What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
>I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.
Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
>Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.
And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.
A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.
>Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)
Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.
If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.
Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).
If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?
In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.
Prediction markets and all the market manipulation are the symptom, not the cause. Our society used to have real consequences for breaching public trust, but with our mere decades old "money is speech" legal system, there have not been any consequences for moneyed interest in quite a while. And as long as there are no consequences, they keep trying more and more egregious violations of public trust to establish where the new red line (if any) actually are.
Money is speech - but speech isn't speech. What's the latest thing a US citizen said in the US that got them arrested? They said in a private WhatsApp group that Benjamin Netanyahu should come and bomb their school to get them out of an exam. Benjamin Netanyahu was not in the group chat, but they got arrested anyway.
Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.
Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.
Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.
I converted ebooks into PDFs specifically formatted for my reader size and typeset in the fonts I like. It had proper kerning, hyphenation, widow/orphan control, drop capitals, etc.
However that PDF is not reflow-able (or changeable in any way) once it's on the device, and that's not what people are buying ebook readers for.
If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???
> If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.
It just means that publishers are really good at manufacturing physical goods. They've been doing it for several hundred years so no big surprise there.
Books don't sell in large quantities. The economics of scale for the publishes for labor aren't there.
No one is getting rich off of fiction publishing except for the rare break out author. Publishers go out of business (or get acquired) all the time because they are constantly one step away from being insolvent.
This is also why the industry has massively consolidated.
I highly suggest reading breakdowns of the finances of publishing books, it is an interesting field that is incredibly different than how we are used to seeing numbers work in software.
The middlemen are giving your book some (still probably rather small) chance of being bought in significant numbers. If you just want a big stack of books and don't care if anyone buys them, they're not especially expensive to produce.
The issue is also one of agency: the public has absolutely no agency in this. There is nothing an ordinary member of the public can do to avoid having their data exposed, there is nothing they can do to cause corporations to have more robust security models nor to cause actual consequences for all the executives that chose profit over security at every possible decision point.
To the public this becomes like the risk of being hit by lightning or being in a car accident, just background noise we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It is just the cost of living in this economy.
There are presentations that you actually present to an audience, to which this point is valid.
But lots of presentations, including this one I think, are merely used as a means of conveying information (yeah, not my favorite way of doing so, but being a contrarian doesn't do anybody's career any good), and those are indeed intended to be read and need to have explicitly all the information that you otherwise would be speaking and addressing.
If you have a fixed profit margin, the way to make more absolute money is to allow your costs to increase. Insurance companies have zero reason to negotiate prices down.
Well not quite. Health insurance is still a competitive business. Customers — both individuals and group buyers — are very price sensitive and while switching plans is a hassle they will change from Aetna to Humana or whatever if the difference is large enough. And many of the largest carriers are non-profit corporations so there's literally no "profit", although some of the employees are very well compensated.
All the highest compensated non executive level employees I know are doctors, who would be highly compensated at every business. Same for all the executives, whose pay does not seem outsize compared to executives at other similar sized organizations. If anything, health insurance companies are known to be pretty stingy with pay unless you're in high demand, e.g. doctors.
Inflation has made prices higher, but people's purchasing power has been decreasing all this time. Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades. It is why young people are marrying later, not able to afford to buy property etc. All the gains the economy has made over the past handful of decades have been captured by a small percentage of the population.
| - Have leaders skilled in whatever their direct reports are doing. Use them as coaches normally and as spare workers in times of high demand.
I think this is the biggest hurdle for US style management produced from the MBA cookie factories. Their only skill sets are MBA speak, assigning blame, taking credit and granting themselves the largest bonuses possible while telling all the actual workers generating value that "due to current financial conditions, your raise is limited to 2%"
It doesn't help at all the US union rules make switching from line work to supervisor work a bad thing. If someone with a union job switches to management they have to start from zero - the company cannot count all those years of experience and so you start at the bottom of the ladder again despite your experience, and your former friends now do mean things to you because you "went to the dark side". It isn't just unions that do the above, but it is the worst there.
Not the "West", obsessive single minded individualism is a US characteristic. All other western nations (read: Europe) realize that there is significant value to society and that to achieve things we need to work as a group.
If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.
The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.
I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.
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