Business

Column: Uvalde demonstrates our cowardice about guns

Published

3 years ago

June 1, 2022

Column: Uvalde demonstrates our cowardice about guns

One other bloodbath, one other outpouring of political balderdash, flat-out lies about gun management and cynical provides of “ideas and prayers” for the victims.

I haven’t commented on the slaughter of 19 youngsters and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, by an assault rifle-wielding 18-year-old prior to now, hoping that maybe the passage of time would permit the occasion to change into clarified, even a bit extra explicable.

However within the week for the reason that Might 24 bloodbath, none of that has occurred. The information has solely gotten worse. It’s not merely the rising timelines that time to the inexcusable cowardice of native regulation enforcement on the scene, however the ever-growing toll of firearm deaths throughout the nation.

The appropriate secured by the Second Modification just isn’t limitless.

— Justice Antonin Scalia, District of Columbia vs Heller

There have been 17 mass shootings nationwide since Uvalde, together with 12 on Memorial Day weekend alone. A mass taking pictures is outlined by the Gun Violence Archive as one by which 4 folks or extra are killed or wounded, not together with the shooter.

What’s most dispiriting about this toll is the presumption that campaigning to legislate gun security is fruitless, as a result of gun management is unconstitutional, politically unpopular, and ineffective in stopping mass loss of life.

These arguments have turned the American public into cowards about gun management. Voters appear to worry that urgent for tighter gun legal guidelines will awaken a ferocious far-right backlash, and who desires that?

But not a single one in all these assertions is true, and repeating them, as is finished after each act of mass bloodshed, doesn’t make them true. The primary problem for these of us involved in regards to the tide of deaths by firearms in America is to wean the general public and public officers from their perspective of resignation.

We’ll skip calmly over a couple of of the extra ludicrously silly claims made by politicians and gun advocates about Uvalde.

For instance, that the catastrophe may have been averted if the college had just one door, says Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas); apparently Cruz is blind to the Triangle Shirtwaist Manufacturing unit catastrophe, by which 146 garment staff died, many as a result of they may not escape the manufacturing unit by means of its locked doorways.

However that occurred in 1911, and who can count on a Senator to stay that au courant?

Or the admonition by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), about second-guessing regulation enforcement officers engaged in “break up second choices.” By most accounts, native first responders didn’t confront the Uvalde shooter for 78 minutes, which works out to 4,680 “break up seconds.”

Or the assertion by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and lots of others that the issue resulting in Uvalde isn’t the epidemic of assault weapons, however psychological sickness. That is nothing however an try to distract from the actual drawback.

“Little population-level proof helps the notion that people recognized with psychological sickness are extra possible than anybody else to commit gun crimes,” a staff from Vanderbilt College reported in 2015.

Even when it have been true, Abbott’s Texas has performed nothing about it — the state is one in all 12 that has not expanded Medicaid beneath the Reasonably priced Care Act. What’s America’s largest single supply of funding for psychological well being providers? Medicaid.

Lastly, there’s the argument that the aftermath of horrific killings just isn’t the time for “politics.” In actual fact, it’s precisely the time for politics. Mass loss of life by firearm is the quintessential political problem, and there’s no higher time to convey it ahead than when the murders of youngsters and different innocents remains to be recent within the public thoughts.

Let’s look at among the different frequent canards about gun violence and gun legal guidelines, and begin eager about learn how to transfer the needle.

The 2nd Modification

For 217 years after the drafting of the Invoice of Rights, which included the 2nd Modification, courts spent little effort parsing its proscription that “A nicely regulated militia, being essential to the safety of a free state, the appropriate of the folks to maintain and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Because the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, mass shootings with these weapons has climbed. An assault weapon was used within the Uvalde bloodbath of Might 24.

(Mom Jones)

That modified in 2008, with the Supreme Court docket’s ruling within the so-called Heller case overturning the District of Columbia’s ban on possession of handguns within the residence. Since then, the impression has grown — fostered by the Nationwide Rifle Assn. and different components of the gun foyer — that Heller rendered just about any gun regulation unconstitutional.

However Justice Antonin Scalia’s 5-4 majority opinion mentioned nothing of the sort. Certainly, Scalia explicitly disavowed such an interpretation. “The appropriate secured by the Second Modification just isn’t limitless,” he wrote. The Structure doesn’t confer “a proper to maintain and carry any weapon in anyway in any method in anyway and for no matter objective.”

There was, and is, no constitutional prohibition towards legal guidelines prohibiting the carrying of hid weapons, he discovered. Nothing in his ruling, he wrote, ought to “solid doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally unwell, or … the carrying of firearms in delicate locations resembling colleges and authorities buildings,” or circumstances on gun gross sales.

The issue with the D.C. regulation, Scalia wrote, was that it went too far by reaching into the house and masking handguns, which have been widespread weapons of protection within the residence. “The Structure leaves the District of Columbia a wide range of instruments” for regulating handguns, in addition to different firearms, he wrote.

The federal assault weapons ban, which was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004, repeatedly got here beneath assault in federal courts, and prevailed in each case. Not a single a kind of challenges was primarily based on the 2nd Modification. Because the expiration of the ban, mass taking pictures deaths in the US have climbed steadily.

“Heller has been misused in essential coverage debates about our nation’s gun legal guidelines,” wrote former Supreme Court docket clerks Kate Shaw and John Bash in a current op-ed. “Many of the obstacles to gun laws are political and coverage primarily based, not authorized.” Shaw and Bash labored on the Heller choice as clerks to Scalia and John Paul Stevens, the writer of the main dissent to the ruling, respectively.

So let’s discard the parable that gun management legal guidelines are unconstitutional.

The NRA

By any typical accounting, the NRA is a shadow of its former self. Its management has been racked with inside dissension, its sources have been shrinking and it has confronted a critical authorized assault by New York state. Attendance at its annual conference final week in Houston drew just a few thousand members, even with former President Trump readily available to talk.

But the group nonetheless carries main political weight. To some extent that’s an artifact of its political spending. Even in its straitened circumstances it’s a serious political contributor, having handed out greater than $29 million within the 2020 election cycle. A few of the politicians taking resolute pro-gun stands are beneficiaries of this largess, mouthing “ideas and prayers” for the victims of gun massacres whereas pocketing thousands and thousands from the NRA.

The NRA additionally has performed an enduring position in blocking funds for analysis into gun violence by federal businesses such because the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, an impediment that remained in place for some 20 years till Congress restored funding in 2019. However the hole in analysis nonetheless hampers gun policymaking. It’s lengthy since time to curb this group’s blood-soaked affect on our politics.

Debate? What debate?

A part of the knee-jerk information protection of the aftermath of gun massacres is the notion that the American public is deeply divided over gun laws. It is a corollary of the normal declare that American society is “polarized,” which I confirmed final yr to be completely false. The reality is that giant majorities of Individuals favor abortion rights, extra COVID-related restrictions and, sure, gun laws.

Greater than 80% of Individuals favor instituting common background checks on gun consumers and barring folks with psychological sickness from proudly owning weapons, in keeping with a Pew Analysis Middle ballot. Greater than 60% favor banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammo magazines.

The ballot was taken final September; it’s an inexpensive wager that the majorities can be bigger now. To place it one other manner, the “debate” is over — most Individuals wish to convey gun gross sales and possession beneath higher management.

Gun laws work

One declare widespread amongst pro-gun politicians is that gun laws don’t serve to quell gun violence. (A typical model of this trope is that proposed laws wouldn’t have stopped the most recent newsworthy bloodbath.)

It is a lie, as statistics from the CDC present. States with stricter gun legal guidelines have a lot decrease charges of firearm deaths than these with lax legal guidelines. The primary class consists of California (8.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants) and Massachusetts (3.7). The second group consists of Louisiana (26.3) and Texas (14.2, and the best complete gun-related mortality within the nation, at 4,164 in 2020).

Texas even loosened its gun laws simply months earlier than the Uvalde bloodbath. When Missouri repealed its allow laws for gun possession in 2007, gun-related homicides jumped by 25% and gun-related suicides by greater than 16.1%. When Connecticut enacted a licensing regulation in 1995, its firearm murder charge declined by 40% and firearm suicides by 15.4%.

Make them vote

Maybe essentially the most inexplicable argument justifying congressional inaction over gun legal guidelines is that powerful legal guidelines don’t have any probability of passage, so it’s pointless even to strive. Defeatism within the face of pressing want is inexcusable.

The resistance of Republicans to voting for gun legal guidelines is exactly the easiest purpose for bringing these payments to the ground. There’s no purpose to offer Republican obstructionists a free go — make them rise up and take a vote.

Make them clarify what it’s about making Individuals safer in colleges and workplaces that they discover objectionable, and why they assume that voting towards measures supported by 80% of the general public is correct. Deliver the struggle to them, and present voters the character of the folks they’ve positioned in excessive workplace.

Present the images

Individuals have change into inured to gun violence partially as a result of our tradition minimizes its horrors. We’re awash in essentially the most visceral depictions of shootings in films and tv, however at their core these depictions are unthreatening — certainly, most often they’re meant for leisure.

Even our information packages experience gore — the basic dictum of native information broadcasting has lengthy been “If it bleeds, it leads.”

These circumstances have inoculated us towards the horror of firearm accidents as they happen in actual life — particularly these brought on by assault weapons such because the AR-15. There’s an enormous distinction between listening to the phrases “gunshot wound” and studying what really occurs to the organs of victims of AR-15 assaults. They don’t look something like what we see on TV, and we have to have a real, visceral sense of the distinction.

“These weapons are sometimes employed on the battlefield to actual the utmost quantity of harm potential with the strike of every bullet,” radiologist Laveil M. Allen wrote final week for the Brookings Establishment. “Witnessing their devastating influence on unsuspecting college youngsters, grocery consumers, and churchgoers is unfathomable. The extent of destruction, disfigurement, and disrespect for all times {that a} high-powered assault rifle inflicts on the human physique can’t be understated. Positioned into perspective, most of the tiny Uvalde victims’ our bodies have been so tattered and dismembered from their ballistic accidents, DNA matching was required for identification as a result of bodily/visible identification was not potential.”

You’ll hear the argument that exhibiting pictures of actual victims or the scenes of massacres will solely be extra traumatizing. For some folks, together with the victims’ households, which may be true. However that solely underscores my level — we’ve not been sufficiently traumatized, and the creation of a really efficient mass motion for gun legal guidelines requires that we be traumatized.

As a result of we expertise the horror of gun massacres at a take away, they have an inclination to float out of public consciousness in a distressingly quick time span. Even after the Sandy Hook killings, which took the lives of 20 youngsters ages 6 and seven lower than 10 years in the past, there was one thing distancing about reportage of the occasion. Pictures of among the murdered youngsters have been made public, however they’re images from life, exhibiting the kids smiling at birthday events or gamboling in regards to the playground.

Let’s face it — few Individuals have been eager about the Sandy Hook killings till Might 24, when the Uvalde bloodbath introduced them effervescent again to public consciousness. Would our response be totally different had we seen pictures of school rooms slathered in blood, of youngsters’s our bodies ripped to items by Adam Lanza’s assault rifle?

You wager it might. These photos wouldn’t simply be forgotten. Each time a GOP senator or consultant stood as much as declare that the appropriate to personal assault weapons trumped the appropriate of these youngsters to reside their lives, somebody ought to have produced a kind of pictures and mentioned, “Justify this.”

Our threat is that Uvalde might be simply one other Sandy Hook. Quickly to maneuver off the entrance burner, or quickly buried beneath the choruses of “We will’t go this” or “This gained’t work” or “That is the trail we’ve chosen.” We have to change the phrases of dialogue, or Uvalde will simply be the most recent bloodbath of a protracted line, not the final bloodbath of its form.

Business

Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread

Published

3 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

Biden Administration Adopts Rules to Guide A.I.’s Global Spread

The Biden administration issued sweeping rules on Monday governing how A.I. chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, in an attempt to set up a global framework that will guide how artificial intelligence spreads around the world in the years to come.

With the power of A.I. rapidly growing, the Biden administration said the rules were necessary to keep a transformational technology under the control of the United States and its allies, and out of the hands of adversaries that could use it to augment their militaries, carry out cyberattacks and otherwise threaten the United States.

Tech companies have protested the new rules, saying they threaten their sales and the future prospects of the American tech industry.

The rules put various limitations on the number of A.I. chips that companies can send to different countries, essentially dividing the world into three categories. The United States and 18 of its closest partners — including Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — are exempted from any restrictions and can buy A.I. chips freely.

Countries that are already subject to U.S. arms embargoes, like China and Russia, will continue to face a previously existing ban on A.I. chip purchases.

All other nations — most of the world — will be subject to caps restricting the number of A.I. chips that can be imported, though countries and companies are able to increase that number by entering into special agreements with the U.S. government. The rules could rankle some foreign governments: Even countries that are close trading partners or military allies of the United States, such as Mexico, Switzerland, Poland or Israel, will face restrictions on their ability to purchase larger amounts of American A.I. products.

The rules are aimed at stopping China from obtaining from other countries the technology it needs to produce artificial intelligence, after the United States banned such sales to China in recent years.

But the regulations also have broader goals: having allied countries be the location of choice for companies to build the world’s biggest data centers, in an effort to keep the most advanced A.I. models within the borders of the United States and its partners.

Governments around the world, particularly in the Middle East, have been pumping money into attracting and building enormous data centers, in a bid to become the next center for A.I. development.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Sunday that the rule would ensure that the infrastructure for training the most advanced artificial intelligence would be in the United States or in the jurisdiction of close allies, and “that capacity does not get offshored like chips and batteries and other industries that we’ve had to invest hundreds of billion dollars to bring back onshore.”

Mr. Sullivan said the rule would provide “greater clarity to our international partners and to industry,” while countering national security threats from malicious actors that could use “American technologies against us.”

It will be up to the Trump administration to decide whether to keep the new rules or how to enforce them. In a call with reporters on Sunday, Biden administration officials said that the rules had bipartisan support and that they had been in consultations with the incoming administration about them.

Though companies in China have begun to develop their own A.I. chips, the global market for such semiconductors is dominated by U.S. companies, particularly Nvidia. That dominance has given the U.S. government the ability to regulate the flow of A.I. technology worldwide, by restricting U.S. company exports.

Companies have protested those limitations, saying the restrictions could hamper innocuous or even beneficial types of computing, anger U.S. allies and ultimately push global buyers into buying non-American products, like those made by China.

In a statement, Ned Finkle, Nvidia’s vice president for government affairs, called the rule “unprecedented and misguided” and said it “threatens to derail innovation and economic growth worldwide.”

“Rather than mitigate any threat, the new Biden rules would only weaken America’s global competitiveness, undermining the innovation that has kept the U.S. ahead,” he said. Nvidia’s stock dipped nearly 3 percent in premarket trading on Monday.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in a statement that the company was confident it could “comply fully with this rule’s high security standards and meet the technology needs of countries and customers around the world that rely on us.”

In a letter to Congressional leadership on Sunday that was viewed by The New York Times, Jason Oxman, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a group representing tech companies, asked Congress to step in and use its authority to overturn the action if the Trump administration did not.

John Neuffer, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said his group was “deeply disappointed that a policy shift of this magnitude and impact is being rushed out the door days before a presidential transition and without any meaningful input from industry.”

“The stakes are high, and the timing is fraught,” Mr. Neuffer added.

The rules, which run more than 200 pages, also set up a system in which companies that operate data centers, like Microsoft and Google, can apply for special government accreditations.

In return for following certain security standards, these companies can then trade in A.I. chips more freely around the globe. The companies will still have to agree to keep 75 percent of their total A.I. computing power within the United States or allied countries, and to locate no more than 7 percent of their computing power in any single other nation.

The rules also set up the first controls on weights for A.I. models, the parameters unique to each model that determine how artificial intelligence makes its predictions. Companies setting up data centers abroad will be required to adopt security standards to protect this intellectual property and prevent adversaries from gaining access to them.

Governments facing restrictions can raise the number of A.I. chips they can import freely by signing agreements with the U.S. government, in which they would agree to align with U.S. goals for protecting A.I.

Under the guidance of the U.S. government, Microsoft struck an agreement to partner with an Emirati firm, G42, last year, in return for G42 eliminating Huawei equipment from its systems and taking other steps.

The Biden administration could issue more rules related to chips and A.I. in the coming days, including an executive order to encourage domestic energy generation for data centers, and new rules that aim to keep the most cutting-edge chips out of China, people familiar with the deliberations said.

The latter rule comes in response to an incident last year in which U.S. officials discovered that Huawei, the sanctioned Chinese telecom firm, had been obtaining components for its A.I. chips that were manufactured by a leading Taiwanese chip firm, in violation of U.S. export controls.

The announcements are among a flurry of new regulations that the Biden administration is rushing to issue ahead of the presidential turnover as it tries to close loopholes and cement its legacy on countering China’s technological development. The administration has issued new limits on exports of chip-making equipment to China and other countries, proposed new restrictions on Chinese drones, added new Chinese companies to a military blacklist, and hurried to finalize new subsidies for U.S. chip manufacturing.

But the A.I. regulations issued Monday appear to be among the most sweeping and consequential of these actions. Artificial intelligence is quickly transforming how scientists carry out research, how companies allocate tasks between their employees and how militaries operate. While A.I. has many beneficial uses, U.S. officials have grown more concerned that it could enable the development of new weapons, help countries surveil dissidents and otherwise upend the global balance of power.

Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at the RAND Corporation, said the rules would create a framework for protecting U.S. security interests while still allowing firms to compete abroad. “They are also forward-looking, trying to preserve U.S. and allied-led supply chains before they are offshored to the highest subsidy bidder,” he said.

Business

With bird flu still affecting egg prices, brunch in L.A. may soon cost more

Published

4 hours ago

January 13, 2025

Press Room

With bird flu still affecting egg prices, brunch in L.A. may soon cost more

Ongoing egg shortages in California due to the spread of bird flu among livestock are bringing another early 2025 challenge to local restaurants, especially brunch spots that rely heavily on eggs for menu items.

It’s also unclear how the ongoing fire disasters that erupted Tuesday could affect eggs and other staple ingredients. But, in light of difficult times overall for the industry and a traditionally slow January, some restaurateurs earlier this week said they have already been forced to raise prices for diners, or are weighing whether to do so, according to multiple interviews.

In San Luis Obispo, Philip Lang, who has operated Bon Temps Creole Café for nearly 30 years, said he increased the price on egg items on his menu right before Christmas. For instance, a $15 menu item now costs $17 for two eggs.

Before the bird flu outbreak, he paid $20 for a case of 15 dozen conventional eggs. Since bird flu, the price has kept doubling, starting from about $50 to now about $110 a case.

“Eggs go into all of our dishes,” he said of his restaurant that only opens for breakfast and lunch. “We make our hollandaise with eggs and dressings with eggs.”

He said most diners are understanding but some still express disappointment.

In Irvine, eggs go in just about every dish at Burnt Crumbs, from bestselling Japanese-style soufflé pancakes to the breakfast fried rice, said chef-owner Paul Cao. On an average week, Cao said his kitchen goes through 180 to 225 dozens of eggs. Cao is now having to pay more than double compared to three months ago — up to $130 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.

The H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus continues to spread across the globe, curtailing egg supply and making them more expensive and difficult to find. There’s no sign of relief, with scientists and health officials fearing we’re on the verge of another global pandemic. In California, egg prices have soared to $8.97, a 70% increase in the last month, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Cao said he doesn’t plan to raise prices for now. “I’ll give it until March — first quarter 2025, if this doesn’t trend in the right direction, we will have to raise prices. We can’t keep eating costs,” he said.

He’s afraid of losing customers but said he can’t sustain the price increase for long. “When egg prices go up $2 per dozen, that costs us a couple thousand a month,” he said.

Chef Walter Manzke, second from left, and the kitchen team at République in Los Angeles. The restaurant, like many others, is weighing increasing the cost of some egg dishes as the bird flu outbreak continues to affect egg prices.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

Walter Manzke, who co-owns République with wife and partner Margarita Manzke, said he feels lucky that he can still procure good eggs from his distributor despite the shortage.

He doesn’t expect to raise prices on his menu yet but is definitely feeling the squeeze because so many of his well-known dishes use eggs — including his popular French toast.

“We’re just doing the best we can,” he said of the Hancock Park restaurant that ranked No. 4 last year on The Times’ 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles guide. “Compromising on quality is not an option.”

On Friday, Delilah Snell, who operates Alta Baja Market, temporarily raised prices to her egg dishes by $1 at her restaurant and market in Santa Ana.

Snell is now paying $131 for a case of 15 dozen free-range organic brown eggs. In October, she paid around $70. She said she could pay less for lower-quality eggs but doesn’t “want to compromise the quality” her customers have come to expect.

On the front counter menu of her store, she posted a sign that reads: “Over the past few weeks, our prices have gone up 40% (and are continuing to rise) because of the bird flu. As a result we need to add a $1 surcharge to all dishes with eggs to cover this expense to still provide you with a high-quality product.”

Once prices drop, she said, she’ll remove the surcharge.

The spike in egg prices comes on the heels of a slow COVID-19 pandemic recovery, as many restaurants in Southern California continue to struggle.

Lang of Bon Temps said there is now a notice on top of the menu that alerts customers to the $1 temporary increase per egg.

The notice reads: “Due to the bird flu that has caused the price of eggs to quadruple in recent months, we find it necessary to add a surcharge of a dollar per egg for all dishes containing eggs until the price of eggs comes down. We regret each time we are forced to raise any of our prices. Please know that we are not doing this for profit, only to maintain our business during these difficult times. Thank you for your understanding.”

Lang said he plans to do away with the surcharge once prices go down to about $50 for a case of 15 dozen eggs.

Used and unused eggs sit in a carton of 18 in a Chicago area home Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023.

As egg prices tick up, several shoppers are also reporting shortages.

On Tuesday afternoon, Cao said the egg shelves at Song Hy market in Little Saigon in Garden Grove were more than half empty. The store, known for its inexpensive groceries, was selling cage-free medium eggs for $8.99 a dozen, according to a video he provided.

Around the same time, an egg cooler at a Trader Joe’s in Irvine was already nearly half empty after having just received a fresh shipment late that morning, one shopper said. A day earlier, at a nearby Costco, Cao said there was a line of at least 12 people waiting to grab a case of a dozen eggs from shelves that were half empty.

Some restaurant owners, such as Jasmin Gonzalez, who runs Breezy in San Juan Capistrano, have opted to raise prices on other menu items and avoid a price hike on the restaurant’s popular egg dishes.

Her restaurant — which serves a Filipino-inspired brunch — will be closed for a couple weeks for a remodel, she said, and she’ll likely raise prices on some items once it opens, mostly on higher-margin items, such as coffee. That would help the restaurant offset the price of eggs and other increased costs, including the statewide minimum-wage increase, she said.

Gonzalez said she doesn’t feel comfortable changing the price of her $14.99 breakfast burrito, a bestseller.

“I don’t want people paying $16 or $17 for breakfast burritos,” she said. “I don’t like the way that feels.”

Business

How Poshmark Is Trying to Make Resale Work Again

Published

15 hours ago

January 12, 2025

Press Room

How Poshmark Is Trying to Make Resale Work Again

Lauren Eager got into thrifting in high school. It was a way to find cheap, interesting clothes while not contributing to the wastefulness of fast fashion.

In 2015, in her first year of college, she downloaded the app for Poshmark, a kind of Instagram-meets-eBay resale platform. Soon, she was selling as well as buying clothes.

This was the golden age of online reselling. In addition to Poshmark, companies like ThredUp and Depop had sprung up, giving a second life to old clothes. In 2016, Facebook debuted Marketplace. Even Goodwill got into the action, starting a snazzy website.

The platforms tapped into two consumer trends: buying stuff online and the never-gets-old delight of snagging a gently used item for a fraction of the original cost. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as people cleaned out their closets, enthusiasm for reselling intensified. It was so strong that Poshmark decided to go public. On the day of its initial public offering in January 2021, the company’s market value peaked at $7.4 billion, roughly the same as PVH’s, the company that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, at the time.

Then, the business of old clothes started to fray.

Using the Poshmark app, Ms. Eager and others said, started to feel like trying to find something in a messy closet. The app was cluttered with features that did not work or that she did not use, and it felt “spammy,” she said, sending too many push notifications.

Many platforms found selling used items hard to scale. Now, online resellers are trying to recalibrate. Last year, ThredUp decided to exit Europe and focus on selling in the United States. Trove, a company that helps brands like Canada Goose and Steve Madden resell their goods, purchased a competitor, Recurate. The RealReal, a luxury consignor, appointed a new chief executive as the company tried to improve profitability.

Poshmark is undergoing perhaps the biggest reinvention. In 2023, Naver, South Korea’s biggest search engine as well as an online marketplace, bought the company in a deal valued at $1.6 billion, less than half its IPO price.

Something of a mash-up of Google and Amazon, Naver is betting it can rebuild Poshmark, which has 130 million active users, with the same technology that made Naver dominant in its own country.

It may also help breathe new life into the resale market. Analysts think the resale fashion market still has room to grow in the United States, with revenue expected to increase 26 percent to $36.3 billion by 2028, according to the retail consultancy firm Coresight Research.

New legislation in California could help. The law, passed last year, requires brands and retailers that operate in the state and generate at least $1 million to set up a “producer responsibility organization” to collect and then reuse, repair or recycle its products. Resale platforms like ThredUp and Poshmark could be in a position to help brands carry out that mandate.

At the moment, though, Naver’s focus for Poshmark is more basic: Make it a better place to sell and shop. The company has the “operating know-how” to do that, said Philip Lee, a founder of the media outlet The Pickool, which covers both South Korean and U.S. tech companies.

“They’re trying to renovate Poshmark and then expand the market share,” he said.

A Marriage of Search and Commerce

Poshmark, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, an entrepreneur and former tech executive, and three others. In trying to expand, Poshmark faced a problem common to resellers: Capturing the excitement of the secondhand-shopping treasure hunt while not frustrating buyers with an endless scroll. The company knew it needed better search, as well as interactive elements that gave people more reasons to come beyond paying $19 for a J. Crew sweater.

For its part, Naver was looking for ways to push beyond South Korea, where its commerce and search businesses were already mature. The growing online resale market in the United States presented an opportunity, and also gave the company access to the largest consumer market in the world.

“Commerce is a big growth engine for us,” Namsun Kim, Naver’s chief financial officer, said. And the peer-to-peer sector, where users sell to one another, was still in its infancy, with room to expand. But, Mr. Kim added, “it’s a more challenging segment, and that’s why it’s harder for a lot of the larger players to enter.”

There are two common business models for resale: peer-to-peer and consignment. With consignment, a platform collects and redistributes physical goods. Poshmark uses the peer-to-peer model, which relies on scores of people — many of them novices — haggling over prices and then mailing items to one another. This decentralization can be a headache for brands, which like to maintain a certain level of control of their products. And platforms like Poshmark must make buyers comfortable with trusting the sellers on their site.

Before the Naver purchase, it was difficult to push through needed technological changes, said Vanessa Wong, the vice president of product at Poshmark.

“I would always talk to my engineers and ask, ‘What if we do this or do that?’ They’re like, ‘That’s hard. The effort’s really high,’” Ms. Wong said.

Naver’s purchase offered both the investment and the expertise to pull off the changes. Founded in 1999, the company is everywhere in South Korea.

“We are not just a simple search technology or A.I. service,” said Soo-yeon Choi, the chief executive of Naver, whose headquarters are near Seoul. The company, she said, “alleviates the frustrations of people, which is what is needed to help growth.”

Search built Naver “into the massive power that they are in Korea,” said Mr. Chandra, who stayed on as chief executive after Naver’s purchase. It was the top priority when the company bought Poshmark.

Several new elements for users and sellers have been introduced. With a tool called Posh Lens, users can take a photo of an item and, using Naver’s machine-learning technology, the site populates listings that are the same or similar to the shoe or tank top that they’re searching for. A paid ad feature for sellers called “Promoted Closet,” pushes listings higher on customer feeds.

Poshmark also introduced live shows, some of which are themed, to draw in the TikTok generation and increase engagement. One party auctioned off clothing previously worn by South Korean celebrities, a connection that was made with the help of Naver.

Still, the resale market is going through growing pains and has not quite found its footing since the height of the pandemic. It’s not clear whether the changes taking place at Poshmark will be enough. In May, Mr. Kim, Naver’s finance chief, said in an earnings call that Poshmark’s profitability was improving, but by November, the company was cautioning that growth had slowed because of weakness in the peer-to-peer resale market in North America.

Missteps and Reinvention

The company has already done some backpedaling on unpopular decisions.

In October, Poshmark introduced a new fee structure, which increased costs for buyers. Sellers, fearing that higher costs would make consumers bolt, revolted. Within weeks, the company scrapped the new fee structure.

And there are still user headaches: tags and keywords that help users find what they’re looking for can be miscategorized. Sellers sometimes tag their products incorrectly to get more eyeballs on their less popular products. (Hard-to-offload Amazon leggings, for example, may be listed as Free People apparel.)

The company is beta testing changes with its frequent sellers — people like Alex Mahl, who sells thousands of dollars in apparel on the site each year. And within dedicated Facebook groups related to Poshmark, there’s a lot of chatter about the changes that sellers and buyers would still like to see.

“The only way for it to do well is there’s going to be constant changes,” Ms. Mahl said about the tweaks on Poshmark. “If you were just on an app that never changed — one, it would be boring, and two, the opportunity to just do better wouldn’t be there.”

One recent morning, Ms. Eager, the seller who joined Poshmark back in college, was pleasantly surprised to find that the app had some new features she actually liked. She snapped a photo of her Aerie gray tank top with Posh Lens. Within seconds, the app populated listings of similar products. It was so much better than conjuring up the adjectives needed to describe it.

“Love it,” Ms. Eager exclaimed.