Their business models are increasingly converging with both generative revenue through seller fees, subscriptions, and advertising. Amazon is ahead in most of these areas and also has the higher margin revenue from AWS. Amazon also has a large base of prime subscribers they can sell incremental services to.
There are two types of BNPL loans: interest free and short-term interest-bearing accounts. In theory BNPL has a couple interesting advantages. First you're underwriting each individual purchase whereas a credit card involves underwriting a line of credit to a consumer. This enables BNPL providers to charge different prices depending on the product being purchased, for example someone making 2,000 a month trying to buy a 1,200 phone may warrant a higher interest rate. Also given the shorter term they should be able to better optimize their rates versus a credit card which is a pre-approved rate across the entire line of credit.
One point neglected in discussions is the effect of spreading it to other territories that are not adopting a similar strategy. The majority of cases in the English-speaking Caribbean to date have been from persons who traveled to the UK recently.
If the UK government's policy is to deliberately allow widespread infection of the population, the logical response from other countries will be to ban entry to people traveling from the UK.
You're grossly missing the point. If your kid steals money from your wallet, you catch them and punish them. That does not make what they did right just because they were punished and you deemed their behavior unacceptable. What if you didn't find out? Or what if you decided to look the other way because it was only five dollars?
Sadly, but a morally speaking you're then getting into the same territory as it is with the sex offenders; who having offended once are stained for the rest of their lives.
There is a reason why there's a statute of limitations, but neither does it mean that the current punishment is enough.
Let's talk children, as you say - you would punish a child, yet you would not mark him as a morally corrupted person forever; the punishment just needs to be severe enough.
When I was taking a class in Statistical Inference, we used a combination of Statistical Inference (Casella and Berger), Introduction to Mathematical Statistics (Hogg and Craig) and Probability and Statistics (Degroot and Schervish). If you're still interested in learning about Fisher Information and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound, you can refer to pages 514 - 521 of Probability and Statistics 8th Ed. It has a number of proofs which you can skip if you're not interested but it also provides a number of examples using different distributions to calculate both the Fisher Information and the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound.
To add to your second point, Andrew Gelman had some blog posts earlier this year detailing the challenges of doing online surveys, where he used simple questions that respondents "should" have been able to answer in a survey and found that a fair percentage >10% answered some of these simple questions wrong.
I am assuming there is no incentive for answering more questions correctly so it's possible that some respondents may have answered blindly to finish quickly leading to lower scores.
