I tried an experiment a few years back. I peed into a small bucket and watered my curry leaf plant with it, not realizing that it need to be diluted. The plant "died" within a few weeks. I just left the pot and plant be. A few weeks later it started sprotuing again and that was the healthiest curry leaf plant I had ever seen. It had leaves double the size and it grew so fast that we had to give away curry leaves to neighbours
They forgot to add Dell Pro Max Premium Plus to complete the word salad, what a missed opportunity.
If the Dell product naming team is reading here I have a couple marketing buzzword suggestions: add “elite”, “ultra”, “platinum” or “diamond” to the mix please. Doesn’t “Dell Pro Max Elite Platinum Premium Plus” sound so much more marketable?
On the contrary, Netflix would have been decent because WB is bigger than them (in terms of IP, existing content, brands, etc) and would have probably (at least that's what they said publicly) left it mostly alone. And it's weird how people assume that just because Netflix produce a ton of content, all of it is low quality. A lot of it is for people half paying attention, but there is plenty of actually good stuff. Them having WB would improve them on both fronts.
Nepo baby is coming with a political angle and wants control of the news media part of WB. The American media landscape is already without much competition nor diversity in political views, now there would practically be none.
The good Netflix movies are small diamonds in a swamp of garbage. Most of the content is the equivalent of fast food for movies with a political agenda.
WB has not been immune to the political angle but they at least care about their IP and produce decent content.
Of course Netflix would have used WB IP and Netflix’s “state of the art” movie making machine to maximise the value of the WB IP.
TBH I don’t care about the WB news media part through I’m not sure if they will really destroy it just to align with their political views. If they make CNN like Fox News the viewers will just leave.
The right move for Netflix from a shareholder’s perspective would be to get into the short drama movies that are popular in China and recently the US too. That would allow them to cover the whole garbage media spectrum and make a lot of money.
> The good Netflix movies are small diamonds in a swamp of garbage. Most of the content is the equivalent of fast food for movies with a political agenda.
What political agenda? Are gays existing in movies political for you or what do you mean?
And again, Netflix have to play a numbers game. They need to have enough content for people not to leave them. That doesn't mean they don't also have genuine quality content like Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders, Kaleidoscope, etc.
> TBH I don’t care about the WB news media part through I’m not sure if they will really destroy it just to align with their political views
They already started, appointing a political hack to be head of CBS, and CBS have already quickly turned very politically biased. Why wouldn't they do the same to CNN?
It was good, actually, that she suppressed accurate news unfavorable to the current President, tanking ratings and the network's credibility. I want more news outlets to decline. Except of course, my favorite, which doesn't count. It says it's fair and balanced; they wouldn't lie, would they?
> I hope the lawnmower goes bankrupt with this and the hostile WB take over.
Unfortunately there is no chance of that happening.
At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.
The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon (even the mega-wealthy can't plastic surgery themselves out of this outcome, at least not yet) and he can't take any of it with him. But all indications point to his progeny having aspirations to be even more damaging to society than he has been.
> The only consolation is the lawnmower is 81 and thus is going to be dead soon (even the mega-wealthy can't plastic surgery themselves out of this outcome, at least not yet)
Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.
The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.
His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.
The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.
Which ones? The Sacklers are a prime example of how impossible it is to actually go bankrupt; considering they harmed millions of people, had the government step in and still remain one of the wealthiest families in the US.
"Filed for bankruptcy" != "out of money" in the ordinary plebeian sense.
These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion, have their chauffeur drive them around in a car worth more than my entire life savings, etc... because it would be "unconscionable" for them to lose the life that they're accustomed to. I.e.: Affluenza.
Just look at Prince Andrew or whatever he's called now. He raped children and his rightful punishment would be to sit in a jail cell with no access to anything even resembling his lavish digs, instead he's luxuriating in a lifestyle you and I would envy.
I can list far, far more examples of billionaires or mere hundred-millionaires living luxuriously after committing capital crimes or "going bankrupt" than not.
Find me an ex-billionaire living out of a motor home, then I'll cede your point.
> These are the kind of criminals where the judges will let them stay under home arrest in their twenty-bedroom mansion…
Another egregious example of this sort of thing:
> Robert H. Richards IV was convicted of rape, the wealthy heir to the Du Pont family fortune […] received an eight-year prison sentence in 2009 for raping his toddler daughter, but the sentencing order signed by a Delaware judge said “defendant will not fare well” in prison and the eight years were suspended.
>The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work.
Empirical work... like conveniently ignoring the fact that there's far less old money billionaires than we'd expect?
>For these lucky people, the experience of the Vanderbilts and their contemporaries offers a cautionary tale. At the turn of the 20th century, America’s census recorded about 4,000 millionaires, note Victor Haghani and James White, two wealth managers, in their book, “The Missing Billionaires”. Suppose a quarter of them had at least $5m (the richest had hundreds) and had invested it in America’s stockmarket. Had they then procreated at the average rate, paid their taxes and spent 2% of their capital each year, their descendants today would include nearly 16,000 old-money billionaires. In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.
> In reality, it is a struggle to find a single one who traces their fortune back to the first Gilded Age.
This is a good point because there are no oil billionaires and things like trusts, family offices, offshoring etc. actually pose no challenge to accurately numerating and identifying people that ‘have’ or effectively control over a billion dollars at their discretion because they all just sign up for the list.
Of course there’s the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers but that doesn
FBI was literally sitting on Epstein files for years. They have chosen not to prosecute. When the state tried to investigate Epstein, FBI came in, took control over with claim they will share investigation results ... and then did nothing.
Yes, which happened only because a journalist broke a story about how FBI was not investigating Epstein for years and years. It was media who forced that to happen, after decades of abuse FBI was aware of.
Speaking of which, the previous conviction, the super sweet deal Acosta gave to Epstein before is also an example of elite unaccountability.
FBI and friends protected Epstein until it became impossible.
J6 is not a strong counterexample, IMHO. Part of the problem with Epstein is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," for which evidence is needed--and, it appears, hard to come by. Whereas with J6, there were thousands of hours of footage showing the crimes being committed (and in many cases bragged about), which made prosecutions much easier.
>With J6, in the matter of 2 or so years the FBI has secured over 1000 convictions.
Again, large numbers, but no context. How many people did you think were at the riots? 10k? 50k?
Moreover, Jan 6th was an event that definitely happened. The same can't be said for whatever happened at Epstein's island. The island exists, Epstein's a convicted sex offender, and people flew there, but associating with sex offenders isn't a crime, no matter how despicable it might seem.
> It's sexism in action; the woman gets punished while "boys will be boys." Prove me wrong.
Epstein died in his cell. If Maxwell preferred death to punishment she could've also killed herself. Also it's well documented that women receive less harsh punishment in court vs men for the same crimes, so yeah, it's sexism but not in the way you insinuate.
> Epstein himself is probably still alive in Tel Aviv anyway.
Yes, and it's Maxwell's lookalike that's serving the sentence, while she's enjoying herself in Argentina. See how quickly you can derails discussion with such absurd claims without any substance?
Please provide a list of all multi-billionaires who have somehow managed to lose any significant portion of their wealth outside of a divorce combined with bad marriage planning. And even in those rare cases, they don't approach bankruptcy.
It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).
> At his level of personal wealth there is no realistic scenario that leads to personal bankruptcy. In our current capitalist society once you're into the billions you're "too big to fail" and you have unlocked the infinite money glitch.
This is plainly false. There are plenty of example, even recently, of billionaires losing their fortunes or going bankrupt. Often they come with criminal prosecution because they get desperate and try illegal ways to hang on to their wealth. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.
There are a lot of stories of billionaires getting too risky with their investments or too concentrated in businesses and losing the majority of their wealth. The Barclay story, Jim Justice, the old Peloton CEO.
It’s not a common outcome because you have to try hard to screw up that badly when you have over a billion dollars in wealth. Parking it anywhere in common investments would leave you and your ancestors set forever.
> Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and several other examples come to mind.
Billionaires that were dumb enough to attempt to screw even bigger billionaires. Sure you can find exceptions to the rules, but Ellison isn't going to be one of those.
More Intel vaporware. Seriously, their other 18A product, panther lake, supposedly "launched" January 18th. It's been 1.5 months and I still can't go and buy any panther lake laptop except from dell.com. Why are they like this?
I'll believe it when I see it.
Also about "make-or-break": they've been saying this for all of Intel's products since at least 2022 *yawn*
AFAIKS there are 18A laptops from Lenovo and HP for the first two I checked. Or do you mean if you click through and buy one it gets put on some indeterminate backorder?
Oh, there are so many lenovo ones I just picked one at random and didn't notice it said preorder. The HP link doesn't say that though, right? Here's another lenovo one that doesn't say preorder.
I have two used external LTO-6 decks that I got used for $200 each on eBay. LTO-7 and later are absurdly expensive, but you can shop around and occasionally find LTO-6 ones for cheap. You have to be a bit vigilant on eBay and shop around for awhile but deals can be had.
I had to “repair” the first one I bought, but that literally ended up being fixed by tightening a screw on the SAS connector. The second one I bought worked out of the box.
This seems like something a liability waiver and an escrow account with money for body clean up (if things go bad) would solve. A little red tape, sure, but not illegal.
there aren't that many accidents. It's also more dangerous to jump in ways that attempt to skirt laws (jumping near dark, trying to evade capture, etc)
If it had been legal, and had he jumped in broad daylight, I think he’d have survived that day.
Right. It's the Park Service to blame. Right there with the "it's the cops fault I crashed and burned because if driving 140mph was legal I would be fine".
But to your point, when some overconfident dudebro splatters himself all over the flats, we the people have to pay for the cops to show up, the medics and the ambulance even if the idiot is obviously dogfood, the body recovery, the coroner and the postmortem, and all the associated bureaucracy.
And someone will still sue because the Park Service didn't prevent the moron from killing himself. You can sue for literally anything in the US.
then we need tort reform to address the root cause. This is so silly and unfortunate that wild spaces are litigated and made illegal for things that are normal and wonderful elsewhere.
I’ll tell you exactly what broke: the social contract. When the rich find ways of not paying a dime “for the common good” and just free ride, plus move everything out of the country because it’ll make them a quick buck (but make everything worse in a decade-wise time frame), people stop agreeing to their enthusiasm for capitalism.
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