napoleonsdumbcousin @ napoleonsdumbcousin @feddit.de

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2 yr. ago

Big chunk of the funding is from the Saudis though - and they have a very vested interest in trashing twitter.

This does not address any of the points above though. The Saudis could have just bought it for half the money and closed the doors.

It’s also entirely possible the truth is somewhere in between - people who knew he couldn’t manage his way out a paper bag working ego boy into buying twitter and ketting the inevitable happen. He’s not exactly hard to manipulate.

Manipulate into doing what? Buying twitter? I think it is very likely that he just attempted market manipulation and failed. Now he is trying to make the best out of the situation and transform Twitter into the company he actually wants. Except he is absolutely incompetent. I don't see where anybody manipulated him into doing anything. Everything that happened seems very much like him.

Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.

1. When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.
2. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
3. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
4. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.

Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4855307

They did in fact do that in the English translation of some Arabic bios:

He had written in his bio that he was Palestinian, followed by a Palestinian flag and the word "alhamdulillah" in Arabic - which translates to "praise be to God" in English. However, upon clicking "see translation", viewers were given an English translation reading: "Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom".

The linked article in this post is a cut down version of the original BBC article below, except it somehow lost all of the important content in the process: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67169228

I spent the last half an hour trying to find anything related to different intelligence levels of male and female cats.

I did not find anything.

Male cats tend to be more playful and affectionate, but there is no difference in intelligence.

I'm not sure if it works with YouTube

I can confirm that uBlock Origin blocks Youtube Ads.

My question was more specific than that. I absolutely understand why it is important to sanction high-tech products and stop Russia from exporting their goods.

But western companies selling non-critical goods inside Russia felt more like russian economic dependancy to western companies to me, which (for me as a layman when it comes to economy) seemed preferable to Russia having an independent economy. Thats where my question came from.

Now I realized that rather than "dependant economy" or "independant economy" the intended goal in this case is "no economy", although i am doubtful whether that will really work.

Good point. Thanks for your insights.

If they imported some ingredients before and then had to switch to local suppliers after the pullout ... doesn't this also benefit Russia, since now all of the production is national and they require less imports?

It is not like making food or soft drinks is really high tech. At worst, it is just going to taste a bit different if the ingredients are different. Or other, already local companies might gain market share.

Maybe, but not without startup investment and knowledge. All of that isn't free, and if an economy is unstable, no-one is going to commit money into it.

At least the knowledge is already there. Pepsi is not going to take the workers in Russia away with them. And as far as I know the investment is mostly the cost of buying the assets from the western company. For example the russian McDonalds branch just reopened with a new name at the same locations.

I have a genuine question that maybe somebody with more economic knowledge can educate me in:

How is continuing the sale in Russia helping Russia? As I understand Russia is gaining money on the sales taxes, etc. but the rest of the earnings will go to the US parent company, which cannot be taxed directly by Russia. If Pepsi backs out, wouldn't operations just be replaced by a rebranded russian company, where all of the earnings would be under russian "sphere of influence"?

I genuinely do not understand why Pepsi backing out is considered bad for Russia. I thought countries generally prefer national companies over foreign ones.

It is not about how many animals a cat kills. The question is "how many kills are sustainable for the local animal population?". And that number will always be different depending on where you are. In North Africa cats are literally native animals and in Europe they have been held as free-roaming pets for thousands of years.

The source is NABU = "Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union" (the largest non-profit nature conservation organization in Germany)

Translated from german:

But you have to look at the overall picture: only in human settlement areas are cats a serious factor that can partially lead to a decline in bird populations. But in fact, bird populations are increasing there, while they are decreasing especially in agricultural landscapes, but also in forests. Blaming these declines on cats would be far too simplistic. The greatest threat to biodiversity is and remains the progressive degradation of habitats by humans.

https://www.nabu.de/tiere-und-pflanzen/voegel/gefaehrdungen/katzen/15537.html

They recommend castration to limit the cross-breeding of house cats with wild cats, but see no general problem in free-roaming house cats.

That depends on where you live. Every ecosystem is different.

Australia or USA? Yes thats bad.

Central Europe? Not so much.

The original contract with the company RWE was made in the 1990s and included destroying whole towns for the coal mine, which was planned to be in use until 2038.

What we see now is a compromise between RWE, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government to save the remaining towns and close the mine earlier (in 2030). The wind turbines are from 2001 and are nearing the end of their lifecycle.

I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities' bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.

It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century's worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.

The "medical exemption" is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a "lifeline" for disabled people.

The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.

No? Nobody thinks that?

My comment was just a response to the following:

Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)

...which for some reason suggests that the introduction of electric cars leads to premature scrapping of existing cars - which is bullshit.

While I partly agree with your argument at the end of your comment, I think your examples are really unfitting.

Only single-use plastic straws are banned. There is also an exemption for straws that are necessary for medical reasons. The needs of disabled people are included in the exemption. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-003536-ASW_EN.html

If people buy a new car, the old one (if still functional) typically enters the second-hand market, not the landfill. There is no reason why this would be different if the new car is an electric vehicle.

The carbon footprint is a perfectly fine concept on its own, the problem is just that some people shit on it with their private jets, which are a legitimate concern. Some people also argue that "most of the pollution is done by corporations, not individuals", completely ignoring the fact that these corporations only do it while producing goods for the people. That does not mean that we can just blame the people for it, but everybody has the responsibility to vote for policies that keep the corporations in check.

Recycling is really bad in some countries, but works pretty well in others. For example in Germany 56% of plastic waste is recycled, 44% burned. 90% of paper is recycled. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/das-solltest-du-ueber-recycling-wissen/#l%C3%B6sung4

AFAIK he just implemented regional pricing. The price is the same in Euro.

My point was also never that it has to be one specific price, but to raise awareness to the fact that the old prices of Sync for Reddit are not actually sustainable anymore for Lemmy.

Of course a single user is irrelevant, but in principle and if it would evolve into a larger trend: yes. At least if the dev wants to keep paying his bills. That is how business works. And with lower user counts at some point the required price per user would be too high to be competitive. Then the dev would have to abandon the project, since it would not be profitable anymore. He is a full-time developer after all.

I literally just explained why the price per person needs to be higher now. It is not about server costs. It is about the cost of app development and maintenance.