zaphod @ zaphod @lemmy.ca

Just this guy, you know?

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Correction: Parts of Canada. It's a big country with a lot of places in between Vancouver and the GTA.

I did the math and it would take me roughly 90 years to pay off a 2 bedroom fixer-upper.

Where?

There have been a quarter million layoffs at tech companies at every level for the last year or so.

Pro-tip: Tech isn't the whole economy. Over-indexing on that one sector--and SV tech companies in particular--is incredibly myopic.

That's not to say it doesn't suck for people in the industry (which includes me, by the way), but tech is just one sector that's experiencing some very specific dynamics (e.g. rising interest rates killing VC investment, overhiring during COVID, the need to goose share prices after stocks reverted to the pre-COVID mean, etc) that should not be extrapolated when considering the broader economy.

In tech by any chance?

Gas prices are down. General cost of living is stabilized. Unemployment is extremely low and the percentage of eligible workers on the sidelines is dropping. Wages are up for the lowest income levels and continue to climb despite slowing inflation. Black households, in particular, have seen a significant narrowing of the income gap, more so than they've seen in many many years. The percentage of women in the workforce is up and salaries are climbing for them as well. In fact, the post-COVID recovery has been wildly successful when you compare it to post-2008 with respect to the improvements for the poorest among us, which is precisely the opposite of what you're claiming.

Yours is purely an appeal to anecdote. The data is clear. Unfortunately, as study after study has shown, data can't compete with vibes, and we just spent the last two years with the MSM (not to mention social media...) telling everyone a recession was around the corner.

Oh god, I'm old...

Your first two paragraphs make the picture worse, not better.

As for your last, I'm not writing an economics thesis. It was a quick analysis to illustrate a problem no sane person disputes: streaming services have substantially driven down revenue for artists, to the point that for many it's genuinely impossible to create their art while making a living wage.

Is it better than piracy? Sure. At least the artists are getting something (well, unless you drop below Spotify's streaming cutoff, in which case you can get fucked). But it's still a shitty deal and gives consumers someone else to blame as artists slowly bleed out.

And all I see is someone taking this conversation way too personally.

You do you. Speaking for myself, I prefer to understand and be able to trivially inspect and modify the moving parts in the things I deploy so I have a snowball's chance in hell of debugging and fixing things when something inevitably goes wrong.

The economics with the artists haven't changed. Until they do I'll still use them to pay artists a living wage.

Assuming each of those tracks is about 3.5 min long, that's about 250 hours of music. Given your numbers they paid an average of 7 bucks per hour of music.

For context, 25 years ago a typical 45 minute album would fetch 15 bucks. And that's not accounting for inflation adjustment.

I'm sure that's totally sustainable for those artists...

Eh even as a Linux admin, I prefer hand installs I understand over mysterious docker black boxes that ship god knows what.

Sure, if I'm trialing something to see if it's worth my time, I'll spin up a container. But once it's time to actually deploy it, I do it by hand.

As a former product manager where the CEO led the sales team, I feel seen.

Yup. Folks seems to be oblivious to the fact that increased interest rates mean savings accounts are pretty decent these days if you shop around. I'm getting 4.5% in a high interest savings account which would've unthinkable a few years ago.

That's quite literally what bankruptcy proceedings are for.

The point is the value of their assets (i.e. the properties and associated cashflows) exceeds their liabilities (i.e. the loans) and so bankruptcy proceedings are required to figure out how to disburse the value of those assets to the debt holders.

It's all in the framing:

1. Create a company, making sure that personal assets are insulated from corporate liabilities.
2. As a corporation, raise funding through equity and debt to support investing in offices, staff, etc, as needed to operate a new venture. Lenders assess the business to determine if it's a good credit risk, making money if the business succeeds and taking a potential loss if it doesn't.
3. Company goes bankrupt.
4. Company assets are liquidated and disbursed to debt holders (who knew the risks going in) to minimize their losses while owners and employees are insulated from personal liability.

Why? To encourage entrepreneurship: who would want to start a restaurant or coffee shop if they knew they would be personally liable if the business failed?

Is it possible to misuse limited liability corporations for nefarious purposes? Of course. But it's absurd to imply they don't serve an important social purpose.

Given MAID wouldn't be available for a typical case of depression, I'm not sure what your point is other than to ride a hobby horse while diminishing the suffering of people with extreme mental illness.