vkou

Most industries aren't in highly competitive markets, though, and many are trending towards oligopolies or monopolies. I can't speak for France, but in Canada, if this happened to Loblaws, the owners would just take it as another excuse to raise prices. Their profit margins are immense, and their competitors can't manage to eat into them or their market share.

The pressure for them to export models is that doing so super-charges the growth of the domestic industry. Same reason why they export solar panels, instead of just hoarding all of them for domestic deployment.

I agree - some parts of this seem very much like a footgun.

The corporate reckoning will only come if there's actual consequences for any of this. There haven't been any when this was happening to one big company a month, there won't be any when it starts happening to five big companies a day.

I just used a physical Suica card, I'd link tickets to it at the time of purchase, and had no issue with using it. Osaka had a weird subway system, but there, I could just tap my credit card.

Rural Japan expects cash fares, yes, but rural Japan also expects cash for everything else, so if you're in rural Japan, you should have enough cash on you to cover all your expenses.

In four weeks of travel all over the country (from Tokyo down to towns of <700 people, and every step in between), I don't think I've seen a single machine/system/vendor there that demanded exact payments, without providing change.

I'm not sure why the OP wanted hotel staff to exchange money, when ATMs are plentiful, and will all provide JPY when you stick a debit or credit card in them. (If using a CC, make sure you have a positive balance to avoid incurring CC cash advance fees).

A lot of stuff in Japan is moving to phone apps, but often without support for foreign Android phones.

Honestly, once I understood that I should link my HSR tickets to my Suica card, my travels through it became very simple.

In which country? The US is an aggressive total surveillance state that executes people in the street and gives out 30 year sentences for people who didn't even show up at a protest, the UK jails grannies for holding up Palestinian flags, and Canada something something something something truckers something something.

In the long term, the US is far more likely to turn into China than not.

It's not weirdness, it's just the combination of being an asshole and nobody in his life being able to tell him 'No.'

Imagine how much supplemental revenue they could get from a 36-hour Twitch stream.

What exactly are they monitoring for, and why on earth is the gold standard of campaign volunteer monitors from all participating parties[1] insufficient to accomplish whatever the hell they are doing?

[1] Who have both the training, the ability, and the incentive to file challenges if they observe irregularities.

He didn't write the character, but he delivered it. The delivery is just as much a part of Picard as the writing.

The loss is because they are building data centers for AI. Profitability of search is up.

A lean interface needs to have incredibly well-specified behaviour to not be a pain in the ass to work with.

Employers are free to use their political capital to push against bad behaviour by landlords and NIMBYs, but they traditionally rally behind politics that favors both of those groups.

They sure have a lot of that capital.

No, the 30 year one for not even being at the protest is.

Or the lack of one for a bunch of feds pinning a man to the ground and executing him. And then scattering like fucking roaches after they do so.

But you know all this. Why are you carrying water for it?

Anyone mind explaining to me why an Immigration enforcement agency is being used to spy on the political behaviour of citizens?

The people complaining about Biden never gave two shits about the president's mental capacity.

Well, the most recent would be a conspiracy to fuck with public transit on election day, perhaps they could start with that, determine the degree of his culpability and involvement, and then keep going in reverse chronological order. Then they could go after corruption, the usual sort of stuff.

His dad's doing time for a coup and an attempted assassination, and his brother's been convicted of coercing the judiciary, by getting Trump to punish Brazil for his dad's conviction. It's a perfectly normal sort of family, this stuff could have happened to anyone.

If he wants to start a war with Brazil, do you think he will win the one with Iran, first?

His campaign provided him immunity from prosecution, but now that it's over, he is for some reason unwilling to answer for his crimes.

People who see the world in black and white are incapable of telling the difference between a shade of dark gray and light gray.

If businesses ran as they saw fit with minimal oversight from the government, the government wouldn't be called in so frequently to use incredible amounts of violence against its subjects.

Authoritarianism is as American as sliced bread. It's in the country's bones, starting from its founding, and continuing forward through segregation, the red scares, and into today.

Two years ago, half the voters were explicitly asked if they wanted more of it, and they said 'absolutely'!

Do you think he will shut down LEO access to its systems if the government decides to have a purge of the undesirables, or two?

Would it be appropriate now for Lula to sanction the crap out of Meta and its operations in Brazil?

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes..?

The advantage is this:

1. Some C-suite asshole wants headcount in your division reduced by, say, 5% next year. He has zero visibility into anyone's performance, or any of the projects anyone is actually working on.

2. His subordinate directors could do random, or targeted layoffs to hit that 5%, but this ruins morale for everyone who survives.

3. ...Or, they could make this offer, let people leave on their own, try to convince any stars who want to take it to stay, don't do any backfill. Then, hopefully, between the voluntary layoffs and no backfill, you might hit that 5% reduction, and not have to do involuntary layoffs. (Or if you do, they would be much smaller.)

4. This is less disruptive for teams and managers, because with voluntary layoffs, they have time to plan for these people leaving, instead of showing up to work on Thursday, and being told that 5 people on their team were given the pink slip this morning.

5. This is also, obviously, less disruptive for employees who take the offer (as they can control their exit, and get a payout), and less disruptive for anyone who doesn't take the offer (lower odds of showing up to work on Thursday, and getting a pink slip).

> What if all the people they wanted to keep accepted while those they didn't want to keep stayed

That's not an outcome they'd like, but it's an outcome they have to accept, in order to not piss off everyone else.

1. For anyone they want to keep who takes them up on the offer, they always have a chance to try to convince those people to not take the buyout offer.

2. If you make the buyout offer conditional to particular individuals, it will sow resentment and division.

It's generally better for the employees and the employer to do this kind of blanket buyout. If they voluntarily hit the reduction targets, nobody needs to be laid off. If they don't, the layoffs will be there, but smaller. If the 'wrong' people want the buyout, there's still a chance to convince them to stay. If they don't want to stay after the convincing, it's probably best for them to go on their way.

It should also not be possible to advertise it, and profits from it should be taxed above and beyond the level of what corporations that don't contribute to social malaise have to pay.

Nothing short of sending a few hundred cronies to prison, and the ones responsible for murder to the firing squad will curb that power.

The king decides what national interest is, and in this case it is in the national interest for him to auction the government off into his own bank account.