Anybody who's looked up recipes online recently knows that they're being used mainly as a way to serve you ads. Before the recipe is a bunch of ad-ridden prose about the recipe itself, with some pictures. Then, at the bottom of the page is the recipe. Google was making the content more easily available, but destroying the ad revenue.

Gotta publish....

They're focusing on this sort of thing:

Betty Smith will give to her mother Gloria Smith (hereinafter "Gloria") one million dollars (the "Payment") on December 1st (the "Payment Date"). Gloria agrees to deposit the Payment at First National Bank (the "Bank") on the Payment Date.

And saying that you only do that in legal writing, not when you're telling a narrative story.

In a narrative story, you might say this:

Betty gave her mom $1M in December 1st. On that date, she deposited it at First National Bank.

There's ambiguity in the narrative story (who did the deposit -- Betty or her Mom?) In legal writing, you're trying to avoid that ambiguity even if you end up with long hard-to-read sentences. If you're telling a story, it's ok to have a little ambiguity and you trust that the reader will figure it out.

It's not surprising that non-lawyers start to use those mid-sentence definitions when they write legal documents -- they're trying to solve the same problem with ambiguity that the lawyers try. It's like saying "novice coders end up using variables just like experienced coders do."

According to the Article, it looks like it was a guy in Houston who got a bit under $291,000.

Not sure how much luck JPMorgan is going to have in the lawsuit department -- people who do this sort of thing aren't exactly the sort of people who are likely to just invest the money. Chances are it's mostly gone.

Note that the online terms are what govern CloudStrike's relationships with small businesses where the size of the business doesn't justify CloudStrike's negotiating a separate agreement. Bigger companies negotiate their own agreements. If you're in the legal department at, say, American Airlines, you don't say "Oh, your extremely one-sided terms of service are perfectly ok with us." Instead, you hand CloudStrike your 40-page agreement that is very one-sided in your favor. And then you spend a couple of months negotiating that agreement.

But, in the final agreement, there will be a section addressing liability. And, in general, CloudStrike is going to have standards of what they will agree to v. what they won't. CloudStrike just isn't going to agree to be responsible for all the harm suffered by its customers -- there's just no way they could buy enough insurance to cover all that risk and, if they did, the price of their product would go through the roof. So, they're going to say something like "Look, you can get your money back (or 3x your money back, or 5x your money back)" or "You can get back at most $5M" and they'll say "If you need more coverage than that, then you need to get your own insurance."

Uh. No. Section 230 says that Cox won't be treated as the publisher. That doesn't help it with the copyright issues, which are governed by Section 512 of the Copyright Act (the DMCA). Under Section 512, an ISP isn't liable for the activities of its users if it implements a policy for terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. The claims against Cox were that Cox didn't actually implement that policy, so that liability shield (the "DMCA Safe Harbor") didn't apply to it.

(1) GOODs have an obligation to be fit for their intended use. If they're not, then that's either a warranty question or a products liability question. SERVICES, on the other hand, are governed by contract. And, in Google's terms of service for Google maps, they specifically disclaim this sort of liability.

(2) In any case, the suit is in negligence, not products liability. And, there they run into a problem because North Carolina is a contributory negligence state. This means that if the driver could have avoided the accident by acting prudently, then *even if Google breached its duty of care* the driver can't collect.

(3) the "You were told about this multiple times" argument doesn't really go that far. Google can't change something just because it's gotten multiple reports. If it did, then you could easily see a group of teenage pranksters reporting things that just weren't true. And, it's not like they have somebody actually reviewing every image taken with Google Street view.

(4) One thing going against the driver is that it's been 9 years. If it really were the case that a reasonably prudent driver wouldn't have noticed, then you would have expected somebody else to have done the same thing in the previous 9 years.

> Everyone has a foot

Exactly. And, not only does everybody have a foot, they have a foot with them ALL THE TIME. People use body-based measurements largely because of convenience, not because of accuracy.

Last week, I had to check to see if a washing machine would fit through a doorway. I put one hand on each side of the washing machine, stepped back, holding my hands in place, then stepped up to the door and compared where my hands were with the width of the door. That's a body-based measurement. I could have used a tape measure, but the extra benefit in accuracy wasn't worth the time in finding the tape measure.

You don't even need to get to fair use. Copyright protects a set of exclusive rights: the right to copy, to prepare derivative works, to distribute and to display publicly. If you're not doing one of those, then you're not infringing. Further, copyright only protects *expression* -- the underlying *ideas* are not protected. Derivative works are things like translations, screenplays, and so on. ChatGPT isn't doing that, AND it's not re-using the original expression.

That's sort of the popular narrative, but it's not really a great explanation. The underlying costs of college have increased far faster than the inflation rate. There are a few reasons for this: (1) college is labor-intensive, and the cost of labor has increased faster than the inflation rate, (2) colleges have had a large run-up in the number of administrators, further increasing costs, (3) colleges have gone on an amenity-building spree, so the experience that today's students get is far nicer than what their boomer parents got.

Underlying those is the easy availability of student loans combined with having a 17-year-old student making a decision to borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Colleges have discovered that 17-year-old students are perfectly happy to borrow a lot of money to buy a great college experience.

Yes, it's true that US states tend to subsidize a smaller portion of college costs than they used to. But, we've seen the price run-up both in public AND private schools. And, those private schools never had the government subsidies.

Consider what would happen if the Department of Education were to say "If your annual tuition + mandatory costs is above $X, then we won't provide student loans for students at your school"? I'm guessing you'd see a mad rush of schools to get their tuition costs down below $X. They might cancel construction of a new student union, or get rid of a number of administrators, or even cancel less popular academic programs to do so. But, they'd get there. That's the sort of belt-tightening that every business does, but US universities have largely been protected from.

I love the implication that "Oh, that's fine, that's been in our terms of service for a year and nobody's complained" makes the idea any the less ridiculous. Know why nobody complained? Because nobody reads your terms of service. Terms don't stop being ridiculous just because nobody noticed them for a while.

Took a caribbean cruise in March -- the ship was half-full and I paid for the 'premium' internet, which was something like $100. Thanks (I suspect) to the limited number of people aboard, the internet worked fabulously -- I was even able to do some video calls, although the lag from bouncing off what I presume was a geosynchronous satellite was definitely noticeable.

Once upon a time, I would have absolutely been with you on getting away completely. But, that's unfortunately not the reality of my daily life -- I was happy to get by with just an hour or two of work per day.

Just a side point.... The "Generations" are each about 15 years. So, while there's obviously some overlap, the children of Boomers are generally Millennials, and the children of Gen X are generally Gen Z. (Although it's possible to have kids at age 15, most people wait about a decade longer.)

Recognize that the Boomers were the hippies -- they used to be referred to as the "Me Generation." And, you can see the Millennials as something of a reaction to the Boomers.

So, if you want to know what Gen Z is going to be like, look at how they react to their parents.

Ford raised wages mainly as an incentive to keep his own workers. The auto industry in Detroit at the time was crazy -- people would jump from company to company and just take unannounced vacations knowing that they could easily find a new job when they returned. Ford raises his wages above his competitors, making it costly for employees to jump ship or to get fired. He ended up getting more reliable employees, and was driven by his business needs, not a desire to help his workers.

From your article:
> Kreipke says there was chronic absenteeism and lots of worker turnover. So Ford gambled that higher wages would attract better, more reliable workers.
>
> "It was an absolute, total success," Kreipke says. "In fact, it was better than anybody had even thought."
>
> The benefits were almost immediate. Productivity surged, and the Ford Motor Co. doubled its profits in less than two years. Ford ended up calling it the best cost-cutting move he ever made.

The battle in universities over how to split a limited pie of money among departments has been going on for as long as there have been universities. And, each department jealously guards its budget and the number of professors in the department. Among other things, those are signs of the department's prestige, both in the university itself, and across universities. That's nothing new.

But, that desire runs into trouble when student interests in various majors don't remain constant. If there are 50% fewer majors in department X, should its budget or the number of X professorships remain constant? What about the budgets of the departments with increasing enrollments?

This is a common current problem at traditional liberal-arts universities. At the University of North Carolina, for example, the number of Computer Science majors has increased 10x in the last decade, but the number of CS professors has not kept up, leading to caps on enrollment. Undergraduate business at UNC has a similar problem. Meanwhile, enrollment in traditional "liberal arts" degrees has fallen dramatically. What do you do if you're the dean of, say, the History Department?

Part of the driving force behind that was a mess of grads coming out of college 7-15 years ago with massive student loan debts and an inability to pay them. So, students entering college started focusing on majors that they believed were high-paying. (Sometimes ignoring profitable majors, such as technical writing, in liberal arts departments.)

You tried to have them build that into the mortgage?

Every mortgage servicer I've ever had has allowed me to pay a little bit extra every month and devote it to principal. Of course, with mortgage rates where they are right now, there are probably better places to put that money.