Just a guy, doin’ stuff.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 27th, 2023

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  • Sway@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldToot toot
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    27 days ago

    He was also a taxonomist with a specialty in parasitology (I worked for him doing parasitology work on fish) turns out when he first met his to be wife (anecdote that came directly from him) he went fishing, and brought the fish to his to-be in-laws where he was sure to point out evert parasite in the fish that they would then go on to eat.





  • So, if his divestment of such a large amount shares in either company would have a negative impact on stock price, wouldn’t the other share holders have a say in the matter? They typically frown upon someone acting in a manner that will devalue their share prices. I’m honestly asking bc I don’t know the ins and outs, but I would assume that if Elon were to just try and sell shares to pay off his problem the pitch forks are going to come out from other share holders.

    Also, wouldn’t the banks potentially be in a conflict of interest? Presumably those institutions who gave him the loans have invested clients money into those stocks potentially? Again, just asking the question, bc this seems like a major boondoggle that could really fuck over a lot of people in a variety of ways.


  • Sway@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldToot toot
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    27 days ago

    I worked for a prof who prides himself on being an absolutely disgusting human being. Everyone has stories about talking with him in his office and then lifting his ass on one side to let rip. To make things worse, he had a fridge in his lab that he filled with booze and the stinkiest cheeses he could find, so his breath and farts were so bad they could make paint peel.

    There’s crazy stories about him traveling to an international conference and puking on the guy sitting beside him and shitting his pants on the same flight.

    Then on a university sponsored trip (with other biology profs/researchers) to recruit new students and research collaboration, he drank some brown bubbling “wine” that he vought from a street vendor, that everyone else refused to drink, he shat his hotel bed 3 nights in a row and every time the hotel tried to charge him for it he claimed it was just chocolate that he had been eating in bed. They then proceeded to a remote research station up on a mtn and when they arrived he rushed to the bathroom and broke the toilet immediately. They had to spend close to a week there, with no functioning toilet.

    Hope your boss never reaches those levels of depravity, lol.

    Edit: spelling.





  • When tech companies say they want to “democratize” they typically mean they are making a service more widely available to the consumer. The democracy bit is that the consumer “votes” with their wallet. A notable early adopter was Amazon, and I would hardly think that the public, today, see that organization as a paragon of virtue. So, in this sense of the word we’re somewhat failing ourselves here.

    In the context you present, the companies themselves become little democracies internally. This sounds nice but would ultimately lead to chaos and ruin for those companies. I think this would lead to highly unstable, unprofitable businesses that no investor would ever give money to, or at least not expect any returns from.

    Furthermore, I don’t necessarily think it would benefit the consumer in the end. Maybe the employees mostly vote to have a good solid ethical company, or maybe they vote in their own best interests to bring home higher wages and/or just keep their jobs safe. One could argue we just witnessed one such example of this with the recent OpenAI debacle with Sam Altman. Board fired him for potentially going against the stated charter of the company (one that has an ethical basis of essentially putting the security and well being of humanity above all else), at the risk of destroying an $87billion company, yet the employees staged a mutiny forcing the board to reinstate him.

    But I digress. At the end of the day I think the most we can ever really expect from companies is that they will, inevitably, find new and creative ways to extract ever increasing amounts of money from us, until such time that we simply cease giving it to them.

    Edit: spelling.




  • Sway@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldMef
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    9 months ago

    It suggests that Europeans embrace the behaviour when they play the game. The people who purport that extreme behaviours in media (games, TV, movies, books) translate into real life behaviour are making a false equivocation that such behaviour will carry over into reality, which has been shown to be false.

    Look, I am not arguing with you that video games do not cause people to behave poorly in real life. But I will push back on the idea that that is what the meme is suggesting. It only suggests they embrace it when they play the game for the first time, nothing more. We shouldn’t extrapolate further meaning beyond that from a silly joke.

    Johnny?

    Edit: fixed wording