absherwin

Increasing payouts should bring more players though it would be offset by eliminating the advertising that currently consumes some of that revenue. Flattening jackpots would have a negative effect but we just need to optimize for being above the point at which there's competition instead of maximizing lottery revenue.

If we assume the main problem with lotteries is that they make some people poorer, we need to solve two things: The payout being less than the cost due to both high overhead and transfers and the payouts tending to concentrate wealth since even in a lifetime of play few win the largest jackpots.

One can't make them too flat because consumers like large jackpots which is why they've grown over time and become harder to win. Presumably there's a level below which consumers would switch to other types of gambling regardless of legality.

There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of money transferred to support government programs makes up less than 0.5% of total government revenue; it's trivially replaceable.

These criteria are such a low bar that merely stating them upfront would have changed the discussion last week.

I wonder if these were the original criteria or if this is a partial walk back. The SBA usually defines a small business as having less than 500 employees even if it has significant revenue.

If I had been asked to guess the criteria based on the initial announcement, I would have guessed 500 employees, $100MM in revenue, or $5MM in money raised with some exceptions for top-tier investors or other judgmental criteria.

The most significant adjustment was excluding a $3.2B writedown of the value of their stake in Didi

The key challenge with this system is merchant adoption. Since merchants are forced to charge the same prices in the less valuable currency, they'll drop out if its exchange rate falls by more than their profit margin (and perhaps before then).

You will find that management consulting firms (and the companies that hire them) have fairly clear rules about how they approach and talk about pricing and competition to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Most notably, they would never ever: 1. Indicate that their advice always is to raise prices 2. They would never share the pricing advice they gave to a competitor.

I don't know if what Patrick does is problematic. It wouldn't surprise me if he was trying to be glib and his actual advice is more nuanced.

If one interprets it literally: Someone who receives advice from him to raise prices can look down Stripe's customer list and find its competition and feel confident that the competition will receive the same advice.

Again, I don't know what he does. All I know is that what he says if read by the right person would be sufficient to trigger their curiosity to ask for records of his correspondence and find out.

Of course the customer can say that. And nowhere does Patrick suggest that taking his advice is a condition of continuing a relationship with Stripe. That's not the issue.

The issue is that coordinating pricing is illegal in any form. In any industry, each company could make more money if they knew their competitors would raise prices. Even calling a competitor to tell them that you are raising prices is illegal if they raise prices.

If there's even a single incident of two companies being advised to raise prices on products which compete with each other, it's about as close as it comes to an open and shut price fixing case. And this post makes it easier to prove because it suggests that companies know he's giving the same advice to their competitors. Whether that's said explicitly or not won't matter.

"every time I convince a Stripe customer to raise their prices ... we benefit directly" sounds like the exact words of an illegal cartel. While I doubt that that is Patrick's intent, if I were an antitrust attorney, this would convince me that the notion of payment processors as clearinghouses for price-fixing merits investigation.

This is a great example of how one can do something well-meaning at small scale (Advise tiny, tiny businesses that they would be better served having more confidence in their value) that can turn into something illegal at scale (Advise price leaders that they can safely lead by less and so-on).

A version of what you suggest has been the law since ERISA was passed in 1974.

The problem is what to do if investment performance doesn’t meet expectations, lifespan increases, or future assumed yield decreases. Generally companies had to pay enough to be back to even within seven years. Newspapers sought the right to have thirty years to fully fund. McClatchy was larger than Congress was comfortable with and found itself unable to pay the required fraction of the difference between the NPV and finding amount. Hence, it declared bankruptcy.