I had no idea he's an animator, that's so cool! In that video he says "Lightwave is so deep, I won't live long enough to see everything that's in it". I'm glad he's proven wrong there!
I know his son Barry. He said his first memory he has was his Dad doing real time drawings for people telling stories. He was behind the story teller on stage on giant pads of paper as a comedy bit at night clubs.
He also remembers having giant bags of toys dumped on the floor of the hotel rooms.
Many A-listers are polymaths. For example, Phil Hartman, used to be Phil Hartmann (extra "n"), and designed some of the most iconic album covers of the 1970s, and Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there. It used to be part of his standup bit.
Dick Van Dyke came from the tail end of Vaudeville, where performers had to have a whole variety of skills.
Remember: Every one of these folks that hits the limelight, beat out thousands of others.
We think our vocation is competitive? Showbiz says "Hold my beer."
Just looked it up and saw he did an album cover for Steely Dan. It reminded me that Chevy Chase was an early drummer for Steely Dan (well, before they became "Steely Dan")
Hedy Lamarr was a prolific inventor. Among other things, she developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique for torpedo guidance and donated the patent to the US Navy during WW2.
> Steve Martin is one of the best banjo players out there
And he’s great with a lasso!
I love his albums with Edie Brickell, he’s good with Steep Canyon Rangers, and more recently have heard him shine with Alison Brown (banjo), Sierra Hull (mandolin), and others in his latest tour.
If you’re looking for the top banjo players technically, you might check out Béla Fleck, Jens Kruger, Noam Pikelny, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, Don Reno, and Earl Scruggs. I’ve personally heard superhuman performances by Jens Kruger in-person and I grew up on Scruggs.
It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop offering a lucrative product that people buy because they're bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly inconvenience people at no cost to you?
> which make zero financial sense for the consumer
Not in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year.
For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.
I don't think they'd work out if everyone used them. It's essentially companies paying for your shopping data. But a) they overpay to incentivise you, b) I'm buying the same boring things on rotation so it's close to useless to them.
Wouldn’t work for money laundering. As far as AML regs (and banks) are concerned a small business is indistinguishable from a personal retail account. This makes sense from a business point of view because a lot of small businesses are just one guy, and small business owners tend to mix their personal finance with their business finance. From an AML point of view, a lot, perhaps most money laundering is done with registered business entities. It’s easier to create a numbered corporation than a whole person.
I'm sure they're not all scammers, but what's the upside to the consumer? Why not just give the money directly? Seems to me like all the upside is on the company, and all the risk is on the user.
In some countries, where people receive conditioned social security benefits, just sending the money via bank account will have disadvantages (at worst the next sum from social security is lowered 1:1 by the money received and they try to keep it that way). So, if you do not meet the gift receiver in person and do not trust the postal service with cash, a gift card can be a solution.
The theory is that if you give someone cash, they're just going to put it in the bank or buy gas with it, but if you give them gift card to e.g. a game store then they're going to buy a game, without you having to know which game they want.
It's the same premise as buying someone any gift instead of just giving them the money so they can buy whatever they want.
Arguably, they'll be happier with the video game than with a tank of gas, which you've ensured they'll choose by not giving them the cash
Edit to add: kids often don't have bank accounts, i mostly received gift cards as a child, from relatives who wouldn't want to mail cash and couldn't give me cash in person. On a dark note, giving a kid a gift card to a toy store makes it harder for the parents to steal it for themselves.
The whole practice originates from "gift certificates" where you'd maybe go to your favorite spa and get a gift certificate to give someone, so that the spa treatment is the gift you're giving, but the recipient redeems it whenever they want. That just got abstracted to non-service gifts as well, with the same idea ("treat yourself to a new video game, whichever and whenever you feel like it" -- that's the gift, facilitated by the card)
Also for kids at least, sometimes they really will be happier with less choice. Sometimes kids make bad decisions and limiting choice to good options is helpful.
Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we don’t let him buy in game currency for any the games that we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards incredibly popular gifts.
I joke that a $100 gift card is an "inferior $100 bill", because you can spend the bill anywhere, but the gift card only in one place. People give them as gifts because it shows marginally more effort than just giving cash.
That's backwards. The company treats the GC as a liability. It cannot recognize the funds as revenue until they are spent. This is GAAP and law (but see exception below).
GCs are valuable to brands because they are marketing tools. Recipients are prompted to go to the merchant to spend money, and they usually spend about 40% more than the face value of the card.
Also, GCs are valuable to merchants for breakage. This is when a card (or partial balance) goes unused. Starbucks, as an imperfect example, recognizes about 10% of their total outstanding GC balance as revenue every year, due to breakage. This amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars.
But all those GC funds sit in investment accounts until they are used. It's genuinely profitable to have millions in unredeemed gift cards (and mobile app dollars) sitting around unused.
I've never had my $100 GC be worth $104 a year later, but for the issuer it is. They just keep the $4.
Sorry I was not aware of GAAP. Anyways, I think the primary benefit is the interest-free financing. The company gets to hold the customer's cash and use it for operations (working capital) for the entire time the gift card is unspent. Maybe I was not right with the account terminology and should have mentioned the cash flow positive impact only.
It's a combination of things: marketing (difficult to quantify, but > 0), interest/appreciation on the float (4-10% annually), forecasted overspend (30-40%), and breakage (5-10%).
The GC face value is a liability on the books though. It's treated as debt when doing cash calculations.
They actually do want you to use the cards though. The overspend is more valuable to them than the other disposition possibilities. Recognized revenue is always the best outcome. The interest/appreciation is the same for the merchant, whether on float or on revenue, but revenue is better for reports.
More broadly: All benefits of the cards definitely accrue to the merchant. There's absolutely nothing valuable to consumers about the deal!
Well yes, obviously, and the company doesn't have to pay anything for the cost of locking you out of all your work files forever and costing you however much, so it's all upside for them.
If they had to reimburse you for the cost of all your lost files, then we'd see the real impact on finances.
One practical reason gift cards exist is tax treatment. In the UK, small non-cash gifts to employees can be tax-free under the “trivial benefits” rules (each under £50, not cash or cash-equivalent). For owner-managed companies, directors have a £300 annual cap across such benefits. Cash or cash-redeemable vouchers don’t qualify and are taxed like salary.
I came here to be dismissive ("power is power, what's the big deal?"), but this is a legitimately useful guide on how to fake a battery. Thanks for this.
Having your stuff in it already, it's always available immediately (for you), not needing to worry as much about getting it dirty at the beach or with a dog, going to remote places where calling a Waymo may be infeasible or would take a really long time. Probably also cheaper if you drive really frequently.
I don't know you or your situation, but many people (including the idealized version of Rivian's target market) like going places that Waymo currently doesn't. There's also tradeoffs with cost, wait time, # of passengers, cargo, etc. Some people may also want to automate "boring" driving while still having the option to do "fun" driving
My cars are more than just transportation. They're mobile storage lockers where I can keep my stuff reasonably secure. They're a place to sit warm and dry while I wait for something else. They're (semi) private changing rooms where I can put on my cycling kit. Regardless of who does the driving I'll never give up owning (or at least leasing) my own private cars.
> pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc.
If you use a car you are paying for those costs. There is no getting around it. If you uber it is indirect, but part of your costs per ride is going to those things. Renting a car gets someone else to do them - but you are paying them to do that somehow. (self driving make trade parking for gas where parking is expensive, so in the densits areas this can make sense, but only because the car is driving empty out to the suburbs in the morning and empty back into the city in the evening - so it increases traffic)
If you own your car you can choose to not keep it clean. The rental will not allow that choice and so you pay for it.
It won't be much if any difference. Rush hour is when most people are trying to get around. Worse, they are all trying to get to the same place, so if you are thinking two trips downtown - that means there is an unoccupied trip back out to the suburbs every morning (and again in the evening) - perhaps more if we are also parking in the suburbs where parking is cheap (though this is probably offset by the cost of parking downtown)
This is better solved by leveraging more traditional forms of transportation. Making biking, walking, and various forms of transit easier, safer, and more effective. Cars, whether self-driving or not, are in direct opposition to this.
I'm sure they could be useful to folks that have the specific use-case for it, but the vast vast majority of trips in a person's day-to-day are better solved by robust multi-modal options and public transit. The benefit there is that less drivers means that traffic is actually better for everyone.
I actually see this as a benefit! Cars take up a lot of space and so now there exists massive right of ways that can be used and modified for other transit modes. Take a lane away from personal cars and dedicate it to buses so they can run faster and avoid traffic. Remove some street parking spots and create a protected bike lane or a street market or something else. The extra space can be a huge boon. It’s pavement, basically a blank canvas imo.
I'm certainly no expert, but if my memory serves me correctly from cases that have hit the media, the carve outs are more broadly applicable than just to sex (e.g. intimate images between partners). But I could certainly be wrong!
(I didn't really want to start looking up the exact details of this topic while at work, so just went from memory. At the very least, the terminology "Romeo & Juliet Law" should give the original commenter enough to base a search on)
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