Good point, updating to Android 11 took my Bluetooth connection from "spotty at best" to "nearly too aggressive". If you have multi-point Bluetooth accessories, Android 11+ devices will almost always try to steal your connection if Bluetooth is enabled. I can't tell if it's a feature or an issue, but it's certainly better than the way it used to be.
>I don't think Facebook is constitutionally able to give up ad revenue gains
This "fiduciary duty" meme really needs to die.
Seriously the idea of fiduciary duty [to maximixe profit] is dystopian, corporations don't fuck us over because they have to they do it because they can.
I also blinked at that. But then took it to mean constitutionally in a pure sense - whether they can keep a strength of belief enough to follow through. Unrelated to 'The Constitution' from a US citizen's point of view. Although now I'm pondering just how misplaced and powerful our reverence of that cobbled together document is.
It’s basically a peace treaty. There are things about it that I think are incredibly counterproductive to democracy (and they were designed to be so!), but I shudder at the thought of rolling the dice on scrapping or heavily re-writing it.
The "fiduciary duty meme" is exactly what GP did not mean as per their disclaimer. Constitutionally in this sense means "as a result of it's constitutive makeup", i.e., it's culture, hierarchy, incentive structures, employees, managers etc.
The relevant legal standard is "Don't abuse the company for your own ends", not "you must do everything to get as much money as quickly as possible, consequences be damned!"
It's especially dubious in Facebook's case because Mark Zuckerberg controls the majority of voting shares. If he wanted to run the company straight into the ground I doubt anyone could stop him.
Mark Zuckerberg could not make his salary $800 billion, or donate the entire company to charity. That’s what that means, nothing about business decisions
Mark Zuckerberg couldn't donate Facebook the corporation to charity, but he absolutely could donate all of his personal Facebook shares to charity. If he did that then the charity would have a controlling stake.
I don't think you can sell shares to the public and then deliberately screw over your shareholders. If Zuckerberg acted terribly then he may be exposed to liability.
That's a question of malicious intent - if he intended to directly cause damage to specific shareholders than yea - they'd have a case. General idiocy isn't going to fall into that category though - shareholders all voluntarily bought their shares.
I dont buy that. Lots of other factors beat out efficiency and execution. Sure, it’ll give you a statistically better shot at doing well, but you won’t die without it.
Our current ecosystem is such that you either get big enough to gobble up all real competitors, or you're consigned to irrelevance.
Why that is is where the fundamental disagreement is. One of the proposed reasons is too much regulation, the other is too little. It's (in my opinion) probably both - too much poorly applied, and not enough where it's needed.
It is a strange phenomenon, in that it is so nonsensical, yet so ingrained and self-perpetuating in a way. I can actually agree that it qualifies as a "duty", because it's something the people who make up the corporation honestly feel morally bound to. The idea seems to have become sort of a load-bearing neurosis in the Modern Yuppie. If and when we, by some act of cultural psychiatry, remove it entirely, that's a lot of personalities that are going to just crumble, and I don't know if there are enough hiking trails in California for the finance dude(tte)s in sillycon valley set to all find themselves again...
The very article you cited disagrees! You said they have "an obligation to maximize shareholder profits" while the linked article says they have to "operate in the interests of the shareholders." Those are two very different things!
Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize share value," and you'll see that what you said is the myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably summarizes the argument against the myth in the most neutral way:
No they don’t, except maybe in Michigan (Dodge v. Ford is a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from 1919, applying Michigan state law; as your own article states: “In the 1950s and 1960s, states rejected Dodge repeatedly”, so assuming that Dodge v. Ford represents anything other than a quirk of Michigan law [and potentially an outdated one even there] is...unfounded on the evidence you have provided.)
Dodge v. Ford was basically a perfect storm of saying just the wrong amount.
To summarize the case, Ford was sitting on a huge amount of cash. Some shareholders, in particular the Dodge brothers, wanted it paid out as dividends. Ford said no, and specifically:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes"
Had he said less, or even nothing, that would have been fine. Management is entitled to make whatever business-related decisions they see fit (the "business judgement" rule). If the Dodges disagree with those decisions, they can sell their shares and reinvest the money elsewhere.
Had Ford said more "...and we think doing so will grow the market for our cars", "help us retain our skilled and motivated workforce" or something else vaguely related to success of Ford Motor Company, that also would have been fine.
Unfortunately, what Ford said fell into a gap where it was clear that what he was doing was not a business decision; he was using the shareholders' money for his own personal ends, charitable though they may be. Shlensky v. Wrigley is an interesting comparison. The Cubs refused to have night baseball games due to some...idiosyncratic beliefs about the "true nature" of the sport. This reduced their potential profits, but was nevertheless okay because chasing after the "purists" OR going for mass-market appeal are both reasonable business decisions.
They have a legal obligation to maximise shareholder value, but what that entails courts will generally leave up to the discretion of the company's executives. In fact, the very first paragraph says precisely that:
> At the same time, the case affirmed the business judgment rule
What is the business judgement rule?
> The business judgment rule is a case law-derived doctrine in corporations law that courts defer to the business judgment of corporate executives.
In other words, if the CEO of a company says that he did something because e.g. he believed it was better for the long-term health of the company, the court will generally take his word for it, barring evidence of deliberate malfeasance.
What one cannot do is as Ford did, which was to deliberately try and hurt other shareholders.
Is there any significantly contagious and deadly disease where natural antibodies have proven more protective than large-scale vaccination? Measles? Polio? Diptheria? Flu? Mumps? Rubella? Hepatitis? ...
Dengue. The initial vaccine did not target all subtypes of dengue, causing "severe dengue" in infections after a naive individual was vaccinated. The same could happen if someone moved from one region to another, since the subtypes inhabit different regions. Your body will respond to one subtype's antigens primarily with it's initial conditioning. If you weren't conditioned with that subtype, you get original antigenic sin / severe dengue
The worst-case scenario for a vaccine is not "no immunity", it is negative immunity. If your adaptive immune response outcompetes your innate immune response in binding to antigens, but does not neutralize them, then your immune system will struggle to fight off an infection
I worded it poorly (and it wasn't really anything worth saying in the context of COVID), but:
A population with 5% naturally-induced/80% vaccine-induced immunity might see more spread of a new variant than a population with 25%/60%, however the total outcomes would still be better in the first population; so "less protected" was definitely the wrong thing to say.
Naturally-induced immunity for COVID is stronger because it targets more than just the spike protein, and it presumably[0] grants better mucosal immunity than our current vaccines induce, but of course the risk/cost of natural infection is very high.
The great imbecility pandemic of 2020-2021. People who have experienced severe symptoms, hospitalization and deaths of relatives came out smarter than those who didn't.
https://libimobiledevice.org/