squokko

"Replacing the CEO" isn't a panacea because most CEOs are pretty average, but when an exceptional CEO does take the helm, they can pull off some amazing feats (e.g. Satya Nadella).

Is there some first-principles reason why this is surprising? Why shouldn't welding pay more than teaching?

These days? "Work from home" there and have your lackeys actually run your business.

It has to do with the company's balance sheet - their list of assets which they use to borrow money.

If they have 1000 units that they say are worth $1 million each, they can borrow from banks as if they are sitting on $1 billion of assets.

If they sell one of those units at $500K, they now look like they have $500 million, which not only impedes their future borrowing but can trigger obligations to their current lenders.

making the toaster is the easy part; getting anyone to buy the toaster is the hard part. The demand is gatekept by companies like Google and Amazon and they will extract almost all of your profit

They’re no less transactional than a used car dealership, they just hide it better

The Polestar 2's 0-60 time is 3.7 seconds. That is faster than a Ferrari F430.

A lot of boards want to lay people off to increase profits, but they're afraid that if they do it, the company will seem like it's failing, causing high performing employees to leave and perhaps even customers to get worried.

But once there seems to be a moment where others are laying off, they can ostensibly claim to be doing a layoff because of broad economic conditions rather than because their company is mismanaged. This means that once a layoff wave gets going, it snowballs memetically.

Of course, if it becomes big enough, it can snowball due to non-memetic reasons (laid off employees have less money, spend less, and cause economic contraction). An example would be BigCo lays off 10,000 people, which ends their Slack subscriptions, which causes Slack to lose money, which causes Slack to lay off people, which reduces their employees' spending on yoga classes, which causes yoga studios to layoff, etc.

Not everyone wants Lamborghini acceleration. I find that riding in a Tesla makes me ill because of how fast it's always lurching forward.

Whether it should or not is a matter of opinion, but the law makes a distinction based on the state of motives of the perpetrator, and the consequences of their actions. Murder has a more severe punishment than attempted murder, and premeditated murder has a more severe punishment than spur-of-the-moment murder.

Ironically enough, one of the rich people who did not have a large household staff was Steve Jobs himself. One thing that money often seems to buy you is a bunch of strangers in your fucking house and he hated that.

What did they do before DoorDash?

What happened to kids who refused to eat 200 years ago? Did they just starve themselves to death? I'm open to information.

I've never used phones with my kids. They throw plenty of tantrums at meals. Sometimes they don't eat. They are alive and fine.

Kids ate food before smartphones existed. They miss one meal, throw one meltdown, and quickly learn that it's better to eat than go hungry.

I've played a few hands of casino poker, just for fun (although I once won several thousand dollars when I was bored at the end of the night and went all-in with 4-7 offsuit and then flopped a full house). After maybe 10 hours spent in casinos I cannot even fathom spending my whole career in stinky windowless rooms late at night with that bunch of degenerates. Absolutely sickening thought

Actually, most studies show that eating ice cream actually is good for you.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

Apple enjoys a level of consumer trust that essentially no other technology business, and almost no other business at all. Whether that's justified or not is a matter of opinion.

I hope she still told everyone on the estate...

The average person simply has no hope of understanding the flows of modern global capital, data, weapons, etc.

Back in the day, if the local leather tanner was polluting the town water supply... you'd just go tell him to stop, and if he didn't...

Nowadays the only people who have any idea what's actually going on are the ones who are profiting the most from it and have no incentive to shut it down.

$1.5B for a screen recorder with customers

hn.algolia.com was a ZIRP phenomenon

I would absolutely love this because I could use the camera that my father used to take all of my baby photos to take photos of my own kids. I would unironically pay $2000 for it in full frame

People who didn't worry about the "population bomb" were considered hopeless denialists just ~15 years ago. People who didn't keep their kids at home for a year were considered hopeless denialists just ~2 years ago. And now people who don't think the world is going to boil itself into steam are considered hopeless denialists.

Go calculate what a small fraction of your total plastic footprint is Lego. Worrying about it for one millisecond is complete lunacy

Changing anything about Lego would be monumentally stupid. The stuff is essentially perfect and has been for decades.

I don't know if it will happen but I'd love to see these oldheads run circles around the whippersnappers.

You're not the first person I've seen with more of a movie-ripping than movie-watching habit. The thrill is feeling like you've gotten one over on the system. The reality is that you made more money for the creator of the film than they would have otherwise gotten from you ($0).

LOL. Imagine the amount of plastic created by Netflix DVD. How many people you can rent one DVD to and how much plastic is in one DVD compared to the packaging in your trash can right now.

Early on, they did find secret algorithmic sauce. By now, they are so large that their edge largely comes from their ability to see stuff before anyone else.

The value per dollar in sponsoring educational content on YouTube is incredible. Imagine how many people are learning from channels like Numberphile, 3Blue1Brown, Steve Mould, etc.