• 0 Posts
  • 1.19K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Tech work can be highly volatile in the business environment. Maybe its different for new tech workers entering the work force, but for a worker owned company, this can mean large losses of revenue for months. I don’t know many tech workers that are willing to take a massive pay cut to continue to stay and commit to a worker owned company if they personally can find better paying work elsewhere.

    From the article:

    "The playful atmosphere of tech offices flush with investment, enjoying luxe catered lunches to attract programming talent, has been replaced by a looming fear that layoffs are just around the corner "

    This boom-and-bust cycle of tech growth and devastation has happened three times during my IT career. Its even more frequent in specific IT niche industries.










  • are they tho? maybe for a quick buck.

    Sustainable business is far less profitable than maximizing profits. The billionaires’ goal is self enrichment irrespective of the impact to others. This is why they’re not pressing the “small profits, sustainable business button”.

    there are lots of factors. for example, unemployed ppl can consume less and pay less taxes, which is bad for the economy as a whole and can devalue the invesrments in all companies of a region.

    Why does a billionaire care about the holistic outcome when there is enough inside their zero sum game for them to still benefit the most?





    • A common insurance co-pay to see a Primary Care Physician (regular family doctor) is $40. That could mean going to the doctor or not for some folks.

    • $20 would pay for five different 30 day prescriptions of common generic prescription drugs.

    • $25 ($5 short) would buy more than a month’s worth of insulin.

    • $20 will by 35lbs or rice. That’s well over 2 weeks worth of meals (at 2000 calories a day).

    • $20 will pay for one month of mobile phone service with unlimited talk and text along with 4GB of data (as well as hotspot functionality)

    • $20 would pay for 100 full charges on a very large ebike battery. Thats enough to go 7500 miles of range on average.


  • Dude, you realize the whole ‘going to the moon’ thing was just a way to convince the public to fund ballistic missile technology?

    And this was true for both sides of the 1960s Space Race.

    • Sputnik 1 was carried into space by the Soviet Sputnik rocket (an adaptation of the R-7 Semyorka Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) on October 4, 1957 source

    • Yuri Gagarin was carried into space on April 12, 1961, by a Vostok 8K72K rocket. The Vostok 8K72K was a three-stage liquid-fueled launch vehicle derived directly from the Soviet Union’s R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) source

    There was fierce competition inside the USSR for which rocket technology would be best used for weapons. The whole “exploration” or “civilian use” thing on both sides (USA/USSR) was just window dressing for weapons programs in space.


  • Just wait until you see how much they waste on unused life insurance!

    I know you’re joking, but lots of people buy really bad life insurance products (whole life, universal variable policies) that are a horrible waste of money in 99.9% of people’s situations.

    A large-ish term life insurance is fine if you have a family that needs to replace your income if you die early. Other than that, you only need enough money to get your remains put in the ground without burdening your family. Estimate $10k or so for full funeral and burial plot if that is your desire. If you just want cremation and spreading of ashes is much cheaper. If you’ve got the cash for that, you don’t even need a small term policy for that.



  • It depends on what you mean by robotic mowers. If you mean motors that drive the wheels and you don’t have to walk behind them (or sit on them), yes, these exist without any cloud service. However, if you mean autonomous, then I don’t think those are here yet. The non-cloud robot mowers use human held remote controls.

    I can think of one that is autonomous and doesn’t require the cloud for operation, but does require the cloud for the inital setup and mapping. Once it has the map loaded in, it doesn’t need an internet connection.