wiki-user: car

  • 0 Posts
  • 144 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle



  • I use the back buttons as alternative shoulder buttons.

    My right bumper button broke and I can’t find cheap replacement daughterboards, so bandaid it is. I can’t just solder in a new switch because the leads on the PCB broke. Seems to be a failure common mode for the bumpers if you ever hit the corner or drop it. The way the bumper is designed transfers the full force directly to the PCB instead of to the shell or any actual structural component.









  • We have plenty of things to be old grumpy grouches about.

    “Those banks ruined the American dream and we bailed them out!”

    “Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied the government to allow them to poison our planet in the name of profit!”

    “Those Disney crooks consolidated all media and destroyed independent creative ventures!”

    “Back in my day we could afford a house if we saved 10 years of earnings for a down payment and then took out a loan eventually totaling twice the value of the purchase price. You kids have it easy with your rental sleeping pods and low-monthly rate outdoors park subscriptions. You don’t even contribute to furniture or clothing industries because you don’t own a place to put any!”



  • The bottom 20% of earners aren’t likely to make the same amount in CA vs TX.

    California’s minimum wage is $16. Working 40 hours (hard on a minimum wage job for reasons) brings $640 a week. 10.5% of that is $67

    Texas’s is $7.25. 40 hours of that job is $290. 13% of that is $38.

    In this bad example, a minimum wage earner in California pays almost double the tax than a minimum wage worker in Texas. It’s a bad example for many reasons, including us not taking into account the extra spending power the California worker has after taxes.




  • I’m not an economist but that makes sense to me.

    What about a modified scenario:

    A small island has three cupcake makers operating out of their homes: Meta, Alphabet, and Bytedance. Each has captured a section of the island’s market with cupcakes and at this point, there’s no real opportunity for growth. Meta can’t convince Bytedance’s customers to switch because they prefer other flavors. Meta would need to purchase one of the other cupcake companies in order to expand.

    None of the cupcake makers are interested in selling their companies. They consider themselves elite and their successes feed into the CEO and shareholder perceptions of value and success.

    Now, we consider that one of the cupcake companies is funded by a rich uncle from a different country. The island’s elders decide that the uncle’s influence is too great and orders Bytedance to sell its cupcake company or leave the island.

    We’ve established earlier that people who like Bytedance cupcakes don’t necessarily want to eat Meta or Alphabet cupcakes, so if they leave the market, those customers may be gone for good. They may have a change of heart and decide that cupcakes of any flavor are fine, but they may also be angry that the government forced their favorite place out of business. In any case, Meta and Alphabet cannot rely capturing this segment of the market to grow.

    Faced with the dilemma of possibly gaining customers organically or definitely gaining customers by purchasing their preferred product brand, I’d argue that the remaining companies may jump on the opportunity to purchase Bytedance before they are forced out. None of the cupcake companies were up for sale in a traditional sense before, so this was never a realistic path to achieve growth.




  • I’m not arguing against them explaining their rationale. I originally argued that they shouldn’t be taken as experts.

    Zuckerberg and Musk “get” to do these things because they are in the US, with majority US-based workers, running off US-based infrastructure. If any of these platforms are being used to facilitate attacks against the US, the government can choose any number of methods to step in and enforce compliance to mitigate the threat. That’s it. This is about free speech in that not all speech is protected. If somebody uses TikTok to perform the digital equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater, the government sees a need to control it.

    If Facebook was run and operated out of Tunisia, I’d expect these same conversations to be happening with them as well.