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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I think they’re going to give him newly-issued stock, not cash. However, the newly issued stock will not be backed by new capital (i.e. nobody would have given the company money in exchange for the stock), so what will happen is that existing shares will have their values diluted, i.e. they will be worth less.

    In other words, shareholders will pay for Elon’s compensation by devaluing their investments, and not by drawing money out of Tesla’s coffers.

    $56B is roughly 10% of Tesla’s market cap of $581B, so shares should be devalued by about that same rate.




  • You don’t need to get rid of private property to undo a lot of the damage done by landlords. You can build subsidized housing to compete. You can write tax codes to make it unprofitable for people to own more than one house. You can tax land by area instead of by built value to encourage building high-density housing.

    There are a lot of levers that other countries have been willing to pull that partially counteract the damage of landlording, but the US has been reluctant to touch.







  • The description is a vast oversimplification of the fall of the Roman Empire, of course.

    Like the game Monopoly, unrestrained capitalism will always end up with a few people owning almost all the value while everyone else live in poverty, and it will always end up in systemic collapse because you can’t get infinite value out of finite resources. At some point the game will be over.

    But unrestrained capitalism doesn’t exist, even in today’s very unequal world. There are forces that undo the momentum of capitalism, including taxation, regulation, trade barriers, and public goods and services. Some countries do this better than others.

    I happen to think that regulated capitalism, balanced by a heavy emphasis of wealth taxation and investment in public goods and services, is better than any other system that relies on non-monetary control of resources. It can be sustainable, but not in its current state.




  • Apps can get woken up when a remote notification arrives that has the content-available key. Apps are woken up in background mode, at which point they have a few seconds to do whatever they need to do to refresh their content cache. This, of course, often leads to the app making a connection to the server, which exposes the user’s IP address.

    I think the sin here is that some apps always set the content-available key regardless of whether there is content to be retrieved or not. That turns the notification into a surveillance tool, allowing the app to check in periodically.




  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldAmazon's Silent Sacking
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    6 months ago

    Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

    The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

    Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.





  • The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.

    Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.