While I agree in principle with this line of thinking, I do worry that this will just lead to platform fragmentation. My thinking is that if Spotify (or any other platform) gives in to one online mob then that will only encourage more future mobs. I imagine that there are numerous podcasts and artists that some group finds objectionable. E.g., I imagine many cultural conservative prudes find music with a lot of profanity to offend their sensibilities. Should Spotify start removing artists if such a mob forms and demands such an action?
The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.
I agree with you, but you’re describing a limitation of the free market.
Historically the press has dealt with this problem by taking a “lowest common denominator” approach to morality. Extreme prudishness.
For example, the infamous Hayes Code was intended to help movie producers deal with the fact that almost every American city had (different!) laws on what a movie could show.
I think the "platform fragmentation" argument might hold more water if we weren't discussing a podcast for which Spotify already has exclusive distribution rights.
I hope you know contracts usually have more than one line, include other terms, and may not go to the end of time.
For example, if Spotify stops paying Joe Rogan, they are unlikely to remain exclusive. Another example is that they may not have rights to remove episodes, or refuse to air episodes without loosing exclusivity or paying a penalty.
My point is that we don't know what the other terms are of the contract are.
You’re misunderstanding me. The contract is an exclusive contract. That may not be the case in perpetuity, but either way that contract today creates the “platform fragmentation” OP is talking about about.
> Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Where else can you get Joe Rogan's podcast, today?
Nowhere. That's fragmentation. Spotify literally signed the contract explicitly for this reason. So it doesn't make sense to start worrying about different content being available on different platforms now that people are removing their music in protest, rather than two years ago when they made his podcast exclusive in the first place.
Thank you for bearing with me. I guess I misunderstood your initial response. I thought you were arguing that fragmentation couldn't happen because services like Spotify have exclusivity contracts, not that it already happened!
Sure things are fragmented today, but that doesn't mean it cant be much worse. Today, most of the big catalogs have a ton of overlap. Exclusivity isn't the norm. If artists and services start drawing up into political camps, this overlap could significantly decrease.
I agree that Spotify has the legal right to stop distributing any content they find objectionable. Anyone arguing that Spotify’s action is a first amendment violation is simply wrong. A private entity, like Spotify, can decide what content to distribute at their own discretion. I don’t think many people are making this argument.
Instead, I think many of us are arguing that Spotify shouldn’t exercise that option just because of an outraged online mob. That includes those of us that aren’t particular fans of Rogan and wouldn’t be affected if we couldn’t consume his content anymore. Many of us are arguing that as a general principal; don’t give in to a short-lived and irrational angry mob.
I am arguing for Spotify and other content distributors to ignore angry mobs because I worry that eventually such a mob will come for something I do value. E.g., I listen to plenty of music that includes gratuitous levels of profanity. I imagine that such music greatly offends many people, chiefly culturally conservative prudes. Should such an online mob form and demand Spotify stop distributing some of my favorite music then I hope Spotify resists that mob.
Maybe one day I’ll even be a member of such a mob demanding that some platform stop distributing something that offends my sensibilities. While my emotions of hate and outrage may cloud my rational judgment, I hope the platform will have the courage to tell me and my compatriots to pound sand. If we don’t like the content, then we don’t have to consume it.
*Edited to fix a mistake as pointed out in a reply.
The difference in me (chiefly culturally conservative prude) and the liberal cancel culture is that I won’t try to silence someone’s choices based on my values. You may listen to whatever you want and I hope you get enjoyment out of it. I support your freedoms and a lot of good men have died to protect them.
The difference between you and the “cancel culture” is that you are a real person who exists, and “cancel culture” is an emergent phenomenon that happens on social media. People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams. There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.
I think we all know what he means. He means the liberal equivalent to the "socially conservative prude". Which certainly does exist.
(Also this is only tangentially related but why is being prude a bad thing? I had a female friend in high school that would get insulted for being too prude. I don't think people really realize the way these concepts get applied in reality. People are allowed to be prude just as they're allowed to be libertines.)
>There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.
There isn't? Are there not people calling for someone to be fired/resign because of some action they did?
It’s not the same people every time. People tend to want to out-outrage one another sometimes and it sometimes it leads certain people to call for boycotting/etc, and then sometimes those movements pick up steam as people try to be “early” to a given outrage cycle.
Nobody’s calling the shots here… nobody went and decided “aim the twitter outrage cannon at Joe Rogan, he ran afoul of the Cancel Culture and must atone.” It’s just a phenomenon that happens due to the tendency of humans on social media to amplify outrage rather than ignore it.
Every "liberal media outlet" I've seen tends to just regurgitate opinions they see on Twitter, so I don't really understand what "pushed" means in your context. It seems more like they're amplifying existing outrage than anything.
Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners? And I suppose fox gets its bias from listening to Joe Rogan?
> Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners?
That's not my claim. I'm claiming that if you actually watch CNN, they tend to literally put a camera to a big computer monitor and show you a bunch of people's tweets. I'm not talking about bias/etc here, I'm talking about how they literally feature tweets as part of their news coverage.
Of the typical stories on CNN that one would qualify as "cancel culture", they typically go something like: "<Celebrity A> said a controversial thing on Twitter! Let's take a look at some of the reactions..." etc etc. Their coverage seems to be focused on "what do the people think of X", all the damned time. Yes, this makes CNN quite useless as a news organization.
This is hilarious. Social conservatives invented cancel culture and used their influence to control the media we watched until very recently. Does no one remember the Dixie Chicks being made irrelevant because they critiqued Bush? No what happened is that the population is no longer majority conservative and the tools employed by them are now under the control of social liberals and they (you) can’t stand it.
Nice try though pretending history starts at some arbitrary line you can then use to critique. Conservatives are just getting a taste of their own medicine.
Well, that's a pretty poor example to use to try to make your point. The Dixie Chicks (a country music group with a socially conservative leaning fanbase) went to a foreign country and decided to shit on their president for whatever the early 2000's equivalence of 'woke points' was. Europe was wildly anti-Bush at the time, so I'm sure it played well over there.
Their American fanbase (yanno, the MASSIVE group of people that enabled the Dixie Chicks' success... it sure didn't come from European audiences) turned on them because their values were obviously different and I guess Natalie Maines couldn't grasp that.
I don't have any evidence, but I'm leaning towards thinking that the people calling for Joe Rogan's cancellation aren't his main fanbase. That's the common thread with today's "social liberal" influence on media- people that are complete non-consumers of whatever winds up in the crosshairs just go to fucking war nowadays against whatever they've decided is offensive.
> Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.
Not exactly “shitting” on him is it?
Anecdotally, I think joe Rogan has lost a TON of fans over the last few years. There is no better example of this than the joe rogan subreddit. It used to be a place for fans to gather, but now he regularly gets roasted and fairly criticized. And if you’ve actually watched the JRE over the last few years, his podcast has changed SIGNIFICANTLY (for the worse imo). There’s no better example of this than the clip from 2020 that was circulating this week, where he basically calls antivaxxers bozos.
He used to have a kooky, interesting perspective and I appreciated how he would approach topics with an open mind. Even if I didn’t agree with his guests, he’d ask decent questions and confront the egregious shit. He doesn’t do that anymore. His guests are just people that believe the same fringe, unsupported contrarian conspiracies.
It is a poor one, if the guys explanation is right. Joe Rogans fanbase is not turning on him. They understand that he will have guests that not everybody likes. I skip the episodes that I don't find interesting. The pressure is coming from the out side mob that has never listened a episode and going with the sound bites from multi hour episode.
American main stream news distribute fake new very often, but I don't see much uproar about that in the cancel culture circles.
Glenn Greenwald made a good video about. Breaking Points, Kyle Kulinski and Tim Pool has talked about this issue. CNN, MSNBC, etc. can say outright lies and nobody wants them to be cancelled. Instead they are being promoted on Youtube. Does "Horse dewormer" ring a bell or "Russia gate"? Both of them are lies period.
Writing off critics of Rogan as those who’ve never listened to him is dishonest and bad faith debating. I was a big Rogan fan prior to 2017 when his guest pool become predominantly right wing (as did his talking points.)
Cancel culture has been going on since humans lived in societies. It's strange to try to pin it on one political party, as if there was a time when humans didn't try to silence those they considered to spread dangerous ideas
I'm old enough to remember the Dixie Chicks being cancelled by conservertives for daring to question certain foreign policies concerning the middle east. Ofcourse, it wasn't called "Cancel Culture" then, it was good ol' fashioned patriotic boycott to get them off the airwaves.
The use of language in culture wars are fascinating, I really wish I studied deeply enough in the humanities to really grok it. To my laymen eyes, there are a lot of evolving shibboleths[1], and verbal (or mental) gymnastics to variably identify an activity subjectively based on where on the political spectrum the perpetrator (or poor victim). People are really insist the other side is completely unreasonable, and is to blame for engaging in the culture war.
1. e.g. cancel culture, BIPoC, woke-ism, gender pronouns, virtue-signaling, &tc
Joe Rogan is not being censored for his political beliefs. There are many conservative podcasts on Spotify. He is being censored for medical disinformation. If you've listened to JRE over the last 2 years, he regularly (a) disparages the research and conclusions of medical professionals and (b) presents his own anecdotal views as fact. It is not "I think COVID is X", it is "COVID is X". This is neither in the realm of opinion nor in the realm of politics. This is a debate on whose medical authority to trust.
I wish people would have the integrity to speak about the situation honestly.
Discussions with conservatives on issues like this inevitably result in every topic being badly grafted and transposed into a discussion on "left-wing culture". The issue-at-hand is rarely, if ever, the point. Reading conservative commentary on this issue, one would believe that he was banned from Spotify for stating that he believed that small government was preferable to big government. It's completely and utterly fucking disingenuous.
As others have pointed out, this isn't about COVID. That said, the notion that some topics cannot be discussed or cannot be discussed in a certain way is not only wrong, it is outrageous.
Yeah, the original post has no context, I assumed they were deleted due to pressure from Neil Young & co about COVID disinformation.
It appears that they were deleted instead due to his use of racial slurs. Which, I guess, is a "gotcha".
With your regards to your second point, I do not know what you are referencing. This goes back to my earlier point. Are you saying that it's outrageous that Spotify would remove podcasts containing racial slurs? Or have you pushed aside the topic-at-hand to discuss some social issue outside of this topic?
As mentioned none of the episodes were about covid for medical information. I major portion where conversations with other comedians that may have touched on culturally edgy topics. It's like they ran a transcript filter for words like Islam
Agree - 100%. There's guys who are payed money to yap all day --- a lot not totally but a lot --- of the talent they interview not Joe is what brings in the listeners --- and that's fine.
Now,
- venture into messing with kids
- screwing with public health
- racism
and ... what were you going to stand on? the serious respect you plowed being the "in guy" for the last 15 mins of fame talking BS? Nobody cares that much. I don't. You're in decline now or out. There's a built in and pre-understood fungibility to the whole business, which puts a smile on my face.
Whether it's Trump, the I-man, or Howard stern a lot of media people like them b/c the bring in viewers. And they are the first to toss them out when the line is crossed. I think Imus (I-man) of "Imus in the morning" learned that in a direct way. So let's not totally dismiss the platform behind the host even if Spotify is OK here.
Do you mean 'distributing' rather than 'disrupting'? [first line & paragraph].
I'm sure Spotify are under colossal pressure to delete historical perceived heretical 'content' on their platform in order to keep their paying customers calm during an unprecedented era of US anti free A1 speech and hysterical media driven witch hunts.
I also think their long term prospects, as societal fashions change and (I hope) reason prevails, will not be good as they will be associated with a very dark period in history. IBM survived this after WWII but it took a lot of PR and having the media on their side.
Agree that hopefully Spotify can resist calls to stop distributing content that other users find objectionable. As you point out, fashion will change and hopefully it does so in a way that shuns calls for censorship.
They aren't forcing any single property to be a duplex. Instead they are preventing a ban on allowing the property to be a duplex. The property owner can still choose to build a single family home at their discretion.
The comparable car example would be preventing a local ordnance that bans minivans. The car buyer can choose a car or minivan based on their discretion if such a ban is prevented. Some localities don't like minivans for whatever reason and would like to ban them, thereby forcing everyone to buy cars.
I worked at a company that migrated a 100 PB Hadoop cluster to GCP for assorted reasons despite many years of success with colocation. I wasn't involved in any of this, but the team's decision process makes sense. You can read through their decision making in these blog posts:
One big point was challenges of maintaining multiple colocation sites, with cross replication, for disaster recovery. Since Hadoop triple replicates all data within one DC, this requires 6 times the disk storage capacity of data size for dual DCs. In contrast, cloud object storage pricing includes replication within a region with very high availability such that storing once in cloud storage may be acceptable. Further, you also need double the compute, with one of the DCs always standing by should the other fail.
HDFS supports RS/XOR erasure coding which gives you same fault tolerance guarantees as 3x at much lower replication factor. This is essentially the same method aws/gcp use under the hood - there’s no magic involved here
Exactly! There are numerous applications where SQLite is replacing an ad hoc file-based solution, with nebulous at best durability and atomicity, let alone scalability. Like an application that would otherwise persist state in XML/JSON/protobuf and have to manage the challenges of regularly persisting and reading state; challenges with become unwieldly as the data size grows.
This is not a challenge commonly faced on on the enterprise server side, hence why many of us cannot imagine a use case for SQLite. Our workloads involve multiple readers/writers for both scaling and availability. An RDBMS cluster is the obvious choice.
But for mobile/embedded, all the data is local to a single device and commonly also a single process. In this case, an RDBMS would add unnecessary overhead. Additionally, there's desktop software that has to work with relatively large datasets, which require reliable persistence and efficient searching/reading. Adding an RDBMS would complicate installation and support.
Further, researchers and data analysts benefit from SQLite databases when the data is too large to hold in memory, yet not large enough to warrant a proper data warehouse. Even ~100 MB datasets can benefit from SQLite if you're performing a lot of random writes/reads or want to execute complex queries. There are other alternatives such as Apache Arrow, but SQLite is tried and tested option. It can be populated and queried similar to SQL-based data warehouses, and it also includes secondary indexes, an efficient query engine, and fast random writes with durability and atomic transactions.
There's a reason why SQLite can reputably claim to be the "Most Widely Deployed and Used Database Engine" with an estimated one trillion SQL database in use. [0]
There are also many use cases where a network service would use per-user SQLite files, which can support concurrent reads from multiple processes (but global write locks). If all processes accessing the file are on the same host, you can also enable a WAL but that has its own pros/cons.
Sqlite is a beast, there's a lot you can do with it. But there's no shared buffer cache or strategy for keeping disk pages in-memory across transactions and files, so you pay for it with random disk I/O access proportionate to your client load. But for many workloads, it's a really low-maintenance option with lots of low tech and effort back-up/disaster recovery options and depending on how chatty your clients are you can get a lot out of modern hardware/clouds.
You could also get clever, and provide pure in-memory access when pinning clients to hosts and treat it like a write-through cache.
As an investor in Miso Robotics[0], the company that makes Flippy, I'm quite excited by these developments. From what I've been reading about the kitchen automation industry, I believe we may be less than a decade away from fully autonomous restaurants. Basically, small buildings that are effectively made-to-order vending machines. Here's some background on the industry from an earlier comment of mine if anyone's interested in learning more.
There has been significant R&D investments in kitchen automation in the last decade and we're just starting to see the amazing results. As covered in Dec 2020 article, Future Restaurants Will Fit In A Shipping Container And Have No Humans In The Kitchen. [1]
> “Starting in the next two years, you’re going to see an explosion of really high quality, small footprint delivery kiosks — think high quality vending machines, kind of express menus,” Miso Robotics co-founder Buck Jordan told me recently on the TechFirst podcast.
> “But then I think around year five or seven, you’re going to start seeing a lot of … all new-build kitchens being completely reinvented, fully autonomous, no humans in the back of house, 25% the square footage, probably fits in a shipping container, completely changing the entire industry and potentially disrupting the franchise model.”
> “The future’s already here,” he says. “We have standalone machines that can cook a pizza in less than three minutes from scratch. We have automated Boba tea bars hitting the scene. And all these things just make it easier for customers to get low-touch food options faster and close to home.”
White Castle has been experimenting with this tech and in October 2020, announced that they would roll out the robotic fry cook to 10 new locations. [2] See [3] for a short video, showing the robot in action. There is also the Creator restaurant in San Francisco, which has a fully automated burger chef. [4,5]
Amazon Go has already solved the problem of automating retail. [6] As a customer, you don't interact with any employees. You scan in with your app as you enter, cameras automatically detect the items you select, and it charges your account when you exit. Go stores still have employees, including people stocking the shelves and someone available to help people as needed. Nonetheless, they still require fewer employees and can therefore offer lower costs.
I used to frequent two of the Go stores when I lived in San Francisco. They are incredibly convenient and offer the highest value in terms of value for cost. Quite hopeful that they'll expand out to my current city soon.
Getting people out of this menial work will drop costs to consumers, while improving consistency, quality, and cleanliness. I can hardly wait for what this sector will look like in just a decade.
In this attempt, I hope the organizers take the time to listen to many workers to understand their employment concerns as well as concerns with unionization. In the previous attempt, I found their website sorely lacking in specific demands, https://bamazonunion.org
The messaging seemed to be generic arguments in favor of unions combined with some general Amazon and Bezos criticisms. Even reading through the linked reports, didn't seem to provide a particularly convincing argument. E.g., they begin their concerns about workplace safety with
> The report notes that between 2013 and the time of publication earlier this year, seven workers had died at Amazon facilities. According to the report, two were crushed by forklifts in the warehouses, one was run over by a truck, one was killed by a driver in its parking lot, one suffered a fatal heart-related event during an overnight shift, one was dragged and crushed by a conveyor belt, and one was killed and crushed by a pallet loader. Two more Amazon workers were killed just weeks ago when a warehouse in Maryland partially collapsed during a storm.
While workplace deaths are certainly concerning, nine deaths in eight years for a workforce that is now up to 876,000 workers [0] suggests these deaths are exceedingly rare and may not be something most workers are thinking about. Further, there’s already OSHA requirements for workplace safety and I’d imagine all firms, including Amazon, want to avoid worker deaths and will make the necessary changes.
I think a union will need to address the specific demands of the workers they will be representing rather than generic arguments for unionization. Further, Amazon may be a particularly challenging workplace to organize since they already pay exceedingly well for unskilled labor, with a starting minimum rate of $15/hour and surprisingly good health benefits. [1] For many workers, Amazon may be the best job they’ve ever had and these workers may be concerned about risking the situation.
This includes risks like Amazon shutting down a unionized warehouse, which should be illegal, but there are workarounds. More likely, Amazon would just not grow a unionized warehouse and instead grow nearby ones to control labor costs. This would include building new warehouses if necessary.
Amazon may also be particularly aggressive in automation investments for a unionized warehouse, which would allow them to justify layoffs for redundant workers. Some analysts have even proposed that Amazon may be able to have “dark warehouses” (i.e., warehouses that keep the lights off) with full automation within 10 years. [2] Union concerns may lead them to invest even more aggressively in automation tech.
In general, I want to see workers' concerns addressed at all firms, and unionizing may be the best approach for this Amazon warehouse, but I think this will be challenging and will require organizers to put a lot of thought into the specific demands that the majority of workers want.
I think this could be solved by including randomization. E.g., if the top schools currently take the top 5% of students by test score, then they could instead consider the top 25% of students and select 20% of them through a lottery. In that case there is still value to performing well on the test, but you can't singularly focus on success through testing well.
Students and their parents would need to plan out a career path assuming they don't get into the best schools. They could still spend time and money on education and personal development, but it wouldn't be singularly directed at test prep. Instead, there'd be more focus on developing the foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and diligent habits that promote career success.
The societal benefits of maintaining fairness in opportunities to move up the economic ladder (speaking about India here) far outweighs other criteria. While one could argue that access to coaching institutes creates an unfair barrier on its own, in practice coaching institutes often teach good students of lesser means for free (because they can advertise their results and good results attract more students to coaching institutes).
These top colleges (in India) are literally a pathway to economic betterment of extended families as they're very affordable (lower income families essentially pay no fees), reasonably good and pretty much guarantee an upper middle class exit. I think introducing any shade of unfairness into this process even if it reflects underlying unfairness of life will damage soceital cohesion.
Source: studied in these colleges and know personally several classmates of very modest means whose extended families benefited from their success. Also personally know a few people in China who have equivalent stories.
The focus of those seeking to help kids is on completely the wrong things. The solution doesn't really lie in optimising the coaching exam system - sure it can be improved but the leverage of outcome is very low - but rather in the larger economy. We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system. This would do more to ease the pressure on kids and families than any regulation on the coaching industry would.
> We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system.
We need these things for good reasons, but the skill premium is here to stay. Both in the West and even more so (because differences are so vast, and redistributing incomes is not exactly feasible) in developing countries like China and India.
Came to suggest this. Has a variety of applications.
And as you point out, if it's all or nothing, or massively increasing returns then the people near the cutoff/bend in the curve fight like hell to stay on the right side of the line instead of rebalancing the incentives.
Basically turns education into a lottery where everyone spends lots of money to buy a lot of tickets because there's no sensible alternative. So appropriate that one of the solutions is to run an actual lottery that you can't buy more tickets for.
Banning tuition seems like a surprisingly far-sighted move, wonder what else they'll come up with and how it'll work out.
I disagree. Banning tuition is a very stupid move. All they did was to deprive poorer kids from accessing these facilities. The families of kids with resources are going to find a way to subvert the ban anyway.
I was surprised by that also. Here's what I found and shared in an earlier comment in this submission.
I asked a friend who has a CPA, but doesn't work in tax law. Their first comment after briefly scanning the legal code is that "disqualified person" is only used within the context of "prohibited transaction". The definition of "prohibited transaction" concerning "disqualified person" doesn't seem to address this case. Instead, it seems to focus on dealing with the Roth IRA assets in a manner to benefits ones accounts outside of the Roth.
> "However, if someone establishes a self-directed IRA with the aim to invest IRA dollars into a small private held business that they control or own – such that the business entity, and/or their role in the business, can cause it to be a disqualified person – there is a risk that allocating IRA dollars to own that business can cause the IRA itself to become disqualified (and treated as fully distributed as a taxable event). After all, if the IRA puts money into the business, and the business then uses that money to pay a salary to the IRA owner (as an officer of the business), the IRA owner has effectively used the assets of the IRA to enrich themselves."
That addresses the self-dealing part of a transaction like this that would be a common-sense red flag. This is all clear as mud; I'm definitely confused enough that I'll be asking my CPA for a recommendation.
I was surprised by that also and asked a friend who has a CPA, but doesn't work in tax law. Their first comment after briefly scanning the legal code is that "disqualified person" is only used within the context of "prohibited transaction". The definition of "prohibited transaction" concerning "disqualified person" doesn't seem to address this case. Instead, it seems to focus on dealing with the Roth IRA assets in a manner to benefits ones accounts outside of the Roth.
I don't know if that's a distinction with a difference. The rules are that they don't want you investing in a business you have material control over, as part of your IRA. Maybe it's because they think it's too risky, or can lead to self-dealing abuses...or $5 Billion tax loopholes.
The guidance they give you may be helpful
Department of Labor (DOL) Advisory Opinions suggest that under the following circumstances, a prohibited transaction would likely occur:
The transaction is part of an agreement by which an IRA owner causes IRA assets to be used in a manner designed to benefit the IRA owner (or any person in which the IRA owner has an interest) such that it would affect the exercise of the IRA owner's best judgment as an IRA fiduciary.
The IRA owner receives or will receive compensation from the subject company.
By the terms or nature of the transaction, a conflict of interest exists between the IRA and the IRA owner (or persons in which the IRA owner has an interest).
The IRA owner will be relying upon or otherwise be dependent upon the IRA investment in order for the IRA owner (or persons in which the IRA owner has an interest) to undertake or to continue the investment (e.g., minimum investment to be satisfied jointly by the IRA and IRA owner).
The end result is that a content distribution platform will have to curate a specific brand that targets specific consumers and only distributes conforming content. Whereas we currently have a half dozen or so music streaming services that all have roughly the same content, we’ll soon find content fragmented across 20 different platforms; each corresponding to a specific slice of consumer preferences. Many of us will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the content we seek and will not be able to mix content. E.g., many of my current playlists on Spotify would be split across several disjoint streaming platforms.
Instead, I think platforms should never be reactive in calls for dropping content. Instead they should have a general principle of broadly distributing all but the most extreme fringe content. They can regularly update their principles used in determining what content they distribute, but that should never be done as a quick reaction to some mob. Otherwise they’ll constantly be facing a series of outraged customers that want the platform to stop distributing some content that those outraged user’s don’t even consume. And I believe that will only result in platform fragmentation as distributors curate a brand around specific segments of consumers.