No, no. You are going in the right direction in analysing the morality of such proclamation. The point is, you can a) give others and collect reward in terms of other's people perception/rewarding of you (what the Bible passage above suggests is bad), b) do the same because someone just convinced you you'll get a reward from .. someone important, worthy of respect/awe (what the passage suggests is good, though I'm sure there will be those who say it's just parabole for being humble in giving, which of course the text could say but somehow doesn't), c) for some another reason. We'll get to c) in a minute.

When you think about what this is really easy to see is a = b. That I am rewarded with promise of heaven for a deed, or hope of being well-respected by others who see what I've done, affects the same object: ego. It's not driven by desire to help others (compassion, love or else), but desire to be seen /judged as good by others.

There is a c) (and more for sure). The much more mundane reason c) is "give to people and let your reward be the feeling you get that you do a good thing". Good thing can be in this case simply the result of mental congruence of your act with, say, your utilitarian belief that "helping others by decreasing their suffering is good".

If I tell people "a good act is when you help others to help them maximize utility", it's a moral stance. It's a very different moral stance than "a good act is when you do what someone says you should do in order to get eternal life".

The former is far better from ego-point of view, and less prone to corruption, and focuses on the values and reasons why somethign is good, in other words - promotes understanding and is clear why it's good. The latter promotes blind following and subservience to anothe person/being becomgin the guide of y our actions.

It's clear that most people need a guide, but be careful what kind of guide you pick.

GDPR covers EU citizens. I don't think it says anything about non-EU citizens.

There is nothing in the GDPR about citizenship. GDPR applies to "data subjects who are in the Union" Art 3(2). So it is the physical location of the person that matters. As a US citizen, if you travel to an EU country on vacation then the GDPR applies to you while you are there.

GDPR also applies to EU based companies for all of their activities - so in addition to limiting US business in the EU, it limits EU businesses in the US.

If it is physical location, that is something you cannot possibly know for a user, due to VPNs. You might know that a person is logged in and registered with a US address, but you don't know if they are traveling (they might even VPN via the US because it is convenient for work).

So I guess you need to assume this applies for all visitors.

I think that's correct; and I suspect it was intentional.

I strongly disapprove of extraterritorial legislation (a US specialty). But in the case of the GDPR, if you want to regulate internet activity, then you more-or-less have to go extraterritorial.

Which is nebulous: someone whose grandad was Italian living their whole life in the US might be a defacto EU citizen.

No such thing as a de facto citizen; a de facto citizen is also known as a refugee.

No, it covers companies and individuals operating within GDPR jurisdiction. A US company that trades in the EU is subject to the GDPR. This is no different from applying the UK Trades Descriptions Act to US companies that advertise in the UK.

There was no attempt to manipulate here - as the author stated, they didn't find out about the mother's crying for a long time. It was never made known.

I wasn't suggesting OP's mother wanted to manipulate. I wanted to express that it's a very common situation in relationships of all kinds that there's assymetry in desired closeness and it's difficult / non obvious what to do there (i.e. no easy solution).

If you were running a business, and wanted someone to do tech talks, or design/run interviewing for tech candidates, or have mentoring for junior devs, would you prefer non-developers to do it?

Clickbait :( It's a device that plays back - through headphones - specific normal-range sound which is crafted in such as way as to help you locate a source of another (ultra)sound which you normally wouldn't hear. Nothing in this thing enables people to hear ultrasonic sources. They still hear sound from normal range.

One could argue that people don't "hear" anything but the electrical signals transmitted from their ears to their brain. If an ultrasonic signal causes someone to perceive a noise--any noise, even if waveform-translated from the original, but in a predictable fashion, isn't it "hearing"? E.g. if we set up a chime that went "bing bong" every time the cat went through the cat door, after a while wouldn't it be appropriate to ask your roommate, "Did you hear the cat come in?"

If that's the case, I could write an article "Company X developed technology that enables people to see individual atoms and hear the explosions on the other side of the Earth."

> hear the explosions on the other side of the Earth

It is quite hard to enable them to 'hear' where on earth it is, not sure how you could hear it properly. (Language is not hearing although hearing is involved)

What's an example where it's not clickbait with a sense that's been 'enabled'?

For this article I'd consider it not clickbait if all the 'information' from ultrasonic is transferred to the ear real time or close to.

If it was realtime, then sure, as it's kind of implied in that phrasing. What are our senses other than machines that detect phenomenon and turn it into electrical signals for realtime processing for the brain? Do people with cochlear implants not hear?

I agree, and real time pitch shifting (as is done with the bat sounds in this work) is itself a non-trivial procedure where certain weigh-offs have to be made, so even pitched shifted it is not an accurate (or even easily invertible) representation that you can mentally pitch up. (this is not a problem for non-realtime pitch shifting where you would adjust the tempo accordingly).

While I don't know of the safety impact of removing left turns, the actual trip time impact in a busy city is severely understated. In my city (700k people), an old European town, city center has seen the removal of a few key left turns in the past few years. Consequences for traffic outside city center: probably none. Consequences if you want to drive from within the city center to the outside (e.g. go back from a shopping mall / restaurant / business meeting): walk further (many places to park are inaccessible) back to the car, drive a block or two more than you normally would. Extra time: +5 minutes to walk, +10 minutes for those 1-2 blocks (traffic is heavy).

Now the "best" part: Consequences if you want to drive into the city center: you need to make a sequence of correct turns 1-2 kilometers before your target, and if you don't, you are punished with extra 20 minutes in traffic at least (and still won't land where you wanted) - there is simply no route to where you wanted to go unless you pick 1 specific ideal route which many drivers don't know. Results: if you know the city / have good gps (Google Maps sometimes gets it wrong) +10 minutes in traffic, if you don't - + 20-30 minutes in traffic.

[edit] You may ask "why you can't do a triple-right-turn?" that's because the city center is not a grid. Many streets are don't have cross-paths for long stretches around historical part of the city.

Now the really painful part... Your trip outside the city center is only 5-10 minutes. Losing an EXTRA 20 minutes is a huge loss, it makes the ttrip almost as bad as walking - but inside a car. Bad for everyone really.

My main beef is with the fact that many places in the city become almost inaccessible due to a huge reduction in possible routes. E.g. 7 years ago I could get to a large mall / parking area next to the town square maybe in 5-6 diffferent ways (allowing me to balance the traffic out).

Now there's 1 way only from my side of the city, and I can't balance anything out by going where others aren't.

Guess the "grid" street network is really a hard prerequisite.

As for safety, safety records in the city haven't moved at all in the past 10 years so I don't know. (But traffic has grown so maybe it's ok?)

I am biased but why do we even need cars in the city center, or at the very least why should they be convenient? Could there not be a situation where you walk to the edges of the city center to pick up your car and leave from there? There are specific accessibility concerns that certainly need to be accounted for, but the idea that the average driver loses 20 minutes on a trip that should be 5-10 minutes doesn't seem like inherently an issue in this context.

edit-add: biased in the sense that I really dislike cars and live in NYC in large part because you do not need one here

I was waiting for this response. As someone who doesn’t live in the city center, and has no easy means of mass transportation to get there, my response is: fine I just won’t go then. You lose my money.

In NYC or Chicago that’s probably not a big deal. In the vast majority of the rest of the US, that’s how you kill a city center. I can tell you in my case, given the homelessness issue that’s been getting worse the last decade, if you make it harder to get to the downtown area it will become a ghost town.

Lol, have you been to the Midwest? In small and medium sized cites there downtowns are often dead, including the small city I grew up in. All of them easily accessible by car. Dead city centres in North America more have to do with the post war experiment of subsidizing inefficient sprawling car dependent suburbs. If you want to actually understand this read more from the advocacy group Strong Towns[0] they also have a great YouTube channel. Now compare small Midwest cities to small cities in the Netherlands like Leiden or Haarlem and you’ll see limiting traffic from downtowns has little to do with how well they do economically.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

That’s not as true as it used to be, but I don’t disagree with the wider point.

I agree it’s improving from the 90s, but when I go back to the Midwest from Western Europe, the difference is dramatic simply in the number of people downtown in public spaces for cites with the same population.

That’s an extreme comparison! I bet only a few US cities would approach what you see in Berlin or Paris.

I’m not talking about Berlin or Paris. I’m taking about small European cities I’m familiar with that have vibrant walkable downtowns. Off the top of my head, Leiden Netherlands, Haarlem Netherlands, Peacara Italy, or Zug Switzerland.

Not true. Go to Leiden Netherlands and see how economically vibrant a small city can become if it incentives efficient land use and limits traffic in city centre in favour of pedestrian paths an public transit.

I think you're overselling Leiden as an example of this here, isn't traffic blocked from just one main shopping street and one other (steenstraat) made somewhat hard to access?

I'm not sure I would say the latter change, which was recent-ish, made a big difference versus just the general cleanup of the inner city (better train station, spruced up Beestenmarkt square etc).

Sure, there are still plenty of places you can drive in Leiden. I guess the point I’m trying to make is small cities in North America favour car transportation to an extreme. It is to the point where it’s physically dangerous to walk to some places because their aren’t even sidewalks and traffic travels much faster inside the cities than you’d ever see in the Netherlands.

Compared to small cities in North America, Leiden infrastructure is amazing — as is a lot of Dutch towns. It not that you have to completely block off all roads either. It’s just that everywhere there are roads for cars, there’s also equal space for bike and pedestrians and public transit is invested in much more. If you want to see a video series that compares the two look up the YouTube channel notjustbikes

Nice to see my town mentioned! I hope we remove even more of the current traffic roads in the center, it is great.

The Unites States is not the Netherlands. If the downtown is already dying, banning cars will finish it off.

It certainly isn't any more, but before the 70s the Netherlands was looking at America when it came to modern infrastructure. Lots of cars, huge roads, pedestrian hostile intersections, massive amounts of and ridiculous highways (Just look at this crazy thing: https://mobile.twitter.com/notjustbikes/status/1176840020751...). It didn't kill the downtown in the Netherlands and they were in much the same position.

> that’s how you kill a city center.

This is a function of American cities being poorly designed. You are expected to arrive by car from the sprawling suburbs. I agree with your exceptions, NYC, Chicago: but I'd add, almost every city in Europe, such as the grandparent was talking about.

If this poor design is killed, hopefully something better can arise.

Honestly, your money is not worth the congestion, noise and air pollution it requires. It’s a real shame your locality does not provide good rail connections.

One thing to remember about NYC's crazy tolls and congestion pricing plans is that there are not many reasons why visitors should need to drive in. There's NJTransit, PATH, light rail to Hudson valley and CT, LIRR, Amtrak, so many regional bus routes and frequent shuttles to EWR and other popular places, where most of these have park-and-ride options. And then of course once in the city there are subway and buses. Other cities that want to copy the car-discouraging policies should think about what the alternatives are.

It was cheaper and faster for me to drive 25 miles into Manhattan than take the train in from a walkable station. Then getting back out doesn't have to be at the mercy of the train schedule which is often every two hours for the line in question.

> As someone who doesn’t live in the city center, and has no easy means of mass transportation to get there, my response is: fine I just won’t go then. You lose my money.

The bussiest city centers tend to be the least car and most pedestrian friendly ones. Park the car at the border of the center, then walk into the center.

When you say "then walk into the center", you do realize you are talking about a (edit) 20-30 minute walk one-way. A car could cut that in 2 minutes.

In my lifetime I was a driver in a city where it took exactly 5 minutes door-to-door from my home to ANY location in the city (at night). During the day it was maybe 8 minutes.

Then some years went by.

I now live in a city where at night it's 20 minutes, and during the day it's 45-60 minutes.

From 5/8 minutes to 20/45-60 minutes.

It's the same city.

Things change, I get it. It just feels like things are getting worse and worse and yeah, it elicits serious questions like "is this going to be my last car, ever?" etc. :)

Don't you ever use public transportation? Most larger European cities have quite acceptable transportation. Also one of the reasons it takes longer is probably that there far more cars on the road and everybody is using their car even for short trips.

Park + ride at the outer edges of the city center. But most American cities are probably a lost cause.

homelessness is a big issue in NYC, it doesn’t seem clear to me that cars have much to do with it, compared to, say, lack of affordable housing. perhaps we could reclaim all the parking space to build more housing

This is what mid-sized American cities have been saying for about 75 years, most of which adopted this plan with zeal. And it's been a total failure. It turns out you can't save Downtown by making it easier for suburbanites to get there. Whatever you think of that approach from first principles, the evidence at this point is overwhelming. It does not work.

Moreover, suburbanites largely don't want to visit the city, they either do by necessity or for special occasions like a big game or a designated social event.

I see this in Seattle so much. People complain about their version of what they think my city is, swarm in for a big football game or whatever and have a great time once every few months, then swarm out to complain more about a city they’re not even in

> In the vast majority of the rest of the US

The cities in these places don't generally have the problems that the GP was talking about: the streets are mostly planned and overall car-friendly, and if you miss one turn there's likely a close opportunity to correct your route.

You could replace cars with public transport rather than just moving the cars. If you don't want to build too much infrastructure then buses and bus lanes work well.

In my town you have largely 4 options: - walk - drive - take a bus/tram - bike

Walking is too slow and cumbersome for most people (e.g. 6-8 km one way to work seems like too much to do every day), and impossible if you want to go shopping anywhere except on your way to work.

Public transport is really slow and not as flexible as you want (many places without good connections, wait times 15-20 minutes, transit times 20-50 minutes).

So you are left really with bike (flexible, constant travel time regardless of traffic, keeps you fit -- but very susceptible to bad weather) and car (flexible, fast, great for transporting items -- but very susceptible to traffic).

Biking is not that susceptible to weather imho. When it rains you can wear a rain coat and rain trousers. When it's cold you can wear any outdoor jacket (gore tex is great even if maybe not healthy). When it snows you have to work a bit harder. When there is ice you can use tires with spikes for great grip. The worst is hot weather, since you can only shed so much clothing. An ebike helps here, but that reduces the health benefits.

Sure if you are super motivated you can bike in any weather. But for 95% of people they will only be willing to bike if it is nice out.

The average person is not going to go out and buy a fat bike or spiked tires for the winter. And they probably shouldn't, biking in winter is dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. And sure I could wear a full rain suite and bike in the rain, but that is far less convenient than just driving and wearing a light jacket. So sure it is possible to bike in all weather, in the same way that it is possible to walk 5k, just no one wants to.

Biking in the rain is such a laughable idea to me. I wear glasses, walking in the rain is a pain in the ass as I can't see shit, it would be impossible for me to ride a bike in the rain.

That's just a first order problem for me. Drainage in a lot of city roads is pretty awful so bicyclists have a pretty good chance of getting swamped at intersections or knocked over if a bus or truck sends a wall of rain water their way.

I guess if you don't need glasses and live in the suburbs biking in the rain might not be too terrible. I couldn't imagine it in the city center of any city I've ever been to though.

Dublin, which is crap for cycling infrastructure and weather in the winter, has about a 25% higher cycle count for summer months, according to the 2019 data (the last year unaffected by covid).

Cycling in the rain is only a huge problem when the infrastructure is crap. Riding in a flooded gutter, getting splashed by passing motorists and being left-hooked by people who can’t see clearly through a wet windshield is dangerous and unpleasant. Cycling on a dedicated bike path with good drainage, mud guards and a waterproof is fine, imo.

It still sucks if you have to look (and smell) presentable at work. Even if you bike at a leisurely pace you and your suit will be drenched if you bike to work in a rain coat and rain trousers.

Anytime I want to spend time in DC, I definitely just drive to Greenbelt, park, and take the metro to whatever part of the city I’m trying to go to. It’s a sanity-saver over trying to find parking.

Usual car-oriented person rant about how this measure affects you personally and harms your convenience.

Complaining about traffic in the center of an “Old European town” tells me you might be doing things wrong from the get go.

I am presenting a counterpoint to the claim in the article that "it's just 1 more block" in a real world scenario (under somewhat different condition though: non-grid street network).

Do you think the phenomenon I described does not exist, or are you saying it's not relevant?

I’ve driven in places that forbid left turns and the impact is nowhere near what you say it is - your example appears very specific to your town where things seem particularly bad but also your phrasing (“punished” by traffic - guess what, if you’re driving, you are traffic) is not very objective for a rational, general counterpoint.

I think the trilemma is something like: improve traffic capacity, reduce conflict points, forgive wrong turns — pick two. The increasing popularity of GPS makes it easier to drop the last item. Of course, it's going to take some getting used to.

> if you want to drive from within the city center to the outside (e.g. go back from a shopping mall / restaurant / business meeting)

But I don't know if being able to do this is a reasonable expectation in the first place. Why do you have a car in the centre of a city? They aren't designed for cars. Live in the suburbs or countryside if you want a personal car.

>Extra time: +5 minutes to walk

why does removing left turns make it longer to walk? Can pedestrians even make "left" turns?

It's because they have to take a different longer route to a different parking space.

A lot of times when they pull left turns it means they’re pulling out the stoplights, putting barriers of some kind down the middle and you can’t cross at that spot at all anymore on foot or in a car. If you have to park on the opposite side of the street from where you’re going you may be walking blocks just to cross.

Sure you could try jaywalking but that’s probably not a bright move in a lot of cities.

I’ll be honest I have no idea why you all are downvoting. This literally happened in a city near where I grew up and it is a giant pain. I presume he was actually asking the question because he didn’t understand why it would require more time.

I think the downvotes are probably because none of what you write makes sense in the "old European city" the ancestor comment suggested.

Although the article is about America, so shrug

Seems like an argument for more pedestrian priority crossings.

> almost as bad as walking

What's bad about walking? It's good for your health, good for the economy, good for the environment.

If you are in a car, chances are the goal was to get there more quickly than you could by walking. If you are getting there more slowly by taking a car then it was "worse than walking" by this metric. No one is criticizing walking as a general means of transportation.

I wonder... what's the actual crime here? I don't know how US law works. In my country there is no "bribe" in the private sector, it's probably still not allowed in some cases (certainly publicly traded companies), but I'm assuming Netflix wasn't a public company during that time. Can someone explain?

If a director is given freedom to make certain purchasing decisions on behalf of a company (private company at that point, I assume), why specifically is it a criminal offense in the US to be rewarded money for it? (I don't mean money laundering i.e. hiding source of income, I mean the actual "bribe")

[Edit] I did just find out that my country also has "management bribery" as a criminal offense within the private sector.

I believe that as an employee of a company charged with setting up relationships to support the delivery of revenue you have a duty to fairly and openly select the offers that are in the best interest of your employers without considerations for yourself.

If you accept considerations for your own interest - like payments or offers of subsequent employment and so on, then you are defrauding your employers. Since the payments mean that effectively there is a transfer of money from your employer to the contractor and then to you I believe that this is also a kind of theft.

At the least, it's dishonest - unless your employer understood you were doing it - in which case it's a kind of hidden remuneration I guess.

It would be tax evasion at minimum, unless you declared everything in your tax return.

In most countries there are laws for dealing with breach of trust, which covers all kinds of damage that a person can do when hired to manage someone else's company.

So my guess is that while bribes in private sector are not illegal per se, you can still go to jail for the decisions made as the result of taking the bribe.

In california at least, private sector bribery is explicitly a felony.

On the federal level you get charged for using mail or telecommunications to lie for financial gain or for hiding the source of the money.

It might give you a better overview to go straight to the source: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...

It outlines that Michael Kail was convicted of wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering, so it seems the "preference of products for payments" was just a small piece of the puzzle here.

He was defrauding his own company by rigging the selection process. The kickbacks are explicitly stated as the core of the case on the DoJ site.

... Wait, are you suggesting that everyone is doing fraud and six figure money laundering?

Are you saying he didn't commit a crime or he shouldn't be held legally responsible for what he did? I don't see how your view is consistent with anything else.

There are many jurisdictions where this would be a tort, not a criminal matter. Being sued into the ground is another way to be held legally responsible. It is a reasonable question if this is the best use of scarce criminal justice resources.

Enough people like him could damage and eventually destroy many American companies, I'd think. That'd create unemployment and weaken the country, so seems to me it's something worth to try to stop and discourage, from the DOJ's point of view, even if the company doesn't want to sue? Netflix even withdrew their lawsuit -- but then the DOJ continued anyway (if I understood correctly) good that they could do that I think

So, you admit there is such a thing as wire and mail fraud, and those laws should exist, and yet if someone is convicted of those crimes it is automatically because they couldn't convict them of another crime. And you don't know enough about this case to make a judgement and yet the only reason they convicted this person of this crime is because it is "axiomatic." You aren't convincing me these are bad laws from this argument.

I'm not trying to, either.

Read the laws or remain ignorant, I don't care.

In the US legal system individual states and the federal governments both have enforceable laws. This case was federal and it boils down to “fraud” of a few types which comes down to lying for financial gain and “money laundering” which involves hiding the source of money.

California though (but it doesn’t seem this was charged by the state) explicitly has a law criminalizing commercial bribery where if you take money secretly and privately to make a decision at your job, you have committed a felony.

> "When an inquiry from the Netflix CEO ensued, Kail falsely denied that he was formally working with Platfora. Kail resigned from his advisory position at Platfora the next week."

Apparently he lied to the CEO for personal financial gain. That's fraud, isn't it?

> I wonder... what's the actual crime here? I don't know how US law works.

Fraud and money laundering - it clearly says so, in the second paragraph in the article:

> Michael Kail, the ex-Netflix executive, was convicted by a federal jury of wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering.

My point was I didn't understand why making a decision that gives a manager an extra (hidden) benefit is a crime - i.e. it's not money laundering (money laundering is misrepresenting the source of money, right?, and "wire fraud" and "mail fraud" is too elusive to me - it's a name, not an explanation of the nature of the wrongdoing :)

It's clearer now.

The article says "wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering". So basically he used telecommunications/the Internet and the US postal system to defraud his employer, and then laundered his dirty money (I assume using the family trust mentioned in the article).

Was wondering the same thing. The article mentions the suit is Netflix vs the exec, so this will at least be breach of contract.

There may indeed by a Netflix vs. the exec, but this article is United States vs. the exec. Fraud is a crime. Wire/mail fraud is a federal crime.

Their standard employee agreement must include a set of clauses relating to conflict of interest.

Actually in Anglo Saxon employment law its very "naughty" as lawyers put it :-)

it looks like the crime is not so much that he accepted bribes but how he did it.

For example if a company came and gave him §10000 in hand and he reported in on his taxes he would probably be alright but reading the article I can see he was found guilty of multiple cases of money laundering - like you indicated that is against the law not the 'bribe' per se, furthermore he got convicted of fraud - I think because as it says

"To facilitate kickback payments, the evidence at trial showed that Kail created and controlled a limited liability corporation called Unix Mercenary, LLC," the DOJ said. "Established on February 7, 2012, Unix Mercenary had no employees and no business location. Kail was the sole signatory to its bank accounts."

So basically the company he created was involved in fraudulent activities.

There may be other forms of fraud involved here - for example if he said to Netflix I think we should use X because it is the best but he actually wants to use X because he is getting 10000 for it - I could envision a law being written in such a way that it could be interpreted as him defrauding Netflix of 10000 worth of value.

on edit: I can also see in the article it says "When an inquiry from the Netflix CEO ensued, Kail falsely denied that he was formally working with Platfora. Kail resigned from his advisory position at Platfora the next week." so he explicitly stated he was not doing something while getting value for doing that thing - that would generally be considered fraudulent.

You can't lie to your employer about receiving money from another company in exchange for preferential treatment. That's the definition of fraud. So, yes, receiving the bribes was absolutely illegal

>You can't lie to your employer about receiving money from another company in exchange for preferential treatment.

but can you receive money from another company for preferential treatment and when asked by your employer say yes, I did it? If you can do that then can you lie by omission? I think these things might depend on the jurisdiction, but I guess this was federal so easier to figure out.

But is that money laundering?

> But is that money laundering?

fraud isn't money laundering, however cashing out fraudulent gains by using a corporation is the textbook of money laundering.

> Kail set up a corporation to receive bribes from Netflix contractors, the DOJ said.

The article is quite clear about that.

It is if you try to disguise the source of that bribery income as something else in order to declare it as income.

At least in California this is "commercial bribery" which is a crime. https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/pen/part-1/639-...

The US and most countries have very strict anti bribery laws

> However, please point me to a law that says it's illegal to give a gift from one private company to another for any kind of advantage.

Company B,Z or X didn't gift Netflix, they gifted a Netflix employee who then defrauded the company he worked for of its money, in exchange for these personal gifts and money. The "defrauding" part is his hierarchy not being aware of that arrangement.

It's called fraud and it's illegal. It's so illegal it is a federal crime.

> It's called fraud

Is it really just counted as fraud in the US? Here in the UK, bribery is a different offence from fraud.

Yes , but when bribery takes the form of lobbying those laws are useless.

You are wrong about apples and potatoes - the blog post author does mention your story just under different term: utility, which is a standard way to express the notion you touched: the total utility of an apple and a potato in the right hands is higher than utility of them in the wrong hands. So barter increases utility, but economy as a whole isn't any more valuable because of it (externally it'll trade the same). It's also echoed in OP's point about utility of money (and a question whether Amazon actually increases or decreases total utility in the economy).

Bezos claims he created 310 B of value and you say "as shareholder I care about value of the company", but you and other shareholders who own (together) 100% of Amazon didn't get 310 B of value, did you?

That's the thing. Neither did the economy "gain" all this value. If I work for 10 hours and earn a 1000 uSD, my employer didn't create 1000 USD worth of value. We traded my time/effort/exhaustion for money. Maybe there was some actual value created through that work for us or economy/society, or maybe it was meaningless work (and we even stole value from the society by e.g. burning me out).

> So barter increases utility, but economy as a whole isn't any more valuable because of it

Many things factor into the value of a good, including where it is and who owns it. If the bartering involves the apple and the potato trading places it’s easy to see how value is created, as the value of a good depends on its location and transporting it to a location where it is more highly valued creates value. (Otherwise transportation as an industry could never create value, in which case, why would anyone ever transport anything?)

It’s more rare that ownership will factor into value, but it comes up sometimes. An example is when the whole of something is worth more than the sum of the parts, like buying the last missing piece of a city block so that you can put a full-block development on it.

That's not accurate. You actually type numbers in right after the color choice and it shows you chart of the projection etc. No login necessary.