panragon
We have no idea that they were sacrificing anything personally. The packages Microsoft offered for people who separated may have been much more generous than what they were currently sitting on. Sure, Altman is a good leader, but Microsoft also has deep pockets. When you see some of the top brass at the company already make the move and you know they're willing to pay to bring you over as well, we're not talking about a huge risk here. If anything, staying with what at the time looked like a sinking ship might have been a much larger sacrifice.
What would cease to exist would simply be speculation and arbitrage. Since all prices are perfect, you simply wouldn't be able to make more (or even less, for that matter) money than the return on capital everyone gets by buying and selling shares quickly.
Very common to see older people drive slow on the highway because going 100KM/h seems scary to them. This is, of course, absurd, since driving 80KM/hs on a 100KM/h road causes way more moments for bad things to happen because you're forcing everyone to merge into the speed lane, including trucks with bigger blind spots, rather then only the drivers choosing to go above the speed limit. If you do this you should absolutely be fined, and that's not because it's a good metric for timidity (which I agree can be bad for drivers in general), but rather that the action itself causes harm.
The site is suboptimal, it's probably not a great company and I have no idea if they're charging me anything - but the one-tap purchase system just works, and that's all I need. There are other great options in Klarna and similar, but even they give me too many options to coax me into paying later so I inadvertently pay fees. PayPal literally just withdraws from whichever card has sufficient funds at the time, has worked exactly as stated for over a decade, so I really have no incentive to investigate alternatives (especially for sites where my PayPal is already setup, like Steam).
€50bln is still a huge amount, but based on the phrasing of that comment you'd assume we were talking about figures well over €1t!
Not to discredit the rest of what you're saying, because it is true the EU has jurisdiction and that anti-trust is a lost art in many places in the world. Still, saying Google Ireland 'alone' is a bit funny when Google (like all multinationals) is known to take advantage of Ireland's tax laws to funnel as much of their EU business through.
Whatever money Google is making in Ireland isn't just what they're making from the Irish market, it's also from whatever they're making everywhere else in the EU who's origins are ambiguous enough to not be attached to any single country.
I agree with you here. But do you really want to reach for the economy and police systems to justify how ineffective representative democracies have been since their mass adoption over a century ago?
If you don't want to do anything then don't, as far as I care that's entirely within your rights, just don't justify it by pointing to other people or organizations that are worse then you, because they can inevitably do the same to someone else. I really don't care about people doing nothing to solve an issue, but I certainly won't play defence for people who do nothing about the problem while feeling good about because they pinned it all on someone else. Either work on the problem or move on to something else, listening to you whine about how terrible other people you have no impact on are isn't doing anything for anyone.
I get that you don't want to do anything, but you can just choose to do that, you know? You don't need to justify it at all, you have every right to simply do as you wish, at least for the moment.
As for the US military polluting too much, that's a political issue and the US citizens obligation to fix. If you don't think you should do something because someone else is worse, I'll remind you that there's almost always a bigger fish. The US military pollution itself is a mere fraction of what China's power grid is using, so why should they bother to change anything until China improves it's own power production either?
And obviously I realize that this doesn’t go for everyone, and that’s completely okay. I just don’t think Apple should be forced to make their phones into full-on computers just because some people say they want the choice, when you could just as easily get a phone. If most customers really wanted to root iPhones Apple would probably have implemented it by now. I don’t believe for a second that Apple’s desire to unilateraly control their ecosystem trumps shareholder greed, why would it?
Not all phones are for everyone and I think that’s OK. More options and more modular devices means everyone will setup and use their device differently, like with a computer, this is fine for many, but I think it would adversly affect the streamlined nature of iOS (even if it is ‘just an option’), so I’m still against it.
There definitely are issues with Apple, but the user not having full access to changing their device isn't really one, and that's coming from someone who most definitely has the know how to do pretty much anything and still remain safe, I'd dread to see users be stuck having full root access to their phones without even knowing what the fuck that means.
There absolutely needs to be options for those that want to be able to hack away at their phone to their hearts content, but it doesn't need to be every phone, and Apple aren't criminals just because they don't offer that possibility and users happen to want their phones anyway.
Please don't give me root access to my iPhone, I do not care about it, I have no need for it, and I do not want it.