I didn't read the fine article, but I suspect that it could easily be argued that if she did not come forward that she was an accomplice to any fraud that he committed. After all, they were married, and she stood to benefit from any financial gains that he made. If your partner steals tens of millions of dollars you probably want to get ahead of that.

Heck, generally speaking, I would like to think that I would report any felony that I personally witnessed, even if the victim was someone that I didn't like. That's just the right thing to do from a general ethical perspective. I don't like the world that we end up with if we each only care about the crimes that are committed against ourselves. I can understand if someone feels differently, but, for obvious reasons, I would rather not be neighbors with that person.

I suppose the true test would be how you would feel if it was your money being stolen. I would bet that if it was your money being stolen you would be grateful to hear that you were being defrauded, no matter who the person was that gave you the information. This is especially true if the warning came soon enough that you could protect yourself.

I recognize that some people truly believe that the most important thing that you can do is to not get involved. However, in this case, Mr. Rinsch had clearly gone off the rails. He needed help, not someone that was willing to cover up his problems. It could easily be argued that turning him in was not only the right thing to do, it was the loving thing to do.

The FSF, GNU, and the GPL have always been about software freedom, and they have always used copyright law ironically to protect that freedom. The catch has always been that you can use the software however you want, but you don't have the license to distribute the software unless you are willing and able to give that same right to the people that you distribute software to.

Along the way they have various legal tools and licenses. My favorite example of this is that Debian's digital RMS program, that was used to warn people about non-free software that I had installed on my system, would warn me about the manual to Emacs, which is published using the GFDL with some unchangeable bits that makes it technically non-free according to Debian's definition. I personally believe that these restrictions make sense for documentation, but Debian had other priorities, so I would regularly get emails from my system from Digital RMS warning me about packages that the actual RMS had helped to write, and using a license that RMS had helped draft.

Technical people like black and white, or at least very straightforward branching, and the rules for software licenses tend to be a little more tricky than that.

It does feel that a repository for reusable boilerplate legal documents should be a thing though. Hackable law, if you will. I wonder if such a thing actually exists.

No doubt. If only there was a device that didn't have battery and required you to be connected to the network with a wire!

I have no problem paying people for services rendered. The real problem is that billions of dollars of VC money was poured into this particular industry subsidizing the price of delivering goods to the point where it was ridiculously inexpensive to have hot meals delivered to your door.

This money has dried up, and now this same service is going to get considerably more expensive. People will either pay the higher costs associated with these deliveries, or there food will not get delivered. It is as simple as that. In some markets DoorDash is already seeing more demand for their services than they have people willing to drive. The only way to fix that issue is to pay the drivers more money, and DoorDash doesn't really have that money to give. It is going to have to come from customers.

I actually agree that we probably should call it something besides a "tip." A tip is something provided at the end of the service to help incentivize exceptional service. This is more along the lines of a bid for timely service.

There's a reason why I tend to drive to the restaurant and pick up the food myself. I know how much a delivery service should cost, and I am price sensitive enough so that I am not generally willing to pay that price. Plus, I have six kids and so when I order food I generally order a lot of it. Paying a percentage to have it delivered doesn't make much sense to me. After all, it is still only one delivery.

However, I really do like the idea of letting the driver know ahead of time how much you value their service. My real problem with tipping is that there is no way for them to know how much of a sociopath the customer for is ahead of time. Delivery people have to work each delivery as if the customer was likely to be super generous so that when they do get a big tipper they have lived up to their part of the bargain. This allows people that aren't tippers to get excellent service without ever having to pay for it.

Personally, I am going to tip, and I have a tendency to be generous. I don't see any problem in letting the person know ahead of time that I appreciate what they are doing. I have experimented in putting the tip on the table at restaurants, for example, right after ordering. Generally speaking that gets me the service that I am hoping for, and it takes most of the pressure off. Sure, the server knows that I am not going to drop a truly ridiculous tip, but they also know that they are not going to be disappointed.

Why should they be forced to give comp days? The competition to become an academic is brutal. There are definitely people out there that would happily give up all of their weekends to be considered for the post, and they have qualifications that are just as strong as the person that wants to have the weekends off. They are just willing to work harder.

Personally, I would much rather see these sorts of positions become more of a meritocracy instead of less. Somebody is going to get this highly coveted job. I would just as soon it be someone that was willing to put in more hours, and to make the job their top priority. Otherwise it invariably boils down to some other completely political maneuver that gets one person chosen over another, and the winner ends up getting not only the job that they want, but ridiculous job security, and other insane perks that really helps to separate the winners from the losers. The difference between a tenured professor and an associate professor is huge. Why shouldn't those positions go to the people that show the most dedication to the job.

I think that it makes sense, in the most highly competitive of jobs, to allow work ethic to play an extraordinary role. That way when I get beat out for the position that I wanted I can at least say that the other person was willing to work insanely hard at getting to the top. Yes, that would preclude all but the most bright of the people that want to have an actual life, but that's how competition works.

Because when it comes to these highly sought after jobs it is more about the competition that you will be facing than the actual job requirements. The real issue isn't that the conferences are on the weekends. The real issue is that the people that are mostly likely to be successful in obtaining these jobs are those people that are willing to be married to them. They are willing to work nights and weekends. They are willing to forgo having a family, or even a social life. There are only so many of these positions available. It stands to reason that most of the those positions go to those people that are willing to pay a much higher price.

As a male that decided decades ago, after getting burnt out working for a startup, that I wasn't willing to be married to my work, I can promise you that this sort of issue is not even really discrimination. A female that is willing to forgo having children, and who is willing to put their career first and foremost, probably has an advantage over a male that is willing to make that same sacrifice. All other things being equal the nod probably goes to the woman that is willing to put in the time. The difference is that there are simply far less women that are willing to make that sort of sacrifice for their career.

So this particular symptom is that academic conferences happen to be on weekends. But the root problem is that it is hard to compete with people that are willing to work twice as many hours as you for the same job. In this particular case it manifests as people being willing to give up their weekends to travel, but if the conference was moved these same people would be willing to give up their weekends for extra research as well. Move the conferences to mid-week and now conference prices have gone up for everyone, because universities are competing with businesses for conference space, and the people willing to work weekends still get ahead.

If you find yourself competing with people that are willing to spend significantly more time and energy on their job than you are, you should perhaps consider finding a job that isn't so competitive. I know that is the choice that I made, and I am glad that I did.

Over the last decade or so I have made it clear to my employers that I was not willing to travel over the weekend, and that I would prefer to not travel at all. I have had my employer tell me that this would likely make it more difficult for me to advance my career. Talking with my colleagues the amount of money that I am leaving on the table I have found that it is actually a pretty sizable amount. Not all of that difference is due to the fact that I value time spent with my family more than my career. I suspect that some of that is that is also due to my personality. I would rather work in a job that I am confident that I could easily replace than maximize my earnings. I am happy to spend time repairing my 1996 Honda Civic than waste money on a new vehicle that is more comfortable. I am happy to sacrifice salary for a situation that I feel is more stable and less stressful.

The difference is that I understand that these attitudes preclude me from a wide array of highly competitive fields. No matter how intelligent and conscientious I might be I am unlikely to ever succeed in the sort of corporate/academic political climate that rewards people that are willing to be married to their jobs. I am going to spend a couple of weeks every summer taking youth groups on an outdoor adventure no matter how much the business needs me. At 4:30 PM I am wrapping up my day, and only the most extreme of fires is going to get me to care about work. Put enough pressure on me, and I will simply find another job. With the experience and skills that I have, and the salary that I need, it has never taken me more than two days to find another job, even now that I am over 50. My employers have invariably been very happy with me, because I am willing and eager to teach people. I have any number of friends that I have mentored and who now make more money than I do. I still get calls from several with difficult questions to this day, and on a couple of occasions I have worked for someone that previously had been someone I had helped. They knew that I do good work, and that politically I am safe. I don't want their job. I just want to be able to do my job and to go home. They know that I am going to treat people with respect, and that I am happy to help people improve, even if it means that they get opportunities that I am not interested in taking for myself.

Perhaps we would have better society if we rigged politics so that no one could get ahead by be willing to sacrifice family time, but I am skeptical. The reality is that only so many people can be high powered corporate execs, partners at prestigious law firms, tenured academics at institutions of higher learning, and a wealth of other jobs that are highly competitive. If willingness to put in long hours is not the sacrifice that gets certain people ahead, what else is society going to use to choose who gets the most coveted positions? Does it just become a popularity contest, where the most beautiful people get the best jobs? Does it become even more a lottery where it doesn't matter how hard you work, just how lucky you are?

Personally, I think that idea is silly. It is 2023. If a woman (or man) wants to achieve the highest levels of professional success they should be well aware that this will take certain sacrifices. The idea that you can "have it all," is a fallacy. Every decision comes with built in opportunity costs. If you can't be successful as an academic without going to conferences over the weekend, then you are going to have to find a way go to conferences over a weekend. Shifting the conferences so that they happen during the week might appear to help on the surface, but it doesn't change the fact that you are still competing with people that are willing to give up their weekends to help further their career. The weekend conferences are really just a symptom. The underlying problem is that becoming an academic is a very competitive field that tends to be dominated by people that are willing to pay whatever price it takes to succeed. These people are going to find other ways to use their flexibility against you. After all, they are willing to sacrifice things that you simply aren't willing to sacrifice.

Exactly. Doordash and the rest of the delivery services took billions in VC money and used it to subsidize food delivery. So for a few years it was possible to get food delivered to your house for an extremely low price. Now that money is drying up, and people are finding that their food doesn't get delivered on time for $3.00.

The good news is that they can always pay more than that. If DoorDash is smart they will not only make the tip completely transparent, but they will give preference to drivers that have good delivery records when it comes to handing out deliveries with big tips. With the right incentives this will completely self regulate. Patrons will learn that paying extra gets them the best drivers, and drivers will learn that speedy deliveries get them the best patrons. There will be some hiccups, but for the most part you can then just pay for the level of service that you want.

Alternatively, you could go and pick up your own food.

I couldn't agree more. However, you can't hardly blame Doordash drivers for preferring deliveries where they are going to get a tip. After all, they get to choose which deliveries they make. In markets where there are more deliveries to do than drivers then someone is going to have to wait to get their food. It makes sense that the person waiting is the one that paid the least.

In some markets, where there are a lot of drivers, or at times when deliveries are slow, you might get your food delivered on time without having to leave a tip. During busy times, however, you might need to pay more if you want your food to show up at a reasonable time. This model seems to make a great deal of sense to me. If you think that the overall price of the delivery is too high, then you can always deliver the food yourself. People have been doing that for a long time.

The whole point of Doordash driving is that you work for yourself. You don't have to show up and work set hours. You can simply make the deliveries that you want to make. I suspect that quite a few drivers are going to find it in their best interest to simply make deliveries where they get paid the most.

A few years ago my oldest child asked me if we could sign up for a music service. She wanted Spotify, but after doing a bit of shopping around I countered with Google Play Music. It was a new service, but it appeared to have all of the music from Spotify, plus all of the Music that got released to YouTube, plus it included a subscription to Youtube Premium. We could get enough accounts for all of the people in my family that listened to music for a pretty decent price, and I liked being able to watch my boat-building videos without having to watch ads. I also liked the idea that part of my subscription went to pay the people that made the videos (yes, I know it mostly goes to pay the people hosting the videos, but that's not necessarily a bad thing either).

I was less enthused when they discontinued Google Play Music for Youtube Music. I used to listen quite a bit from my laptop, and the web front end for Youtube Music is crap compared to what Google Play Music had, but the Youtube Premium subscription that was included meant that it was still a much better deal (in my opinion) than the competition.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Google is now going to push more and more of its customers towards a subscription. I watch more Youtube than any other streaming service by a wide margin, and I suspect I am not the only one. I pay good money for Netflix and Disney Plus, and my family uses them far less, and Youtube Premium also throws in Spotify-alike service for free.

Of course, up until now people were happy with the free version of Youtube. The ads weren't that intrusive, and with an adblocker you could basically get the subscription for free. While Youtube was growing its market share they didn't care about this freeloader problem. However, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the good times might some day come to a close.

For giggles I spent some time last night looking over my financial records. I have been a T-mobile customer for over 20 years, and I currently have 7 lines with them (I have 6 kids). As you can probably imagine they are all on the Magenta plan. When I first read this article I became a bit concerned. I am very happy with my current plan, and there is nothing that I want from T-Mobile that is worth another $70/month.

A bit of research, however, turned up that I could almost certainly save money, even with my current plan, if I switched carriers. I am not under contract, and so I don't have to worry about paying off a bunch of devices if I leave. I could just port my phone numbers to another carrier and be done with T-Mobile today. There would be a bit of hassle, but I would save money every month. I am somewhat tempted to make the switch anyhow. T-mobile has been good to me, but everyone likes saving money.

A bit more research, and it appears that the biggest difference between the Magenta plans and the plans that they currently offer is that the Magenta plans don't involve financing a phone. I could probably save money at T-Mobile by simply switching to their Essentials plan. It has a lower data cap before you get throttled, but none of my lines come close to the current Essentials cap. I suspect that T-Mobile did the math and they realized that most of the people on their older plans were in a similar boat. We aren't using our phone bill to finance phones, and we are already paying for way more data than we currently use. If pushed most of us will choose a less expensive plan, not a more expensive plan.

In other words T-Mobile walked this back because they ran some tests and realize that they were going to lose money.

This is a big deal because China has tricked one of its trading partners into accepting their magic beans for a significant amount of oil. There is almost certainly a good reason why the other party doesn't want to be named. They are only willing to accept this deal because they are under significant international scrutiny.

Here's the problem with trading with a currency that isn't USD. When Russian invaded Ukraine and came under U.S. sanctions, India offered to exchange Russian oil for rupees. Russia thought that was a good idea, and so they proceeded to sell Russian oil (at a discount) to India for rupees. Fast forward to today and Russia currently has a balance of nearly $200 billion worth of India rupees that it can't spend (that's a lot of rupees). India traded those rupees for oil, but now it won't let Russia trade those rupees for anything but Indian goods and services (and not at market prices at that). Russia doesn't want that much overpriced Indian goods and services, so it has stopped accepting rupees for trades for oil. In many ways what India has done to Russia is worse than what the U.S. did to Russia. The U.S. merely said that they were unwilling to trade with Russia (or allow other countries to trade with Russia using its banking system and currency). India, in a far shrewder move, stole hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian oil.

Well played India.

That's basically the reason that the rupee is unlikely to ever become a significant reserve currency, despite the fact that the BRICs nations all wish that they could use something besides the dollar. India is not willing to give up the control over rupee prices that is required of a reserve currency. No one wants to be like Russia and find out, after the fact, that they have $200 billion dollars worth of rupees that they can't sell. Russia has since switched to doing oil transactions in Chinese yuan, even with India. This is better for Russia, as China makes lots of stuff that everyone wants. However, there are significant problems with using the yuan as a reserve currency as well. The primary issue being the severe transaction controls that China puts on the yuan. China does not want a strong yuan as that would make their exports less competitive around the world. There's a reason that so little of the world's transactions happen in yuan, and it is because China is not willing to open up their economy to the extent that would be required.

China's e-CNY is even worse than the rupee or the yuan as a reserve currency. This is primarily because it is not actual yuan, but is rather a separate, even more highly controlled, digital token. Even it's most anonymous accounts require a cell phone number to be tied to the account, and all accounts have very low balance caps, daily transfer caps, etc. You can get business accounts, but they require even more onerous terms. You definitely can not move money out of e-CNY without permission from the government, and even if you want to purchase stuff with e-CNY you will find yourself paying a premium for this very unpopular way of transacting business.

These tokens are, apparently, being used to make transfers between banks, but for those transactions I suspect that the government has allowed the banks ot simply use them as like a stablecoin, meaning it is easy to simply pretend they are yuan. In short, it would probably be easier for everyone involved if they left e-CNY out of the equation entirely. These transactions are not actually the market, they are just there to show that some volume is happening.

Think of it as if you had stablecoin tokens on Binance in the U.S. You used to be able to just withdraw those as dollars from your bank. Now, however, if you want to purchase something in dollars, you have to find another institution that is willing to trade your stablecoin for actual dollars and then withdraw those dollars. That's still possible today, for the sorts of amounts that most cryptobros are likely to withdraw, but what would happen if you needed to move $1 billion dollars. You probably get told that the max withdrawal is $10,000/day.

e-CNY is like that, except there are no third-party exchanges where you can exchange e-CNY for anything. China is happy to give you e-CNY for your goods, but good luck turning e-CNY into something that you actually want, especially at scale.

Whatever is happening though, it is nonsense to think that this represents some sort of shift towards a new reserve currency. Like India buying oil with rupees from Russia this is mostly just China taking advantage of some country that doesn't have access to the actual global market. The Western world has decreed that whoever it is can't do business in dollars (or euro), and so they are forced to take a deal that is possibly a step up from India buying oil with rupees that it won't let Russia spend. Whoever is accepting e-CNY it is super likely that they are getting absolutely raped. They are only doing this transaction because they have no other choice. The second the embargo disappears whoever this is will go back to requiring dollars for their oil. In the meantime China is taking advantage of the situation to purchase oil at a ridiculously low price.

That was the classiest /. response I have ever received, and I have been here a while. I agree 100% with everything you said, and I am sorry that I took a bit of offense originally. In my defense I am a little bit in mourning over my sugared cereals. I know they aren't good for me, and I honestly don't eat them very often, but I definitely do like them.

Seeing it written out though I can't help but agree that this is a problem. Americans basically take food from the rest of the world and make it considerably worse for your health. American food is basically bad for you, by design, and that's not much of a legacy.

Still in mourning a little though.

I am actually glad to hear that someone likes EU Froot Loops (that ought to show you how much I eat the US version, I didn't even get the name correct). There is a wide range in people's tastes, and I think that is part of the fun. However, I don't just need to reset my over-strained taste sensors. I have spent the last several years writing down every food that I eat. In that time I have experimented with all sorts of different eating styles and diets, along with notes about how these different experiments made me feel, how they affected my exercise regimen, health, and weight. As a young adult I spent 5 years in South America where I did not eat Froot Loops even one time. I have definitely learned to appreciate different types and styles of food, but no matter what experiment I have done with food sugary cereals are still amazing.

EU Froot Loops was also pretty good. In fact, if it would have been called something besides Froot Loops I probably would have loved it. I like tuna fish sandwiches, but if someone were to hand me a tuna fish sandwich that they called pepperoni pizza I would tell them their pizza was broken.

Any way you look at it, I don't think that I am broken simply because I don't like precisely the same thing that you like.