"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
These people have all set up financial constructions that will see them and their children safely into old age with the very best of medical care, pocket money to the tune of being able to just buy off the whole evening of their favourite fancy restaurant for the night for just the two of you on a whim, and owning one or two private fucking islands in perpetuity, whatever happens to their megacorps.
They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.
What they don't have is financial constructions that would leave them in nominal control when they go down that path. And they absolutely do want to stay in control, or else they would have sold a long time ago.
Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.
> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
But are there any that don't overheat when you try to funnel dual screens through the USB-C/TB4?
The only setup I have that doesn't is a super minimal one that has a single DP out that feeds a daisy-chain (and a single USB out that feeds a simple hub for low bandwidth peripherals, and a PD in). Unfortunately, most of the screen pairs that I run don't do daisy-chain.
Every other hub I tried eventually got me to give up and connect one of the screens through direct HDMI.
The key is to not use TB4; that's far more energy intensive to handle than DP1.4 alt mode (+ MST for 2 displays). Basically the dock needs to be a little shitty and not have too many features...
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.
But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
The magic sauce in terms of bubbleability is that the product is all secret and investors can't form any natural opinion beyond what's published in company performance publications. Because they aren't allowed to know anything beyond that. It's just blind trust, "governments have bought before, they might continue buying, perhaps buy more". Reminds me a bit of the psychological mechanisms that make a con work, might be something to it.
I'm running an LG initially released in 2013 and the only thing I'm not happy with is that about a year ago Netflix ended their app for that hardware generation (likely for phasing out whatever codec it used). Now I'm running that unit behind an Amazon fire stick and the user experience is so much worse.
(that LG was a "smart" TV from before they started enshittifying, such a delight - had to use and set up a recent LG once on a family visit and it was even worse than the fire stick, omg, so much worse!)
Fire Stick is the most enshittified device (which is why it was so cheap). AppleTV is fantastic if you're willing to spend $100. You don't need the latest gen; previous gen are just as good.
Count me in as another one with a longstanding mostly dream project aiming for human enjoyable notation grammar.
For me it was coming from tracker notation (buzz), where i was wildly underwhelmed by all that whitespace for timing (well, empty cells for timing) and the lack of parameterizable macros. A seriously underexplored field, perhaps because almost everybody who ever started got pulled in by the lure of textually defined synthesis.
And they said five year plans struggled with predicting demand ;)
I'd rather go with "for any delta in mining convenience between solar systems, there exists a level of FTL magic where shipping would become economically feasible"
Perhaps space slow steaming might be an option if your goal was to make a Dyson sphere exist before the star inside burns out?
Hogwash! We can do it much faster than that. With a machine in Alpha Centauri capable of flinging rocks full of rare earth metals back towards the solar system at 1/10th the speed of light, we could be up and running in <150 years.
This feels about as realistic as most of the spacetech proposals I hear.
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
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