I haven’t really used any other platforms so I can’t really compare but I have encountered enough audio issues too. Especially with new Teams and bluetooth devices.

There are plenty of companies that never pay dividends, yet people buy them.

II struggled with this as well for a while. You can look at it this way, they are worth money because they could pay dividends, but they don’t actually have to. Your bar of gold is worth a certain amount of money equal to the money you could sell it for, and your money is worth something because you could buy something with it.

Because that’s how the stock market works, the price of a stock is the current value of assets (including cash) + expected earnings (with some correction factors for risk and time). If the company pays out $x of cash it’s $x worth less. You might not always see it it the stock price because expected future dividend payments are also already priced in.

How do you think it works?

Imagine you have 10 stocks worth $10 each.

Scenario 1: There is $1 dividend per stock. You now have 10 stocks worth $9 each for a total of $90 in stocks and $10 in cash.

Scenario 2: There is no dividend but you decide to sell 1 stock, you now have 9 stocks of $10 for a total of 90$ in stocks and $10 in cash.

These scenario’s are equivalent unless the stock wasn’t priced correctly.

A dividend is just a forced sale of your stock

How is it fake news? They are moving functionality into a proprietary SDK and have a whole framework ready to get around the GPL.

I think that can be explained, but tell me how someone can be in favor of the death penalty but be against assisted suicide.

And different opportunities, going MIA on a construction site is suspicious, but during war? Who can tell whether they defected or died?

We have this: and this:

At the time most Americans were farmers. Can’t be Sunday because it’s a Christian rest day, Wednesday neither because that’s market day. They might have to travel a whole day to get there, so it can’t be on Monday or Thursday either. Which leaves only Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.

I personally don’t see/experience any of that either, but ask some “native brown” (adopted/2nd,3th generation fully integrated/…) whether they have the same experience and you’ll likely get a different answer.

There’s a reason Chrome was able to steal the alt browser market from Mozilla at a time when even laymen understood that IE was awful - Mozilla stopped innovating the second they were winning. They had tabs! What more could you want?

That’s part of the story, but even more important is that they shoved it down everyone’s throat.

So instead of spending 1 day writing good code, we’ll be spending a week debugging shitty code. Great.

There are also women who have XY chromosomes, but they don’t have receptors for testosterone. They can even have very high levels of testosterone but it doesn’t do anything, why wouldn’t they be able to compete as women?

And why would having an uterus and being able to give birth naturally even matter? Are infertile humans not allowed to compete in the Olympics?

Security software are also “apps”. Since Microsoft is also in the security software business locking down access for their competitors could definitely be seen as anti-competitive practices.

Apple doesn’t have a monopoly with MacOS so other rules apply.

From which size is a country too big to operate as a single country? I think cultural identity is much more important than size, and the Chinese government has put a tremendous effort in culturally unifying the land with great success (and great cost; see Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, the relationship with Taiwan, loss of local languages and culture). I don’t see that disappearing anytime soon.

A civil war with a stalemate is of course possible (in fact it’s already the reality), but an USSR style collapse in many different countries is just not something I can see happen.

I’m the first one to hate on the CCP, but people have been saying that China is going to collapse anytime now for 20 years.

The demographics are a real problem, but nothing that will cause an immediate collapse. Housing, youth unemployment and inequality are real imminent issues, but the CCP has survived much worse and I think they will survive this as well.

Economical they have made some good bets, investing in solar and batteries, for that alone we should hope they don’t collapse, it would be a setback of several years or maybe decades.

I believe China will more go the way of Japan, stagnate but not collapse.

Honestly, I’ve used some pretty decent AI chatbots. They can help you with basic questions and contact you with a human for things that require it or if you ask for it. Chatbots that don’t let you talk to a human on the other hand, those are awful.

LFP is actually a relatively old battery technology, it’s only now that the patent is expired that it’s starting to breakthrough (outside of China, they somehow got a license if I understand it correctly).

How are they planning on sending over any significant manpower and supplies across 2800km?

Rail? They border Russia and there’s a railroad over the border