Yeah. Prop 13 massively depresses housing turnover and reduces property tax revenue, which means they need to collect more from income tax. Malcom Gladwell's excellent podcast on golf courses has a great discussion of this.
The question isn't who gets their money back, the question is who has to pay and/or take on the risk. In 2008, the banks were largely bailed out by taxpayers. In this case the hacker 'paid' because what they held was no longer recognized as ETH.
Even then, the hacker didn't lose anything. He might have a legal argument that he has been unjustly deprived of his wealth, but the legal system isn't generally available to criminals. Also, there's an alternative timeline where ETH fails because of this breach of trust, ETC takes off, and the hacker gets rich. But since the value creating developers supported to forked chain, that's where the value went.
I am not 100% certain that the hacker did anything illegal. As I understand it he exploited a loophole in the contract, that has been going on since contracts have existed and is not illegal in itself.
For me, this is the most interesting question. I suspect this was illegal, though. CFAA is pretty broad for exactly this reason -- the effect and intent, not the vector -- is what matters.
Why would the CFAA[1] apply? I don't think US law is the governing law for everything that happens on the Internet (though they'd probably love that...).
You mean jurisdictionally? E.g. if the hacker was located in the US, or in one of the many, many countries with an extradition agreement since some of those distributed computations almost certainly occurred in the us. Or in one of the many, many countries whose hacking laws are explicitly modeled on cfaa...
It's a pretty grey area. I'm not sure they did either, but my guess is that they want to find out for sure by approaching the court system. Would definitely be an interesting conversation with their lawyer.
Fulfillment is a hard thing to quantify. Maybe unemployed people feel bad because they aren't doing anything, or maybe they feel bad because there is nothing for an unemployed person to do when everyone is working. Maybe they feel bad because other people make them feel bad for being unemployed, through their pity or indifference or even well meaning attempts to help.
You are completely right that it sucks to not have a job, but its possible that's a reflection of how social life is structured and not some biological Protestant work ethic. Right now "I work at X company" is shorthand for "I am a a productive member of society". That certainly benefits companies and certain types of people. But it's not the only imaginable value system. And I suspect that people who feel valuable are a lot less likely to find solace in bottle of pills.
Yes. This isn't Wall Street is bilking the common man. This is one side of Wall Street trying to squeeze the other side, and appealing to the public to help their case. It's a tough market for big money right now. Opportunities are scarce and their customers are pushing down costs, so they're putting pressure on their suppliers.
Not really. It's still too hard to do from both a regulatory and technical standpoint. There is enough liquidity and infrastructure around BTC to be feasible, but the regulators squashed that idea.
Also ETFs are great, but they are not a panacea for every asset class. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons why they don't work, but the idea is so buzzy that you can make a buck off selling garbage and calling it an ETF. Reminds me of something...
I agree with you, this is all true in theory, but this definition also excludes non-dividend stocks that offer no governance controls. Like Snap, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. In addition, the move to buybacks in lieu of dividends in many companies changes the shareholder dynamics considerably. So does the fact that a ton of money is indexing these days.
The market has fundamentally changed. Graham was right, as proved by Buffett, but even Berkshire can't make Berkshire returns anymore. To make money in investing you have to be right when other people are wrong, otherwise the value is priced in. So speculation does have economic benefit, in that it serves to help find new value and fund boundary-pushing projects. It is VC with more liquidity and lower barriers to entry.
Sure, a lot of speculators will lose their shirt, but who cares? As long as they aren't over levered, the rest of society benefits from the fruits of their risk.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoile...