2,488 karma · joined October 18, 2010
That is the traditional meaning of grey market, but I don't think that's what Amazon meant here. Amazon isn't threatening to import Tile and Sonos devices from other countries, they are threatening to use cheaper no-name knock-offs. The meaning of "gray market" has expanded over time.
You're mixing up a bunch of ideas. The traditional definition of "grey market" is buying an item oversees at a low cost and then importing it into the US. For example, the identical textbook usually sells for much more in the U.S. than it does in Asia. The supreme court has indeed ruled that the First Sale doctrine allows people to buy that book in Asia, then sell it back to someone in the U.S. for more.
However, the first sale doctrine only applies to copyright, not patents. It hasn't yet been decided as to patents.
More meaningfully though, the meaning of the term "grey market" has expanded. It used to refer to authorized items sold overseas, but now it more generally refers to items with questionable IP rights. When Amazon is using the term "grey market", they are referring to counterfeits and infringing products as well.
The "gray market" indicate cheap knock-offs of new products.
For example, literally days after Tile released their bluetooth powered device locators, you could find cheaper knock-offs from China. These products may very well infringe Tile's patents and trademarks, but proving infringement in court takes years and costs millions of dollars. Even if you win, during that time many other knock-off manufacturers will pop up and you'll have to start all over. At that point your company will be dead. Intellectual property litigation is simply not strong enough to protect smaller companies.
So a threat to go to the gray market from Amazon, can effectively spell the doom for your company.
As an aside, while this is a problem for small companies, larger companies can usually afford to wage these large IP litigation campaigns. A good example is Bosch which sells patented windshield wiper blades. There are numerous knock-offs from China, but Bosch goes to war with each and every one. Eventually, Bosch starts earning a reputation and the knock-offs slow down. But this takes many years of heavy investment in IP enforcement and never entirely goes away. It only makes sense at very large scales, no small company could take on this burden.
I haven't but others have (e.g. Warren). A 2% wealth tax on assets over $50M will generate $3.75T over 10 years. Even if the actual number is half of that, it's still plenty to pay for many progressive programs.
Source: https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/ultra-millionaire-tax
That isn't enough. Mainstream physics research lacks skepticism about the laws of thermodynamics. Mainstream biology lacks skepticism about cell division.
When evidence for a proposition is strong, skepticism is weak.
If you want to argue for climate change skepticism, you have to provide evidence for to raise that skepticism. Yet every time someone does so, it gets shot down.
It's not easy to get SSDI, it requires many requests, hearings before judges, and lots of forms. However, I agree that once you get it, you're basically trapped within it. There's definitely room for improvement (e.g., if you have SSDI and a job, some progressively increasing percentage of your income is subtracted from your SSDI benefits).
It's a great idea. Starting a business will open you up to a whole world of new skills. As a programmer, you can probably start something with zero capital, just your free time, so the risks can be generally low. To make it successful, it will eventually become all-consuming, but it doesn't have to be at the start.
I've started two SaaS businesses, one successful, one not, and looking back I still think the most gratifying moment is going from $0 in revenue to $1. Doing that still takes many nights and weekends, but you can still psychologically treat it like a hobby. The emotionally hard part comes after that first dollar, although you should just cross that bridge when you get there.
Happy to chat more about this offline if you're really interested, feel free to lookup my profile and email me.
Conservatives are plenty self-righteous, you only hear ad-hominems like "anti-American", "hates freedom", and "naive" from the right.
It's a convenient target because the super-rich have never had as much wealth and power in the entire history of the U.S. as they do now. Inequality is worse now than it has ever been.
Consider an extreme hypothetical, where one person in a country has all the wealth, and everyone else has zero. That obviously cannot sustain a functional democracy. Now consider the other extreme, where everyone is mandated to have exactly the same amount as everyone else. Both are distpoian, but we are far closer to the former than the latter.
Conservatives love raising freedom of speech issues, if it aligns with their viewpoint. Where were the conservatives when extreme leftists were getting jailed for burning the american flag? Where were they when in the middle of the century when a bunch of music was considered being banned?
Conservatives don't care about free speech, they care about their own speech.
Why would anyone research "climate change skepticism" and not just "climate"? The very idea of a discipline with "skepticism" in it's name suggests that there is an existing answer that someone is looking for, whereas the whole point of science is to keep an open mind. Nobody researches "physics skepticism", they research physics.
If you presuppose an outcome, you're not really doing science.
Raising a family is a wonderful endeavor and an important part of life, but it's just one part of life. Most people work at least 40 hours a week, that's a huge part of their existence. Finding employment or activity that you're proud of and inspired by can take those 40 hrs/week from drudgery to inspiration.
I don't want to insert my own values for your own, but maybe consider optimizing your work life for yourself, and raising a family may come with it.
How many people really understand the difference between a VPN and a proxy server? Even among the tech literate.
I'm not sure I buy this. If the IRS can measure income, they can also measure wealth. Sure rich folks will try to hide wealth, but they've also tried to hide income and the IRS when well funded is decently competent at finding it.
> The other fundamental problem with giving a big additional slice of the national wealth to the poor is that they will spend it on consumer services
That's no what anyone is advocating. They are advocating basic healthcare and education, not exactly consumer services.
> At which point you no longer have a middle class to extract from.
Even super leftist democrats are not advocating taxing the middle class. They are focusing on the super rich. The somewhat nice thing about this type of taxation is that even though it'll effect the absolute money you have, it won't affect your wealth rank. Sure, maybe Bezos' or Gates' net worth will go down, but they will still be the richest in the US. Your low-millionaire friends may be slightly less rich, but they will still be just as rich rank-wise as they were before.
Folks generally get less upset about taxes if it keeps their existing rank and standing in society
I'm not entirely sure this is a bad result. Driving down welfare costs may indeed drive up medicaid costs, but this seems like a decent trade. Rather than giving people a check, give them health insurance and support for them to get their own job.
Give people the minimum necessary to keep their dignity (basic housing, public education, foodstamps, basic healthcare), and if they want more give them opportunities to grab it.
I am amazed and saddened, that in 2020, concatenating strings, regardless of the form or language, is not blazing fast across all environments.
Some analogies work better here than others. Sure, a rich person may get a better chef and better food than a poor person.
But should a rich person get better justice than a poor person? The entire idea of justice is that it's blind, everyone who comes before it is equal. If we accept the fact that rich folks get more justice than poor folks, we are by definition admitting that there is no justice at all.
I agree that there seems to be a bit of bias (if not racism) in the OP's point, but there's no denying that the vast majority of fires are created by humans, whether indigenous, farmers, or hikers.
Actually, it's often worse than nothing. Even assuming that "race" is entirely genetic and not a social construct, fitness in society changes so rapidly, that no genetics can properly account for it.
A day laborer born in the 1950s U.S. a genetically perfect fit for mining coal, might have had a great deal of success for the first 20 years of their career, and then a poor outcome for the last 10 years. Nothing changed with their genetics, they just became less desirable within society based on social trends.
Genetic changes take generations, often dozens of generations, to realize any noticeable difference. Social changes often occur in years and sometimes months, far faster.
Therefore, any conclusions based on genetics that fail to consider how the genetics fall within society are missing most of the point.
Your point is about the "market": if the market is iOS devices, then there is no question Apple has "control". If "market" is smartphone apps, the argument gets shakier.
Antitrust violations are notoriously difficult to prove in court. Even if Apple were to lose in some iOS app antitrust case, the prospect that it leads to general B2B applications is quite negligible.
I'm pretty skeptical the U.S. military is concerned about wasted ammunition. They waste so much on training and preparation that anything wasted in combat is minimal.
> I'm pretty sure the first side to allow fully autonomous weapons will do so before the technology is ready
It doesn't have to be autonomous to be deployed before it's ready. Iran managed to should down a civil aircraft based on human error. The U.S. has done the same decades earlier. Clearly there were either technology or human process problems, I suspect that autonomous military robots will follow this trend.
A good team manager can identify what motivates everyone on the team, align incentives, and then take a step back to get out of the way.
If an engineer likes to work with new technology and hates your legacy system, find the new tech they can work on. If the product manager is only interested in a particular feature, then make them the manager of that feature but hold them accountable to its success.
A good manager will line up the dominos, but not tell any one of them how to fall.
I was happy about it, called my mom and told her the news.
What I didn't realize is that a large group of senior engineers were not to happy about it. The went through every one of my commits, identified every time I broke a validation, broke the build, or otherwise caused someone else a headache, and then took this information to management without me knowing about it.
I'm sure jealousy may have played a factor, but today, I largely think they were correct. I was a cowboy coder fast and loose with my code. When I broke the build, even if was for 10 minutes before I fixed it, I basically stopped a dozen or more engineers from being productive.
It took time, but I learned how to be more of a team player. I created my own build environment that would only commit changes if everything passed, and built a far more robust validation system. Quickly I changed from being the biggest cause of bugs, to the biggest reporter of bugs in the company.
Finding and reporting bugs in other people's code also did not help my standing.
The truth is that any organization is made up of humans, and simply being the most efficient at creating new features, building validation systems, or reporting bugs, is not going to be enough. You have to actually talk to your peers, build a relationship and a mutual respect and trust.
There's plenty that can be done to equalize advantages based on inherited wealth. A wealth tax would be simple, an estate tax is another. I don't think anyone would agree that "wallowing" would help.
I did found a company, and I feel like the daily job description was "get me out of this impossible mess". Every day it's something different, and very likely something that you've never experienced before. Often, the reasonable answer is that overcoming the issue is impossible, and shutting down is the right course of action. Many startups fail this way, and it's not because they aren't clever enough, just that there really is an impossible obstacle.
However, the ones that succeed generally find ways of getting around one obstacle after the next. Maybe they're super clever, maybe it's dumb luck, most of the time, it's impossible to know. However, having the mentality of taking a setback as a challenge can definitely help.
Small personal anecdote about this: when I first started my company, I relied heavily on getting Google traffic. Using best practices SEO, it kept building. But one day, Google traffic tanked around 10X. In literally 24 hours, I thought that would spell the end of my company.
But then I thought, it's ridiculous that I'm relying on Google (a third-party company that I have no control over) to send me potential customers. I should be more proactive and find them myself any way I can. I built email marketing campaigns, spent days on the phone, went to conferences, advertised... literally anything I could think of.
The google traffic tank hurt badly, but I eventually got over it. And as a result, I now have a far more robust company. Google traffic is now a nice plus for leads, but by no means necessary to keep the company growing.
The trick is to mentally transform "wholly crap, this is the end" to "okay, how do we get over this".
The entire 2 to 3 transition is an excellent illustration of Python developers failing properly recognize the challenges in transition. What other popular language intentionally broke backwards comparability? It's hard to think of any.
Python set the entire community back 10 years or more by making this drastic mistake.
In a perfectly fair world, companies would get attention based on the value they are providing to society, not on the level of VC funding or particular affiliations.
In particular, labor rights, non-profits, legal technology, and governance are generally under-reported despite their larger potential impact on society, largely because they aren't attractive to VCs looking for out-sized returns on investment.
Lady Gaga almost certainly sold all of her rights to her label, a corporate entity, when she was signed. However, because of termination rights, 30 years later, that contract will lapse, reverting the rights back to the original artists. If 20 people created the Lady Gaga song, then it will revert back to all 20 of them jointly, and if a label wants to buy the rights, it will need to make deals with each one individually.
The S&P 500 has pretty consistently had yields of 10-15% over the last 100 years. It makes more sense to invest in a "boring" ETF that follows the market making 10% than a "boring" stock that yields 5%.
The definition of "monopoly" varies widely even within the USA, and enforcement of antitrust issues generally depends on who has political power.
If a company has market control and is monopolistic, but no one with power actually prosecutes them for their behavior, then is what they did actually "illegal"? Whether something is legal depends on both the written law, as well as how it is enforced.