The class was led by Norfolk County's pension fund but seems to include a much wider range of investors:
> The claimants in this case were all investors who had bought shares between November 2018 and January 2019.
And the EU fines in the Spotify related case were just a bit under 1.8 billion euros / $2 billion, so still significantly larger but indeed an interesting comparison point.
I could have sworn I've been to a place that does the letter flipping, but I might be misremembering. And yeah, lots of places where that wouldn't be legal.
I was trying to think of this as well. I think recently there's the great example of NFTs, but in 1998, I think that was around the era Beanie Babies collapsed in part from the speculation/collectible editions and maybe the Baseball Card collapse in the late 90s?
And maybe in general, at that point, a lot of limited editions existed but were somewhat tacky and obvious, versus naturally limited or collectible items. But I do think around this time we saw a few collectible items go overboard in trying to push the phenomena as far as it could go.
A lot of things about Zelda's plotting clicked for me in a new way when I read about how the directors were inspired by Twin Peaks and just surreal little characters and moments:
My pet conspiracy theory, of which there is sadly ample contrary evidence, is that the Zelda universe was supposed to be more like the Bond universe, where it just kind of reboots and picks and chooses its continuity rather than the convoluted branching of time, which I think doesn't add anything to it.
If you're interested in this area, Lean Startup (book or general resources from that area) might be helpful. One example from the [Wikipedia Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup):
> As an example, Ries noted that Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn wanted to test the hypothesis that customers were ready and willing to buy shoes online. Instead of building a website and a large database of footwear, Swinmurn approached local shoe stores, took pictures of their inventory, posted the pictures online, bought the shoes from the stores at full price after he'd made a sale, and then shipped them directly to customers. Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business based on the model of selling shoes online.
We also definitely did it in the early days of my non-profit — we wanted to build a very optimized public records submission platform that handled mail, fax, etc., but in our early days I literally hand delivered records requests, which was super helpful from learning but at $2 per request was a huge money-not-maker.
Where I live onselling is illegal, but it is still a pretty common practice for small online retailers to just not stock some items and go buy them at retail when it's ordered. It makes a little bit of sense, since it lets you expand your catalogue without keeping stock on hand or negotiating a supplier. For a small ecomm store, that can mean the difference between looking like a legitimate retailer a customer can trust or not.
This is different to the practice of buying up stock on sale and reselling on marketplaces.
> We also definitely did it in the early days of my non-profit
We are in Phase One testing of our NPO flagship.
It has been designed as a native Swift iOS-only app (but the backend will feed anything).
It also has a few design "tricks" that probably won't scale to millions, but has been tested with tens of thousands (of fake users). They make it lightning fast, and it will be a sad day, if I have to sideline them, in the future.
We sign up users manually, one at a time. I'm developing a dashboard, to lubricate that process, but it will still be manual.
Fortunately (for us, but many for-profits would hate it), I think it will be a long time, before we get to the point where matters of scale become an issue. We Serve a small, demanding, demographic.
Also, we don't collect PID. Extreme privacy and security are a big part of our model. I deliberately avoid a lot of the dependencies that could introduce issues.
> [EDIT] Heh. I find it absolutely fascinating that this post, describing our own small, non-threatening, NPO app, has already earned a ding.
There's a barrier to being able to downvote, but the only downvotes I actually see on HN seem like they're given in bad faith. I'd love an option to turn off displaying downvoting at all since it's never useful to me; from my perspective random comments just fade off a page, usually in the middle of a thread.
If I had to guess, you're being dinged because this is your only contribution to the conversation about doing things that don't scale is: "We sign up users manually, one at a time."
Actually, I suspect it might be because the original version mentioned that the way we do things was not going to be popular with profit-seekers. Its tone was a bit petty, and I removed it.
Otherwise, it is absolutely relevant to the topic at hand. I described:
1) Native iOS-only (not something that will necessarily scale. A large part of our demographic uses Android, and I am regretful that we don't Serve them, but I don't write Android, and don't want to use a hybrid system or PWA)
2) Uses "tricks" to improve performance (I mention these may not scale into the millions. An example is loading a fast list of minimal info on all the users on the system, so we don't have to do realtime searches)
3) We do sign up users manually (BTW: lots of other posts, here, say pretty much exactly the same thing).
But it could also be because I mention that we don't collect PID, and that I eschew dependencies. These postures don't play so well, in today's tech industry. Dependencies are how to scale, but they can also add risk; sometimes, big risk. If we screw up our data, it could put people's lives, careers, and families, in actual, physical danger, so we're kinda anal about that.
But our app will be great. It absolutely Serves its users well, and we're already getting a great deal of positive feedback (We've only been testing since Monday). My main concern is that we may have to scale sooner than I expected.
I won't announce it here, as the very last thing it needs, is thousands of curious geeks, registering one-time-use throwaway accounts. Like I said, each signup is vetted manually, by, like, two of us.
If you are truly interested in what it will be for, feel free to get to me, offline.
As someone who really appreciates the lessons learned in Lean Startup, kinda breaks my heart to know Ries had a heavy hand in the creation of R E S I S T bot. Hard to appreciate the art once you know the artist.
Just as an informational point, it's generally highly discouraged for foundations or non-profits to have board members (the ones that have the legal control) take a salary as it creates a conflict of interest that's hard to work out of. So if you help found a non-profit, raise money, and then want to do it full time, a lot of times you'll invariably lose control — and there's good governance reasons for that, but it definitely matters who the board ends up being.
If you're living off the land IRL, you forage and take what nature gives you, and it's important to recognize safe plants, fungi, etc. you can use because you can't go shopping.
In cybersecurity, the concept is that it's easier to go undetected or just get things done if you're a hacker if you can use apps that are already installed on the system versus installing new systems, which will often raise red flags or be locked down. So you learning to see if target system already has GroupChatApp installed and if so, it lets you escalate permissions in a way that otherwise you couldn't do.
A few folks have talked about digitizing paper documents, so one of my favorite tricks for iPhone havers:
iPhones have very nice scanning tools built in, but it’s buried in the Notes app. Create a new note, click the camera icon, then “scan documents” and it will create a very nice, usually well cropped and OCRd scan that’s saved as a PDF you can then export elsewhere. Wish it was a standalone app because it works so well, and this is from someone who helps digitize and preserve paper documents for a living.
one problem I've found with notes is that they don't appear to have any kind of export mechanism - i.e., you're tied to apple and that app. Is that right?
If you're a publisher, just the insurance for lawsuits like this can cost $10,000 to $20,000 at the low end, and even if there's little merit to the case the litigation costs can easily go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if a few things don't break your way.
If your case gets the right publicity at the right time, there's a number of groups that might be a fit for pro bono assistance (I've personally benefitted from just that in at least three cases), but counting on that is a huge gamble and, even if the case is thrown out, then spikes your insurance costs down the road.
There are non-profits and foundations that help with supporting folks, but they have to be very selective — if one case can cost $250,000 in legal expenses, and those costs can go into the million+ range with appeals etc (let alone a loss), even very deep pockets can quickly run dry.
And to make matters worse, one person shared that a lot of lawyers that sue in this law actually look for folks that have insurance policies, and then just ask for whatever the max of the policy is, so the advice is don't bother with a $2 million policy vs. $1 million because they'll just double the ask.
Yes, in some cases you can try to recoup legal expenses, but that often involves more years of being tangled in litigation, more legal bills, and more uncertainty.
I think the focus on federation is to encourage small, decentralized and communally operated sites that play well with the broader fediverse. I can see that working well for a lot of book communities!
Also, spent a bit of time a few weeks ago and it already seemed to have the nicest UX of the open social book services, at least that I could see (would love recs - mostly interested in a personal tracker).
Well, that's a license I've never seen before! This makes it entirely unpractical for any company to host a server, which is an... interesting approach.
I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed to host a book reading website, though. I guess this was written as some kind of anti-government protest.
> The claimants in this case were all investors who had bought shares between November 2018 and January 2019.
And the EU fines in the Spotify related case were just a bit under 1.8 billion euros / $2 billion, so still significantly larger but indeed an interesting comparison point.