Is raising money from the companies willing to buy you an option? Instead if taking the $12M, you could take the $2M you need and dilute accordingly.

"charged customers 19 yuan ($2.90 USD) per umbrella deposit and an additional half yuan ($0.07 USD) per 30 minutes"

So customers holding on to their umbrellas are bring charged 3.36$/day? I've paid that much to buy umbrellas in london on rainy days. How is that not an incentive to return it? Or are the umbrellas just being stollen from the rails?

I think that's exactly the case. From the picture there seems to be a mechanical password lock on the umbrellas. I guess how it works is: You can the QR code -> pay thru app -> received password, input the password on umbrella -> unlock umbrella. But since it's mechanical lock, I assume the password doesn't change every time. Then whoever returns the umbrella knows the password and can just take it away directly. The company can't prove they steal it.

This is exactly what happened to a lot of ofo bikes. They then scratch off the serial number and qr code so that no one else can use it.

The $2.90 is a deposit though right? So it is returned?

You are right. It is difficult for me to remember and remove those when sharing.

The upside of irrationality. Ariely

Germs guns and steel. Jared Diamond

Influence, the psychology of persuasion. Cialdini

Justice: what's the right thing to do. Sandel

QED. Fyenman

All of Feynman lectures on physics

The hard thing about hard things. Horowitz

Al muqqadimah. Ibn khaldun

What is really worrying though is the normalization of privacy devaluation. Soon the uk will follow suite and then others. And sooner than later we ll be "back" to 1984

Isnt it weird that drasticly restrictive all encompassing rules are hastily pushed after attacks? Blanket Decryption of messages, and other privacy suppression rules will make intelligence agencies into super powers with too much control at a very reduced cost (less messy assassinations, or physical threats needed)

That's the perfect time to hastily push them through!

Makes sense. However, how is that going to protect the US? The moment such information is public, perpetrators will not transport any digital devices with incriminating data. What you re left with are people being harrassed over a digital copy of "how to make a potato launcher" on their laptops.

Frankly, it seems the US policing practices have been looking more and more USSR like. And i dont just mean since trump arrived to power.

  how is that going to protect the US? [...] perpetrators
  will not transport any digital devices with incriminating
  data.

Options include:

1. Bad guys with imperfect opsec (I see in your unallocated space there's a deleted TAILS ISO... onto a watchlist with you!)

2. Friends and relatives of bad guys (I see your nephew e-mailed you holiday photos from cybercafes near two different suspected terrorist training camps... onto a watchlist with him!) a bit like social media companies' 'shadow profiles'

3. Non-terrorist targets, like good old corporate espionage and political blackmail (Oh, you're a journalist/oil industry exec/prostitute? Let me just take a copy of your contacts, records and reports)

Pretty sure from leaked XKEYSCORE rulesets, anyone who downloaded or googled "tails" is already on that list.

The answer is simple: It doesn't protect the US at all.

I know that thesis. But i find that the middle class usually has a propensity to buying the more expensive items (even if it ends up being only marginally better than crap) because of a different dynamic. and it always puzzled me, i see it as an uninformed, irrationally positive, outlook generated by the mean fact of paying more for a "brand", because "surely it is better".

But if the consumer has no way of telling which is better there's no reason for the manufacturers to use quality as the determining factor for setting the price. Instead they'll focus on making it look more expensive or add features you'll never use in order to win market share.

By the time this technology is out there, car keys would be obsolete. You would nt own a car.

Exactly. Not forgetting that radiation protection has nothing to do with the hardness of the casing. Lead is nowhere near hard and is one of the most used materials to shield from radiations.