Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
After being acquired by Google, YouTube got better for years (before getting worse again). Android really improved for a decade or so after getting acquired by Google.
The Next/Apple merger made the merged company way better. Apple probably wouldn’t have survived much longer without Next.
I’d argue the Pixar acquisition was still good for a few decades after, and probably made Disney better.
A good merger tends to be forgotten, where the two different parts work together seamlessly to the point that people forget they used to be separately run.
One of the worst companies in recent years has been Purdue Pharma, which worked with the also shitty McKinsey to get as many Americans addicted to opioids as possible, and make billions on the epidemic.
Both Purdue and McKinsey were privately held.
Koch industries is also a terrible privately held corporation.
Being public versus private doesn’t make a difference, in my opinion.
I used to be really into cars in the late 90’s. But I got into other stuff since, and car stuff kinda fell off my radar.
Last week I read an article talking about how automatic transmissions are up to like 8 gears on average. And cars seem so computerized now, I’m wondering whether the old mechanical systems for things like variable valve timing have just given way to totally electronic systems.
What can you tell me about what has happened since, say, 2000, in regular ICE cars?
Like many others, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in 2020, but fell off sometime during the year after that.
But a friend of mine stuck with it, and expanded into sourdough pizza doughs for NY style or Neapolitan style pizzas in his backyard pizza oven. He had a bunch of us over today, and I don’t think I understood everything he was saying (he was doing 60% hydration for 00 flour, but stuff I didn’t quite catch about when to knead/rest), but I can say that the pizzas he was making were delicious, and he made it seem so effortless to stretch the dough out to around 14 inch (35cm) diameter. And it was kinda infectious to see his enthusiasm for something he’d been churning away at for the last few years, explaining a bunch of things to a bunch of friends gathered around, and just having a great time on a Sunday afternoon.
So a bunch of us are probably gonna try our hands at the same thing, and form a bit of an amateur pizza group, texting our successes and failures to each other.
It’s certainly interesting that people are exploring other options for creating hot dark beverages that taste at least somewhat similar to coffee, but it’s also entirely possible that synthesized caffeine makes its way into other beverages entirely. Obviously there’s tea as a substitute, but there are also lots of soft drinks and energy drinks with caffeine.
So long as caffeine remains cheap, increasing price of coffee will likely be met with caffeinated substitutes that have nothing to do with the coffee plant.
Given I’ve been described as a right with conspiracy theorist for saying that capitalist countries experience less starvation than socialist ones, I’m going to have to take this assessment with a grain of salt.
That’s not the methodology used, unless your description of starvation literally includes QAnon hashtags:
Tracking commonly used QAnon phrases like “QSentMe,” “TheGreatAwakening,” and “WWG1WGA” (which stands for “Where We Go One, We Go All”), Newsguard found that these QAnon-related slogans and hashtags have increased a whopping 1,283 percent on X under Musk.
And if not, then I’m not sure what your observations add to the discussion.
Gas stoves are simply much, much better to cook with than resistive heating electric stoves. You don’t need to lie, you just need to try both out and come to that conclusion on your own.
Induction stoves do address almost all of the drawbacks of resistive electric heat, but are significantly more expensive than gas at the entry level: usually about twice as much for the stove/range itself, and then operating costs and maintenance tend to cost more over time. But it also makes certain high end features much more accessible: French cooktop style flexibility, precise temperature control, easier to clean, etc., so high end induction is comparable to high end gas.
I’m personally interested in seeing a direct comparison of which air pollutants are released by cooking the exact same dish in induction versus gas. I’ve seen some small studies analyzing resistive heat versus gas, but nothing that compares the actual high heat cooking discussed in this article.
Anecdotally, I’ve set off smoke detectors with electric stoves, so obviously the cooking itself can create air pollutants. I’m just interested in seeing that quantified between cooking methods.
The article specifically did ask two other people, who gave more equivocal answers, saying that the flame is part of the answer but that most of it comes from just the high temperature.
Either way, on this particular question, you can visually see the flame ignite the aerosolized droplets. Note that it’s not unique to Chinese or wok cooking, as you can see a similar phenomenon with French chefs sauteing mushrooms in butter, where the flame can flare up at the edge of the pan. The taste comes specifically from that flame above the food, not below the pan.
There seems to be a misunderstanding here. Who’s keeping ill gotten gains? This is like the Madoff case where the investments on paper simply didn’t exist. There are no gains, much less ill gotten gains, that aren’t being returned to victims.
That’s like telling Madoff’s victims they get paid back in 2024 the amount they invested in the 1990s.
No, people are getting paid based on the value of their investments at the time of the FTX collapse, not tracing back years to when they first deposited funds. That distinction makes a huge difference, especially in a case like Madoff (or the original Ponzi scheme by Charles Ponzi himself).
Yeah, FTX stole customer investments, sold them, then invested that cash in other stuff and hand out cash to executives. Some of it was traced to specific people (including SBF and his parents), and the restructuring officers clawed that back. Some of the investments paid off, some didn’t, but the end result was that there was enough to repay people based on what things were worth on the bankruptcy petition date.
Convenient for who? The people who orchestrated the theft are going to prison. The people who came in to pick up the pieces are the ones who were able to claw back the money to pay back the victims.
The FTX restructuring officer wrote a letter to the criminal court specifically arguing that SBF’s argument was bullshit for all sorts of reasons, and the court agreed: “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on his sentence.”
Plus that argument and a few other statements he made showed his lack of remorse, which denied him credit under the guidelines for acceptance of responsibility, and probably factored into his fairly harsh 25 year sentence.
I’m too old for school shooter drills, but I’m like basically the perfect age for being terrified of velociraptors after watching Jurassic Park in theaters. Not only do I know how to barricade a door, but I also know how to use mirrors to visually trick people into seeing hallways that aren’t there!
Both here and on reddit communities/subreddits, especially big ones, is a difficult place to hold a discussion on the topic of that community. Take for example technology, I could enjoy to discuss anything from SR-IOV to maglev trains. But the technology subs are filled with business news of companies run by eccentric...
And the comment-section on those type of post isn’t the right place for a “philosophical” discussions that would otherwise be on topic for that sub/community, but exactly align with topic of that post or news article.
Can you explain why you believe this? I’ve always understood deep dives into the topic or context or general issues raised by an article to be fair game, whether we’re talking the comments on the news article itself, a link on Reddit, a link on Hacker News, a link on a vBulletin/phpBB forum, or even old newsgroup/listserv discussions.
Reddit’s decision to start allowing “self” posts that were only links back to the comments thread itself (showing just how link-centered the design of reddit originally was, that every post had to have a link to something) came after the discussions around links became robust enough to support comments-first threads.
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
IT IS SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS POLLUTING THAN LITERALLY ANY OTHER OPTION!
It’s not cheaper. New nuclear power plants are so expensive to build today that even free fuel and waste disposal doesn’t make the entire life cycle cheaper than solar.
Can you name an example? Because the reactor constructions that I’ve seen get delayed have run into plain old engineering problems. The 4 proposed new reactors at Vogtle and V.C. Summer ran into cost overruns because of production issues and QA/QC issues requiring expensive redesigns mid-construction, after initial regulatory approvals and licensing were already approved. The V.C. Summer project was canceled after running up $9 billion in costs, and the Vogtle projects are about $17 billion over the original $14 billion budget, at $31 billion (and counting, as reactor 4 has been delayed once again over cooling system issues). The timeline is also about 8 years late (originally proposed to finish in 2016).
And yes, litigation did make those projects even more expensive, but the litigation was mostly about other things (like energy buyers trying to back out of the commitment to buy power from the completed reactors when it was taking too long), because it took too long, not litigation to slow things down.
The small modular reactor project in Idaho was just canceled too, because of the mundane issue of interest rates and buyers unwilling to commit to the high prices.
Nuclear doesn’t make financial sense anymore. Let’s keep the plants we have for as long as we can, but we might be past the point where new plants are cost effective.
It is understood that Ireland and some other EU states will announce formal recognition of Palestine once a peace initiative – expected in the coming weeks – is under way. Sources were reluctant to put a date on this but said it would be “sooner rather than later”, and was a matter of weeks rather than months....
Don’t forget “foreign power just starts drawing borders” like India/Pakistan partition and the ensuing chaos, or the Sykes-Picot Treaty carving up the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
A furious China launched “punishment” drills around Taiwan on Thursday in what it said was a response to “separatist acts”, sending up heavily armed warplanes and staging mock attacks as state media denounced newly inaugurated President Lai Ching-te....
Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.
Does enshitification happen because companies are publicly-traded?
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification? Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders, even if that means utterly ruining their original product (Reddit, Boeing, etc.), yes? What do you think?
What's a hobby or interest of yours that you really love explaining to others?
What’s something you love, and love describing or explaining to people who are new to that interest, hobby, or activity?
He revealed the secrets ! (jlai.lu)
Your Coffee Is About to Change, Whether You’re Ready or Not (slate.com)
archive.is/NHhH1
Thank you, Lemmy users: I have a working Linux laptop for the first time in 8 years! (imgflip.com)
I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I’d ever be here again....
"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says (mashable.com)
Archived link....
Can electric woks produce great stir-fry? (grist.org)
Collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX says it has billions of dollars more than it needs to repay customers (www.bbc.com)
The firm says that once it has sold off its remaining assets it will have as much as $16.3bn to cover the debts, which stand at around $11bn....
Both of Biden’s Key Economic Advisers get Basic Econ Wrong (mises.org)
Columbia Student Terrorists? NYPD Must Think We’re Pretty Dumb (jacobin.com)
I would like communities to be a better place for discussion.
Both here and on reddit communities/subreddits, especially big ones, is a difficult place to hold a discussion on the topic of that community. Take for example technology, I could enjoy to discuss anything from SR-IOV to maglev trains. But the technology subs are filled with business news of companies run by eccentric...
The race to decarbonise the world’s economy risks repeating the mistakes of the colonial era by building industries on forced and child labour, rights advocate warns (www.smh.com.au)
Almost 90 per cent of the global supply for polysilicon, a common raw material in electronic devices and solar panels, comes from China, and about half of that comes from Xinjiang, the north-western province that is home to the Uyghurs, says Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free, a charity dedicating to fight forced labour....
Delay ‘not credible any longer’: Recognition of state of Palestine by Ireland and some EU states expected in coming weeks (www.irishtimes.com)
It is understood that Ireland and some other EU states will announce formal recognition of Palestine once a peace initiative – expected in the coming weeks – is under way. Sources were reluctant to put a date on this but said it would be “sooner rather than later”, and was a matter of weeks rather than months....
China launches 'punishment' war games around Taiwan (www.reuters.com)
A furious China launched “punishment” drills around Taiwan on Thursday in what it said was a response to “separatist acts”, sending up heavily armed warplanes and staging mock attacks as state media denounced newly inaugurated President Lai Ching-te....
What exactly is the "language" dropdown in creating comments/posts?
Three questions:...