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k_sh

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I've always taken "public ownership" to imply "publicly-traded company", which means John Q. Public can call up his broker and buy some shares in the company.

This in contrast to privately-held companies, which can and do have many owners, but whose owners are acquired through partnership, investment, key employees within the company, and M&A - but not through the sale of securities.

It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest

Not in a direct sense - but civil asset forfeiture and arrest/citation quotas do incentivize individual officers to take actions that benefit their department's budget and their annual review, respectively.

It's not like we [...] pay the prison $500/night per inmate

In the case of private prisons (which house 8% of the US prison population[0]), a per-prisoner stipend is the most popular[1] business model.

The government quite literally pays the prison company a fixed dollar amount per inmate-night, which the company then turns a profit on.

[0] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/comparing_correc...

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062215/busin...

AI doesn't solve the underlying issue that made ketamine depression treatment expensive: intellectual property rights on a particular molecule.

If a company achieved AI that can identify effective alternatives, why wouldn't they just acquire the patents for all of those alternatives and prop up all the prices?

Follow-through.

Google is infamous for this sequence of events, time and time again:

1. We made this great new thing that's gonna change the way you verb! Hope you enjoy it!

2. (1-5 years of product stagnation)

3. Hey, thanks for the all the good times. We're closing the thing at the end of the year.

Amazon (for all their warts) is much more adept at keeping customer experience in their crosshairs.

Babel (specifically, babel-preset-env, which I assume you're referring to) only ensures that your code's syntax can run within a given browser. It doesn't make sure all the web APIs and browser features you take advantage of are compatible, or that they produce the same result.

Giving someone 0-day notice and physically escorting them out of the company is simply unacceptable.

This is a pretty common practice, especially when dismissing employees that work with sensitive information (e.g. architecting trade secrets), or work in public-facing positions (e.g. spokesperson or PR). It avoids the risks found in the question of "what will this person do when they know they're on their way out?".

You're describing theft. Bird didn't abandon their scooter, they know where it is and intended for it to be there.

As noted in another thread here, something being left on the street doesn't mean it's legally abandoned, whether it's a car, a wallet, or an electric scooter.

Most jurisdictions require the (former) owner to intentionally relinquish ownership in order for something to be considered abandoned.

Wellbutrin (bupropion hcl) is FDA approved as a smoking-cessation aid.

I took it for a year or so (though not for smoking cessation), if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them! Email in profile.

If roads were 20x wider, 68% of LA County would be streets.

Sure, turning two-thirds of a city into roads will cut down on traffic - but within realistic restraints on road construction, induced demand is real.

(There are 140mi^2 of roads now[0], and 4,058mi^2 of land mass[1].)

[0] https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/30/9895842/how-much-parking-lo... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County,_California

This would be illegal in some (most?) places - labor laws ban employers from clawing back pay for almost any reasons.

In California, for example, you can't even dock someone's final paycheck if they fail to return a uniform - if someone worked the time to earn a wage and you don't pay them in full, you're going to find yourself in court.