and on the right hand, you just don't prioritise life expectancy over other considerations when making said choices.
Of course the line is thin and the complexity of design trade-offs in all directions makes it pretty hard to pinpoint where evil actually happened... which is why the "right to repair" is so complicated in terms of hardware.
Software though is another matter: no-one can claim it's "too difficult" or "too costly" to provide users with the information that will allow them to use their device with the software they want.
Long ago in the country where I live, the regulator:
- set up an opt-out central register where the owner of any phone number can freely declare they do not want any unsollicited calls
- made this register freely available to all businesses
- required from telcos that they make it easy for customers to report infringing calls
- made telcos liable if they do not swiftly take action whenever they have 'sufficient' reports (10s not 1000s) that one of their clients is infringing on the opt-out list, including by cutting off all of the client's numbers.
... does not seem such a big deal to set up.