Sorry for getting all political on this but we need to stop associating success only with financial wealth.
He is successful at amassing billions of dollars. From my point of view, his success in the grand scheme of things is below zero. His actions have degraded quality of life and hurt future generations.
Well if we didn't have an economy that makes us replace everything every year (an exaggeration but you get the point), we wouldn't care about the expensiveness.
We already have good enough technology that a phone should last us 10 years at least without having issues with the performance. The only problem is having replaceable batteries.
We need to move back towards things that last and backwards compatibility. Then it would make sense to pay $1000 or even $2000 on a phone, since you know it works perfectly and it'll last you 10-20 years.
The morality is that he got exactly what she offered and exactly what he asked and paid for, and the arrangement was perfectly consensual. It would be immoral for him to demand more, without additional payment.
The morality is already clearly established: in exchange for a very small monthly sum, you get the property when the owner dies. The property may be a dedicated rental unit already, so whether or not the owner lives there has no bearing. So it's not just _within_ the contract, it's the _purpose_ of the contract.
>The morality is already clearly established: in exchange for a very small monthly sum, you get the property when the owner dies.
That's, again, the contract. Seems some people can't tell between legal and moral, unless we talk about the 70s and segregation or something like that...
No, I (and presumably the other posters) can tell the difference - I just disagree on the morality, partly because I think the legal aspects are related to the moral aspects.
The guy purchased the right to the house once the current owner dies, but you believe it's immoral for her to continue living in it, or renting it out, or loaning it to friends, while she is alive. I think it's immoral to demand the house while she's alive, since that wasn't the deal.
Sometimes legality and morality are widely separated, but here they seem related.
It is a lottery with two participants that willingly took part in it. She won big, but if she had died the day after the contract was signed, he would have won big: he would have gotten the house for about $500. Would you suggest he should have paid her inheritance a lump sum if that would have happened?
He would have had to make a down-payment on the house too. You pay e.g. half the total payment up front and then the remainder in monthly installments. Still, it would have been a quarter of the retail price, not half, in that case.
Her heirs would have disagreed. Consider the case where your mother owns a house and 'sells' it for $500 just before dying.
Also, I expect people buying such rights are generally well-off, and the people selling it to be relatively poor. After all, the buyer must be able to pay money on a house they cannot live in for an indeterminate period, and the seller typically chooses this construct to be ensured of both a roof over their head and money to live from for one's entire life, no matter how long that is.
The odds in this lottery get better every month for the buyer, so, assuming that the buyer can afford to buy into this, they should have no reason to want to get out of this.
You'd think the contract would say that in addition to being alive you have to actually live in the house as well. Otherwise you could just sublet it out and have someone else pay you for it while you live somewhere else. Seems kind of counter to the intention of the idea.
I've seen this in an older version of NFS on PC. I can't remember which one it was (I think Underground?). The way they always caught up with me when they were behind was insane.
I actually tried a bit to look back and see it happen beacuse, I was wondering, do they just teleport or actually drive at like 800km/h.
this feature is literary called "Catch Up" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics#Catch-up and has been a thing in racing games since before 2000. Diddy Kong Racing (1997) had it, so did motorhead in 1998, then EA got familiar with it and we got Hot Pursuit 2/Most wanted and burnout 3.
I dunno, I'd see it as the opposite. The bigger the scale the more cost effective it is to have more redundancy. I can't remember the last time Google search wasn't working or saw news about it being down.
The fact that github keeps going down while being a huge business shows they still need to work on having more redundancy, something that's expected of big services like theirs.
I was thinking the same thing. We need a permission system for websites. Preferably useable on a per-domain basis so I can disable those APIs on adnetworks' domains.
He is successful at amassing billions of dollars. From my point of view, his success in the grand scheme of things is below zero. His actions have degraded quality of life and hurt future generations.