> The AI goldrush has proven that intellectual property laws are null and void. Money is all that matters.
Indeed they never really mattered. They were a tool for large corporations to make money and they will go away if they can no longer serve such purpose. Anyone that thought there was a real moral or ethical basis to "intellectual property" laws fell for propaganda and got scammed as a result.
Except authoritarians can only clamp down in protests so much, working against them is economic and even regional social collapse due to running out of water. There's a lot building against them.
I actually hope western countries stay out, lest it gives support for nationalists to rally
You clearly never experienced chases anti-fraud division. Who will, without warning, close all of your chase accounts because you used a credit card at the wrong store at the wrong time and you set off whatever fraud score. And csr will not help you as the anti fraud system is treated as god.
Funny you mention that. I did open a joint Chase account back when I was getting married and first order of business was paying for all the wedding expenses. We went to QR, Mexico for a weekend getaway prior to the madness and because I logged into the Chase account from Mexico they not only locked the bank account, but completely closed it with no way to reopen. We had to both go to the Chase branch at which it was opened with passports and even then the manager said Chase would mail me the money in 3-6 weeks, 2-5 weeks after the wedding. I politely told him I was not leaving the building until he handed me the cash in an envelope and after some time he finally caved and did it after making some phone calls.
Most bizarre experience. Never had a bank account with Chase ever again after that incident.
A client of mine pushed her business expenses through a Chase account. She banked with them too.
She traveled to the “wrong” country. A country that is not and was not embargoed or sanctioned. A country that the US is/was on good terms with. She had been there and used her Chase card previously. She didn’t do anything out of the norm.
Chase closed all her accounts with no notice while she was traveling and refused to provide a reason. I told her to sit on my invoices while she scrambled and got things sorted out.
It took months. They refused to send her the balance of her asset accounts until she threatened to sue them and air the calls she recorded.
I have kept a healthy distance from relying on Chase ever since.
Wonder what Apple caved on. They famously only found goldman to work with them originally because they had significant demands that bucked the industry, including setting everyone's statement dates to the exact same so that customer support collapses the same day every year.
Settling on the same day is quite a choice. PDF creation cluster scaling alone must have been something else, let alone the obvious problems they had knocking over CS and getting fined by the CFPB.
I doubt that PDF generation makes any dent given all the other things they have to process at statement closing. They also don’t mail out statements by default and I don’t think everyone looks at the PDFs on the first day, so they can do it just in time.
> so that customer support collapses the same day every year.
Every _month_. And it's not just the customer service desk that's a problem. With even distribution of billing and a large customer base, outflows match inflows and you don't have to do much to manage it. With all money coming in on one day you have a huge outflow of money and then it all rushes back in.
Much easier to borrow 1 dollar for a year than 30 dollars for a month.
I would guess putting a cap of 660 credit score and adding some fees back like late fee, over limit fee, and return payment fee. I don't see JPM doing a card with rewards/cash back in the sub prime market, slate doesn't have any rewards.
Apple card with GS was amazing deal for people who didn't have prime credit.
Some of the perks were great even for prime if you're already bought into the Apple ecosystem. 3% cash back plus 0% APR installment on Apple product purchases is a nice double dip that most cards can't touch unless you're really trying hard.
If you don't want to mess with points, its a great card. You still need another card for travel since it doesn't have rental car insurance, travel insurance, etc. Its missing all the features that normally come with Visa Infinite or Mastercard World Elite cards.
I have no insider knowledge here but it doesn't seem outlandish to think that the negotiations would go a little differently for an established product vs a brand new one. Goldman may have simply been the only bank willing to work with Apple when the customer base (in size, demographics, spending patterns, whatever) was hypothetical.
What bank offers rewards and no fees to subprime(below 660) customers? There aren't any. Why no wanted the deal. Guaranteed to lose money. Its not like there's name recognition, i doubt most people could name the underlying bank for the Apple Card. Only place the bank is mentioned is the fine print at the bottom of the card details. Everything is branded "Apple Card"
> i doubt most people could name the underlying bank for the Apple Card. Only place the bank is mentioned is the fine print at the bottom of the card details.
And in the bottom-right corner of the titanium card and in the picture in Wallet. And it's advertised practically everywhere they mention the titanium card. And if you have Apple Savings it's also specified to be from GS everywhere.
GS was inexperienced and didn't know what they were getting into; that's why Apple was able to get such a good deal and also why GS now wants out. I fear Chase does know what they're getting into and Apple likely has far less favorable terms now. Though I'm incredibly glad they didn't give it to Synchrony (who runs PayPal and is incredibly sociopathic)
I would imagine Goldman want out. They were never a retail banking firm to begin with. And sell the current Apple Card division with debt and customer base packaged at a discount.
Consider the transition takes 24 months I wouldn't be surprised if the discount allow them to run three years with clause to terminate at later date. The downside and exposure should be limited with great upside on worldwide launch.
But judging from Apple's speed with their execution in Apple Wallet this will likely take a lot longer than expected.
Not sure which way this tips the scales, but Chase has a retail banking presence in the UK, GS doesn't. If Apple wants to expand Apple Card internationally, and want to keep the number of partners to a minimum, Chase would be a better fit. Inversely, Chase's market in the UK is still small, and an Apple Card partnership would be a big draw to pull customers in.
You could well be right, though I have a couple of theories why they Apple haven't rolled it out here:
- maybe they think it'll just be too messy, having to market different cashback reward rates and so on for the US and UK, due to the capped interchange fees - too much "it's not fair" style moaning like everyone did about Black Friday, even though we don't even celebrate Thanksgiving here.
- Apple have somewhat de-prioritised UK/Europe generally given their dealings with the EU
- (as others have hinted) most banks simply aren't interested
From the outside it does seem as though there was basically nothing in it for Goldman Sachs, other than perhaps useful spending data (they must surely have got some data, regardless of Apple's privacy claims) and a bit of industry prestige for being the ones to work with Apple?
Absolutely. I'd imagine not being able to use the card at Costco alone would be enough to have them entertaining surprising concessions. It was the first thing I thought of, with Chase CC's being Visa instead of Mastercard.
>The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
Ive had that argument with many of the schematic PCB ai startups. Online open source schematics and PCB designs are awful training sets by large. There are some gems out there publicly but that's gems in a sea of sand. Far different than training a LLM on all the published books of the world.
You think you are making a counter argument, but you just managed to be welcomed to the end of the thought process of this exercise as contending can be done by just about anyone. It reinforces a bad precedent.
You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to contend that Zelensky is not the democratically legitimated head of state of Ukraine. For Maduro, it's much simpler: He lost the election, yet he remained in power.
Seems silly to ignore that the last date in your list had an event closer to what OP is referring to than any other year, no? Considering he was already crying election fraud in 2016 you could certainly view this as a line with upwards slope…
Alrighty then, in a few years you can test your model’s accuracy against my prediction based on history and an understanding of how our laws and civics actually work.
TSMC running stateside != "nevermind Taiwanese independence"/"US withdrawing military protection for Taiwan"
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
The Ukrainian Constitution suspends elections in a State of Emergency. The State of Emergency is renewed regularly by the Ukrainian Parliament. The Ukrainian people are broadly supportive of Zelensky, who is publically open to holding elections if given the space and resources to do so. Which is a ceasefire, and some time and money.
I think following the constitution is a good thing, even if bombs are falling. I mean, look, people are dying, and yet the country is not just hunkered down in bunkers for the last four years. Life is going on. People are getting up and going to work and coming home and eating dinner and going to bed. Surely they could also go and vote... if the constitution did not say what it says.
I would agree, but Russia has shown that they're not about fair elections in their own country and they've bombed plenty of civilian targets throughout this conflict. I'd assume that Putin would crank up the notch about 10x on all fronts if he knew elections were taking place to make it impossible to have anything resembling a fair process.
> He won the election in the most corrupt country in Europe.
He won by a landslide regardless of corruption (if there ever was one during those elections). Everyone was fed up with Poroshenko, and Zelensky was seen as a new wave, young politician who will bring change (on top of his popularity as a comedian).
> he suspended the next election and no more elections have been celebrated ever since.
Zelensky did not suspend elections. Ukraine's constitution prohibits the holding of elections under conditions of martial law.
"However, martial law—imposed after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and still in place as the war continues—has prevented elections from taking place. Under Ukrainian law, elections cannot be held while martial law is in effect to ensure continuity of governance and support the nation’s defense." [1]
> Then, he suspended the next election and no more elections have been celebrated ever since.
Yes, but that may have something to do with the fact that his country was invaded and he has been at war ever since. Suspending elections for that reason is legitimate by "our" standards.
We didn't suspend elections during World War II. We had been attacked (and overseas parts had been invaded and conquered), and we were at war. Elections still went on as normal.
Even during the Civil War there were elections, even though there was fighting in some of the states that were voting.
> We [industrial superpower dwarfing whole axis combined, surrounded by ocean with no neighbors who can challenge us and unique geography that makes it literally impossible to invade at the time] didn't suspend election during World War II. We had been attacked [parts so insignificant compared to the whole that there was no reason to even consider delaying elections]...
This is the most `ShitAmericansSay` argument ever. What's next? Poland should've held elections while being pounded from both sides? Russia had "elections" during WWI and look where it ended up.
As opposed to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Mother Russia, who won every single one of his extremely fair and properly done democratic elections with a landslide. 88.48 at his last democratic election! So beloved!
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