No that never happens /S

I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team he was an idiot and to have fun looking for a new job a few months.

The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own “consulting business.”

1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.

After a couple years “consulting”, the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn’t bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.

Relatively easy to do with strawberries. Look up pictures of greenhouse cultivation of strawberries. You’ll see that the fruit all hang over the edge of the beds/trays.

All you need is a robotic pickers with a color sensor on it.

The court’s decision also introduced the concept of systemic failure, which holds providers liable when they fail to adopt preventive measures or remove illegal content. Now, platforms will be expected to establish self-regulation policies, ensure transparency in their procedures, and adopt standardized practices.

Pretty sure this would cover Lemmy and most traditional forums as long as they have a written policy and standards that are consistently enforced.

In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.

Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.

Taxes can go either way. It depends on how they were written.

The tax code after the Great Depression allowed for massive expansion of public projects in the U.S. It was 63% for the top earners. During WW2 the top tax bracket was at 94%.

When the boomers were all born the tax bracket was above 70% for the top earners. This high tax bracket is what fueled the creation of a large middle class, public infrastructure, schools, research, space exploration, and the massive military buildup and wars. It also acted as an effective anti-minopoly/oligarchy system because the tax system discouraged it.

Then in the 80’s Reagan slashed the taxes for the top earners down to 28%. its never gotten above 40% since then. Most high earning companies have so many exeptions today that the real tax rate is often 0%.

Because of it the infrastructure built during the 50’s-70’s is degrading and falling apart. Public services are declining and the middle class is shrinking as people become more impoverished.

Now I want to see human population density compared to birthrate 25 years later for regions with a current sub-replacement birthrate.

“Losing the social skills required to mate” sounds like many people I know.

I designed my wife’s wedding ring. I drew it up the evening we decided to get married. I still have the drawing. I then found a small independent custom shop and had it made. The diamond is actually small but looks massive because of the design.

Cost me $1,200 for it. Most of it was in the hours of labor to make it back in '00.

I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.

I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.

A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.

The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.

The main draw of movie theatres was a better entertainment experience. A good movie on a large screen with excellent sound.

At my home I now have a 60" TV, surround sound speakers, comfortable couches and the ability to watch any movie/tv I want for free from pirate streaming sites. It’s better than any movie theater in my opinion.

The problem, there’s nothing I want to see. The vast majority of stuff produced due to the extreme consolidation in the film industry is absolutely trash. Lack of competition has led to film studios producing mediocre garbage in a never ending quest to make guaranteed money.

So my teenager uses the setup to play video games on.

I have the same issue. I have a 10 year old laptop that I use as well. My solution was to dual boot Linux mint & Win10. Most of the time I use Mint on that computer and load the windows only when playing that game.

Tech tends to goes through stages:

A need or idea is created. Usually by a small independent entity.

A proof of concept is developed and starts to gain ground.

Investors pour money into the concept to an extreme degree. Tech grows in functionality, matures and develops into a useful tool.

The the investors demand a return on the investment and the money dries up.

Company either goes bankrupt or their product goes to shit.

Freereadfeed.com

Then use the library for the rest of the series if needed. :-).

Large companies do not generally innovate. Their internal inertia prevents them from successfully creating new things. Also the larger a company gets, the more layers of brainless MBA parasites latch on to suck them dry.

Large companies rely on purchasing innovation by buying up a never ending stream of smaller companies. They then take the ideas/products and launch them to a wider market.

Steam has remained small by rejecting massive buyout offers. This has allowed them to remain innovative.

People require different amounts of repetition to remember something in long term memory. The average is 8-10 repetitions if I recall correctly. What we define as gifted is really a lower required number of repetitions. Photographic memory is very rare but it only requires 1 repetition. Most “gifted students” require 2-4 repetitions to recall it. Students that struggle can require 30+ repetitions to recall the information. Some of the learning impaired can have 1000+ repetitions and never learn it.

What’s fascinating to me is that somebody can be a low repetition in some areas but high repetition in others. For example, a person can have a high ability to remember imagery but struggle with names and language.

To add in more complexity, short term memory varies as well. Some people have an exceptionally strong short term memory. These people excel at the study and forget it method. Give them a long sequence to remember for a short while like the old Simon game and they win everytime. Other people struggle to recall a sequence longer than 3 or 4.

Now what your friend is describing is the ability to process information. This is referred to sometimes as critical thinking. Just like memory this varies greatly by individual it also varies by age. Most people don’t start to develop the skill until their mid-20’s if they ever do. A large percentage of the population never develops this ability. Unfortunately this skill also commonly degrades as you get older.

FYI microeconomics is basically a little bit of vocabulary and critical thinking. Most of the text books could really be a pamphlet if they got rid of all the fluff.

Hey now, I know a bunch of farm laborers and started out as one myself.

They are nowhere near qualified for farm labor. That requires being able to work, not just regurgitate platitudes from the most recent bullshit management fad.

I honestly would love to. Unfortunately my banking and accounting apps for my business won’t run on it.

Also the reason I have an iPad for two apps that are not on Android that I have to have for business.

M business laptop is W10 instead of Linux mint like my personal one for the same reason…

I am typing this on a pixel 8

Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.

How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.

What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.

I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.

I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…

All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.