What happens if you make cost an inverse ranking factor?
Structure your ranking algorithm to allocate a proportionate share of traffic to french news sites, given relevancy to a query topic, and rank order publishers by negotiated cost?
Given there is SUBSTANTIAL value in a news publisher being sent traffic, in terms of advertising and circulation, the power law in search engine clicks should keep cost paid to a bare minimum.
Unless the French are going full dystopia and picking the winners within their own markets?
Amazon has sponsored a picking challenge for a few years now, but I'm not aware of this level of automation being deployed in production. The last I saw, a Kiva robot would bring a shelf of items to a human picker, who transferred an item from a bin to a box.
For an unsecured lender, this is basically the apocalypse. Let's do the math - numbers are US, but most of the major Western economies are going through some version of this.
- 30% household unemployment
- 90+ day shutdown of most retail / service businesses
- Implicit Mortgage and Rent holidays (no enforcement)
- Other household assets are tanking (stocks, real estate)
- Small business restart will be brutal, since the personal balance sheets & credit of owners are getting devastated
So... payment on unsecured loans... bwhahahahah. Speaking as a former banker, I'm guessing what - a 40% delinquency rate during Q2 and part of Q3? We're not just talking about the unemployed people - others have hours cut, money lost on investments, business slowdowns, etc.
Not to mention most of the population probably won't give a damm about you trashing their credit score at this point. What's the point? It's all crap now...
Oh wait... I haven't gotten to the best part. If a loan is 60 days delinquent, these guys have to buy it back per the terms of their deal. That's why they froze this thing...
At this point, it is a race between their cash reserves (what % they held back to support buybacks) and the unknown peak of a massive wave of 60 day delinquencies....
You're picturing it "too honest": there are allegations of misconduct which I am afraid (given the bad quality of the recent official posts) might be true, see for example:
Speaking as a publisher who has spent over $5000 on their platform over the past couple of years, TextBroker offers a very valuable service for people who are otherwise shut out of the job market. I took the time to get to know a few of my favorite writers.. here are their stories...
- Several are working in countries where they cannot get a work permit (cannot support themselves via legal means)
- I'm almost certain several of my writers have criminal convictions, which blocks you from most white collar jobs.
- Many of the rest are the victims of age discrimination, where hiring managers "just prefer" to hire younger people or decided that anyone "out of the workforce" a few years must surely be damaged goods.
If you can write passable text, Textbroker really doesn't care who you are. That's huge benefit, in terms of getting access to work and being able to put a gig on your resume.
By the way, they're not the only game in town. Another good option for US writers is Constant Content, which allows you to publish & market pieces in a "catalog" at higher rates. I'm a writer on that platform.
But since people are agitated about the money side, let's talk about that topic.
Are there higher paying freelance writer opportunities? Certainly. Take a look at Problogger or Media bistro. However, get ready to spend unpaid time pitching... and chasing people for payment. (so a bunch of unpaid hours and social stress from pitching, plus the risk of unpaid work)
Upwork is another option, although the competition can get pretty brutal. I've found I can buy content for less on Upwork than Textbroker. Too many people want the same gig. I tried applying to a few gigs as a specialist contractor and was blown out of the water on rates (50% - 80% below what I was asking for). I will say a few folks have found a way to make it work, usually for high end specialty roles.
Where TextBroker excels is as a dumping ground for unused time. Go chase higher paying gigs... and if you can't sell a full book of work, Textbroker gives you a way to recover some of the value of that time.
Also... there are some highly productive ($$/hour) writers on Textbroker. I worked with a few of them to assemble an article on how to level up your earnings at a content mill.
It walks through how to go from making minimum wage (as a entry level writer) to about $40 - $50 per hour (between productivity hacking, direct orders, and leveling up the quality rate). And shows you how to recycle your work to build your own websites as a longer term investment.
Is it my life plan? Nah, I'd rather go write software and do data science. But in case of emergency, that is most definitely something on my to-do list....
The part I really admire about TextBroker is the relative openness of their market for people who are otherwise not able to participate in the regular labor market. This includes:
- Unable to work a traditional 8 hour shift in person
- Travel / Visa restrictions
- Criminal Record
- Lack of "credentials"
- Socially Awkward / Interview Challenges
- Ageism / Lifestyle Discrimination
The latter is significant to me personally, since it became very apparent a few years ago that I was an "increasingly undesirable candidate" to many employers due to my age.
I'm medically handicapped. For me, it allows me to work whenever I can manage to get my act together and it means when I go through long periods of being unable to work, I haven't been fired. I've just not earned anything recently, but I can go right back to work.
I had an account with whatever became Upwork. I never made money on it because you have to pitch for an assignment and compete with others. On Textbroker, I just choose something I think I can write. Done.
The other platform also only allowed me to do up to five assignments per month with a free account. To access more, I would need to pay a fee.
I was homeless at the time and I worked very erratically. There is no fee to have an author account with Textbroker. There is no minimum I must work or anything like that.
The flexibility is critical to my ability to make my life work and having some earned income that has gradually improved over time helped me grow healthier and get back into housing.
I know there are other services. But I don't chase my pay and I don't have to negotiate for work or pitch myself and these are huge advantages for me that help make it make sense.
Edit: And that's why I say Textbroker is nominally low paid work. Because it cuts out so much of the unpaid hours freelancers typically spend pitching their work, chasing their pay and even working for free when they can't successfully get the pay they were promised.
If you count those unpaid hours, actual hourly wage is lower for many other avenues than their nominally higher pay rates suggest. Textbroker pays better than it seems to most people.
That's a critical detail and I never know how to really get that point through to people.
Kids can catch and transmit the virus to other household members; this was the main path through the community in a few flu models a while back (spread through daycare and the elementary schools first, then families, then everyone else).
Household transmission rate was about 15% in china. (so a 15% chance of infecting another member of your household).
I would LOVE to see a full population test sample... Would be expensive (probably need 5 K - 10 K tests for a significant read, most of which will likely be wasted on "likely healthy" members of the community... but would decisively settle this outstanding question of asymptomatic infection frequency.
The closest data point we have is likely that South Korean church, where I think they hunted down more or less every member and tested them... Doesn't give you a true view of asymptomatic presence in the general population but does provide a cue about relative size vs. known infected...
The scary part is the WHO mission were adamant that they failed to find a large number of asymptomatic/mild cases in the population at large, and they tested 300.000 people. I can't get this to match up with my other hunches, so I might be very wrong on this.
Uh... data from this Chinese study suggests that death & recovery take longer than that... I read it as about 30 - 40 days from exposure.
Also suggests you've got a critical / potentially terminal patient occupying an ICU bed for 2 - 3 weeks in the process, which becomes a significant load on your available hospital capacity...
> Old Book Illustrations presents itself as a scholarly resource, including a digitized Dictionary of the Art of Printing and short articles on some of the most famous artists and significant texts from the period. The site’s publishers are also transparent about their selection process. They are guided by their “reasons pertaining to taste, consistency, and practicality,” they write. The archive might have broadened its focus, but “due to obvious legal restrictions, [they] had to stay within the limits of the public domain.”
> We do not try to limit the use of the Illustrations available on OBI, but we cannot guarantee these Illustrations are noninfringing, or legally accessible in your jurisdiction and your use of them is solely at your own risk. Although we do our best to offer only Illustrations that are considered public domain in most countries, copyright laws vary from one jurisdiction to another, and you agree that you are solely responsible for abiding by all laws and regulations that may be applicable to using the Illustrations. While we endeavor to provide enough information to make that process as easy as possible, we cannot guarantee that this information is accurate.
The image of the squirrels in the article is from Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin. I'd be really surprised (pleasantly though) if the publishers of something so famous had allowed the images to become public domain.
Published in 1903, and Potter died in 1943. The copyright would have expired in 2013 (! — i.e., 70 years after the death of the author) at the latest as far as I can tell.
It should of course be completely unnecessary to look up the exact rules for something published that long ago, but that's the consequence of defect intellectual property laws.
Where did you find the 75 year period? The general consensus seems to be that her works entered the public domain in 2014 (which is 70 years counted from the year following her death, I missed a year in my previous post).
The copyright math is complicated, and even experts disagree commonly. Wikipedia's lists, though helpful, have been known to be disagreed with by the courts on numerous occasions.
For works published before Jan 1, 1978, it generally comes down to:
+ Lifetime of last involved author, +70, or +95 or +120 years.
+ If the work was already under copyright at that date (not everything was), then it also gets extended by 45 years
75 years came from the example given by the official documentation that attempts to explain the various acts (not definitive, but helpful) [0], and how they interact with each other:
> Example: A work that first secured federal copyright pro-tection on October 5, 1907, and was renewed in 1935, would have fallen into the public domain after October 5, 1963. The first act extended the copyright to December 31, 1965; the second act extended it to December 31, 1967; the third act extended it to December 31, 1968; the fourth act extended it to December 31, 1969; the fifth act extended it to December 31, 1970; the sixth act extended it to December 31, 1971; the seventh act extended it to December 31, 1972; the eighth act extended it to December 31, 1974; the ninth extended it to December 31, 1976; and the 1976 Copyright Act extended the copyright through the end of 1982 (75 years from the end of the year in which the copyright was originally secured)
This describes an example published in 1907, and we're talking about one published in 1909. As a rough guide, a minimum of 75 years fits works of that era. It is often actually more.
But, as I didn't put a lot of effort into my earlier statement, let's do a little more digging.
A provision in the UK's 1988 act probably means that Potter's works would have been revived for another fifty years, that is, expiring in 2038. However, that was only if Potter's estate owned the copyright - which it turns out, is not the case.
Potter left her works (and their copyright) to the National Trust upon her death, in the UK, which has a different set of copyright laws that are almost, but not quite fitting to the ones I've described above. (Which is common. The laws look the same until you try and do anything.)
The National Trust _sold_ the copyright (not just the publication right) to a company that was eventually absorbed into the Penguin Group, and so the copyright belongs to them.
This makes it extremely complicated. At one point, the National Trust held the copyright, meaning that Crown Copyright laws applied, which are generally shorter. However, the copyright was then passed on to a private company.
It is difficult to track down a date when the rights were passed from the Trust to Penguin - it may have been that the works had already expired at that point, meaning they might _mostly_ (see 'Another note' below) in the public domain, before considering the new ownership.
If however the work wasn't yet in the Public Domain, then a tweak of the UK copyright laws in 2006 may mean that they still aren't. The "artistic resale" right (literary works fall under artistic copyright in the UK), which is non-reassignable, and non-waivable, says that as long as the work is still being sold in a reasonable number, it both qualifies for royalties (in this case to Penguin), and cannot enter the public domain. However, these sales must come in units of greater than 1,000 to qualify. As a very considerable number of these books are still being sold, it appears to fall under this right.
Another note: Penguin published a previously unpublished work in 2016, containing some of her illustrations. Which, unfortunately, means that Penguin has a definite right to those works and any works that may appear to be derivatives of it. Whilst this new work might be considered separate from previous works, courts have sometimes in the past considered book series, even without overarching plotlines, to be a single work, even across extremely varied timelines. Penguin could argue all works should be linked to the copyright of the new work. (This is an odd situation. If Penguin didn't have the copyright right, and just the publication, then the work would expire in 2039, under the guidance on posthumous works given in the 1988 act. But Penguin has the actual copyright, not just publication rights.) (How does a company having the copyright work out with the general guidance of author + 70 years? It gets simplified. Publication date + 50 years is used instead.)
However, despite all this, for now, Penguin have said they won't enforce their copyright on the works. Copyright in the UK is not (today) a right that can be waived, so it doesn't automatically mean Public Domain. However it does probably mean that you don't have to have a lawyer looking over the situation.
Phew. I wonder if sensible copyright reform will happen in my lifetime. Either that, or we go back to a society that accepts intellectual property infringement of works older than a couple of decades as noble and necessary (cf. the attitude towards SciHub).
How did you get her death plus 75 years though? The example quoted works from the date of publication, which is 1903, so the longest possible copyright would be death of Beatrix Potter plus 70 (ignoring the informative, but weird dystopian legal possibility of Penguin making the case for owning the rights to all of her works in 2020).
Not commuting is huge. That adds about 3 hours a day to my availability, when you consider the prep time and various other incidentals.
One way to pitch it to the boss: savings on relo and the ability to tap into a much broader hiring pool. I'm seeing this now with a private equity group, where they've decided it is cheaper to hire operating talent nationally in major metro areas and let them commute / remote work vs. relocating everyone for a two or three year gig. (After which point, you're laid off in a small town where you're brand new... not a good thing; absolutely no way I would relo for this gig)
Structure your ranking algorithm to allocate a proportionate share of traffic to french news sites, given relevancy to a query topic, and rank order publishers by negotiated cost?
Given there is SUBSTANTIAL value in a news publisher being sent traffic, in terms of advertising and circulation, the power law in search engine clicks should keep cost paid to a bare minimum.
Unless the French are going full dystopia and picking the winners within their own markets?