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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Dave@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThanks, now I'm blind!
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    5 months ago

    I mean, 1 in 5 is a lot, just to be perfectly clear, so anything even approaching that is a pretty bad. When I was growing up, the number of cars inappropriately using high beams in city traffic was basically zero, so this is a massive regression.

    You can tell that a car is using high beams because their light fixture appears fully and evenly lit from eye level. Low-beam headlights look “half full” from an opposing driver’s view. You can also tell because many lower-end cars have a separate housing just for the high beam that only light up when the high beam is on.



  • I think they’re going to give him newly-issued stock, not cash. However, the newly issued stock will not be backed by new capital (i.e. nobody would have given the company money in exchange for the stock), so what will happen is that existing shares will have their values diluted, i.e. they will be worth less.

    In other words, shareholders will pay for Elon’s compensation by devaluing their investments, and not by drawing money out of Tesla’s coffers.

    $56B is roughly 10% of Tesla’s market cap of $581B, so shares should be devalued by about that same rate.




  • Dave@lemmy.worldtoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.worldGet rid of landlords...
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    7 months ago

    You don’t need to get rid of private property to undo a lot of the damage done by landlords. You can build subsidized housing to compete. You can write tax codes to make it unprofitable for people to own more than one house. You can tax land by area instead of by built value to encourage building high-density housing.

    There are a lot of levers that other countries have been willing to pull that partially counteract the damage of landlording, but the US has been reluctant to touch.











  • The description is a vast oversimplification of the fall of the Roman Empire, of course.

    Like the game Monopoly, unrestrained capitalism will always end up with a few people owning almost all the value while everyone else live in poverty, and it will always end up in systemic collapse because you can’t get infinite value out of finite resources. At some point the game will be over.

    But unrestrained capitalism doesn’t exist, even in today’s very unequal world. There are forces that undo the momentum of capitalism, including taxation, regulation, trade barriers, and public goods and services. Some countries do this better than others.

    I happen to think that regulated capitalism, balanced by a heavy emphasis of wealth taxation and investment in public goods and services, is better than any other system that relies on non-monetary control of resources. It can be sustainable, but not in its current state.