Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500. After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.

There is no one so ignorant, as someone who is quite sure they know all they need to.

I would encourage you to study the writings of your enemies as well as your friends. I have found it most useful.

Have a good one!

privacy as a luxury good

Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…

Sadly wanting privacy is kind of a niche thing, not a large # of people buying iPhones to avoid surveillance. And most TV buyers DGAF… If a large # of them opted out of content recognition we’d still have dumb TVs on the market.

Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(

Well if the risk is that they are paying $300 an hour in unnecessary labor, that’s a risk that would put almost any restaurant under. Perhaps a better answer would be a commission-based system, just build a 20% commission into the price of the food rather than making it a mandatory tip or a line item on the receipt. Problem is that makes marketing harder because you have to explain why your food is 20% more expensive than the competition and try to get people to understand that their bill will actually be the same or less. It also doesn’t necessarily incentivize the employee to provide better service. And while I conceptually agree that should be the responsibility of the manager, in practice it’s difficult. I’m not sure what the solution is. I agree there needs to be one.

Please see my reply to ulkesh here

I think it’s telling that monetizing the operating system is the immediate place one jumps to with this, rather than earning more profit by selling more products which are better for the consumer.

Please don’t take what I said as a suggestion that what we have right now is great. Like anything, capitalism requires checks and balances. In my opinion the heyday of modern capitalism was the mid to late 1900s, because industry was operating at full efficiency but regulation also insured that the average person was able to benefit from that. All three factors of production, land labor and capital, all had a seat at the table.

We have moved a good distance away from that. Capital dominates the conversation, land has made some advances in the form of environmental protection, but labor still takes a distant back seat. And so you get ridiculous situations like a company gets hundreds of millions in tax breaks and subsidies while the CEO gets paid hundreds of millions and the guy who mops the floor is on food stamps. I don’t see this as good capitalism. Labor needs a bigger seat at the table. If a business cannot afford to survive without paying ALL their workers a living wage that allows upward mobility, that business does not deserve to survive. As I see it, that is part of the very base of capitalism.

That said, your suggestion that businesses don’t need a leader is a ridiculous socialist/communist fantasy that doesn’t actually work in reality. Take an established business like McDonald’s. From where you sit it probably looks like it doesn’t need a leader, it just keeps going on its own. But who decides how much the burgers cost? Who decides when to introduce new menu items? Who decides what the promotions will be? Who decides what market segments will they focus on? Who decides whether their next new product will be a salad or a triple cheeseburger? And if you’re going to say middle managers can make these decisions, who decides who those middle managers are?

For what it’s worth, I’m a big fan of employee owned corporations. That doesn’t always work in every segment, but I wish there were a lot more of them. But even an employee own corporation has a CEO, the CEO is just selected by the employees.

As for Elon, your suggestion that he has done nothing shows that you are uninformed. The reason he is not listed as an original founder of Tesla is because of the handful of people who founded it, one already had a business registered and it was cheaper for everybody to buy into that than pay to have it dissolved and pay again to register a new business. I have actually been following them very closely more or less since they started, so I know this better than most. In the early days Tesla was headed by a guy named Martin Eberhard and Elon was just an investor. Eberhard insisted on a design with a two-speed gearbox. This is extremely difficult in an electric car because of the high amounts of torque and extremely high RPMs involved. They went through a couple different versions of this, trying to get one that would last the life of a car, and burned a year or so trying to make it work. If you dig through the archives, you’ll find several news articles of journalists who got to drive the original Roadster, but it was locked in second gear because the shifting didn’t work. Eventually, Elon realized this wasn’t going to work so him and the other investors pushed Eberhard out. There was no love lost, Eberhard fought back, eventually they came to a settlement and Elon became CEO. Please understand I’m not saying this because I like Elon, I’m saying it because I was literally reading the blogs of both sides as it happened. The two-speed gearbox went right in the trash, they went to the one speed reduction gear Tesla uses today, and upsized the motor to give better acceleration. Elon was right about that decision, and he was the one who made that decision, all EVs today use that design.

As for SpaceX, Elon basically started that from the ground up. As I recall the guy who designed the Merlin engine was his first hire. I personally know people who worked for SpaceX and worked directly with Elon. Everyone I’ve talked to says the same thing- Elon is kind of an asshole to his employees, he has absolutely no sense of work-life balance and he wants employees who are 120% committed to the cause and will work late nights and weekends without complaint, he is opinionated and stubborn but in the end he’s right more often than not, but however hard he pushes his people, he pushes himself even harder. Most people don’t last very long in that environment, they put in a handful of years and when their stock options vest they quit, or if they don’t have equity they work until they have a family and can’t put in 60 hour weeks anymore then they quit.

So you want to say Elon is an asshole, you want to say he treats his employees badly, you want to say he doesn’t create a positive environment at his company’s, I will probably agree with all of these things. But you say he doesn’t do anything of value, that is just uninformed.

If you really think he did nothing at all, then you have absolutely no understanding of how business works or how Tesla works. It’s like saying the ship doesn’t need a captain because the captain doesn’t personally operate or clean a part of the ship.

You are right that it is greed. But that is the very point. That is how our economy works. That is how our government works too. The whole point of checks and balances in the US Constitution is that people are expected to be greedy. Rather than rely on a king to be altruistic, it is expected that people at every level will be greedy so their greed is balanced against the greed of others. Same thing is true with our economy, the whole point of capitalist economy is it harnesses the greed of everybody to move things forward. Investors provide capital because they are greedy and want a return on their investment. Their greed is harnessed and put to work, This benefits all by providing a rich market of investment capital for businesses to use. And because they are greedy, because those investors have partial ownership of the company, they affect its direction.

It’s not always perfect. Lately far too many business decisions are made based solely on next quarter results at the cost of long-term success, and that is driven by short-term investors. Boeing is a perfect example of that.

But to write the whole system off and say it’s all greed and it all sucks and it’s all stupid reflects a fundamental lack of understanding how the economy works.

If you want an economy without greed, the best you’re probably going to find is communism. That’s been tried, it doesn’t usually work so well because without a greed incentive pushing things forward, there isn’t incentive to innovate or to work at maximum efficiency.

And as for Elon’s windfall, I think it’s fair to say nobody needs $56 billion. I definitely support a much higher tax rate for the extreme upper income brackets. If you are making more than 50 or 100 million a year income above that should be taxed at a pretty high rate. I am extremely against the extreme income inequality that has happened in this country. When the CEO is making hundreds of millions and the guy mopping the floor relies on government assistance to afford food, something is seriously fucked up. But I think the solution to that is to bring up the lower guy, raise the minimum wage by a fairly significant amount. I think in most places minimum wage should be ¢15 or $20 an hour. And I also favor a prohibition that if any of the companies employees rely on government assistance the company loses all tax breaks and government benefits.

You’re acting like this was his standard salary. It wasn’t. His contact, approved by shareholders at the time, basically offered him a King’s ransom for an impossible miracle, defined with metrics like sales and stock price. Elon delivered the miracle. Love him or hate him, the conditions were met.

Lol I guess that’s what I get for using voice typing

You can like him or you can dislike him, both are valid positions for various reasons.

However the fact is, his huge compensation plan was at the time a wild shot that would only kick in if the company achieved certain performance metrics that were considered impossible. Under Elon, Tesla achieved all of them.

Whether he is the right person for Tesla or not in this moment is immaterial IMHO. What matters is the performance. Contract was a King’s Ransom in exchange for an impossible miracle, and the miracle happened. So pay the man what he is owed.

Fire him after that if he’s the wrong person to keep leading Tesla. But pay him what he is owed.

That’s when an operating system is supposed to do. They make mistakes when they make it worse. Usually, the operating system starts worse and eventually gets tolerable. That happened with Windows 10. Initial versions were far inferior to Windows 7, but now it’s at a pretty good state. Windows 11 is a pile of fucking garbage. There is no compelling feature in Windows 11 that would make anyone want to upgrade. There are compelling reasons not to upgrade, such as advertising, menus that require more clicks to get the same shit done, forced use of Microsoft account, etc.

There’s also the fact that Windows 11 refuses to run unless you have a handful of specific hardware in your computer, such as TPM 2.0, and a relatively modern processor. There is no technical reason for this requirement, it was discovered very early on that if you override the check it will install and run just fine. But Microsoft seems determined to get people to throw away their older but still perfectly good computers.

That is a very big part of why Windows 10 is still so popular. If you have a computer from six or seven years ago that you’ve upgraded once or twice, it’s probably still perfectly good. No reason to throw it away for Windows 11 when you can keep on trucking with Windows 10.

Of course they can’t. It’s gotten so bad they ship their TVs with antivirus on them. The only reason anyone uses their Android phones is they have the best hardware, most of their add-on software is just useless gimmicks people turn off. Tizen on watches was never going to work. Apple has a large enough ecosystem to attract app developers. Google has a large enough ecosystem to attract app developers. Samsung does not. Smartest thing they could do now is shut down their remaining software development. Ship the TVs with vanilla Google OS like LG, strip the bloatware off their phones, etc. They would lose face but their products would become way better.

I know, right? This seems so fucking obvious to me. Maybe I’m just old school, but I still believe if you come out with a new product and it sucks you should pull it from shelves and go back to the older better one that people liked before you drive all your customers away.

That doesn’t seem to be the attitude of modern tech tho, SOP now seems to be if you come up with a new version and it sucks and everybody hates it, you double down, keep telling people why it’s actually better and your customers don’t know what they want and refuse to change course until either you fix it or all your customers leave. This apparently is better in some way. Not sure how, but most of the companies seem to be doing it.

My thought exactly. If this was back in like 2010, it would be a real oh shit moment, The key to the kingdom has been leaked. Now I don’t think anybody really cares other than SEO spammers who will game the system even more than they already are.

Google search is crap and has been crap for some time. Not sure any others are better. But it started going downhill with the Google Plus social network, when they removed “+” as a search operator so you could better search for ‘Google+’ that was the first time they messed with Search to further some other business goal. It wasn’t the last time. Back when Google was good, they publicly said their goal was to get you off their site as fast as possible. Now the results reek of engagement algorithm bullshit.

One could hope but I don’t think it’s likely.

This thing is way too half baked to be in production. A day or two ago somebody asked Google how to deal with depression and the stupid AI recommended they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge because apparently some redditor had said that at some point. The answers are so hilariously wrong as to go beyond funny and into dangerous.

Quite true. Keeping in mind everything but the serialized frame is unregulated (and probably unregulatable) accessories, that makes assembling illegal guns even easier. Just build, machine, import, jury rig, etc a frame, and buy the rest legally including all the stress parts like barrel and slide…

Right, and don’t forget that guns are a lot easier to manufacture than drugs. All you need is a decent machine shop. So they could be made domestically with a night shift at a legitimate machine shop business, or made elsewhere and imported with the illegal drugs that are already being imported. The black market will provide what criminals want. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.

You aren’t giving the black market enough credit. Right now most of the illegal guns start as legal ones, and are either stolen or straw purchased. That’s the case because that’s the easiest/cheapest way to get them, NOT because it’s the only way. Even if you completely cut off that supply, even if you somehow ended all civilian gun sales in the US, it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. Guns are not difficult to make. Any decent machine shop can make guns, and unlike a drug lab, that machine shop has a legitimate daytime purpose so it can operate out in the open, pay taxes, employee people, just have a ‘night shift’ that makes guns.

And even if we could somehow cut that off too, which we can’t, we illegally import billions of dollars worth of drugs every year. The government spends $30 billion a year trying to stop this, with pretty much no effect. If it’s that easy to import illegal drugs, why do you think it would be any harder to import illegal guns?

Finally, you say gun owners aren’t being responsible because their guns are being stolen. How exactly do you expect to stop somebody who breaks into your house from stealing your stuff? You can put your guns in a safe but the thief can just steal the safe because that’s a guaranteed payday.