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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Just today there was a great comment by @Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works on why this does not make any sense.

    1. When you factor in the incredible damage done to the Tesla share price by the amount of stock he had to liquidate to finance the deal, and the almost billion a year in interest and operating costs the company is pulling out of him, the deal has, altogether, cost Musk about half of his net worth. No amount of petty childishness is worth that.
    1. He literally went to court to try to get out of the deal. What was his play here? To sue with the intention of failing? For what possible reason?
    2. If his plan was to kill Twitter, why would he attach his beloved X name to it? Musk has spent his entire life trying to make X happen. It is dearer to him than his own children. Why would he attach that brand to a company he’s intentionally sabotaging?
    3. If his goal is to kill Twitter, why is it still here? He owns the company outright. He took it private. There’s no board. There’s no shareholders. He doesn’t have a fiduciary responsibility. If he wanted Twitter dead, all he had to do was shut the doors, turn off the lights, and send everyone home.

    Anyone who buys into this “He’s trying to kill Twitter” nonsense, please, I am begging you, try to get your head around the fact that Elon Musk is not a smart man. This isn’t some incredible 4D chess play. Twitter isn’t failing because of intentional sabotage; it’s failing because Musk is genuinely trying his best, and his best absolutely sucks. He’s a bad businessman who lucked into a fortune he never deserved.

    https://sh.itjust.works/comment/4855307



  • Of course a single user is irrelevant, but in principle and if it would evolve into a larger trend: yes. At least if the dev wants to keep paying his bills. That is how business works. And with lower user counts at some point the required price per user would be too high to be competitive. Then the dev would have to abandon the project, since it would not be profitable anymore. He is a full-time developer after all.



  • That was in response to your comparison with t-shirts.

    And yes, scaling does not work in the same way for app development. A large part of the required work for app development stays the same, regardless of how many actual users there are (excluding server costs (-> Sync Ultra) and probably the amount of support tickets). But since Sync has way less users now, there has to be more income per user for it to be profitable.






  • I don’t think the article is trying to claim that labor exploitation is new.

    This part directly admits that it is a very old phenomenon:

    It’s been noted, and correctly so, that entertainment industry labor disputes often erupt when there’s a change in technology — from theaters screening projected films to the cathode ray tube of the home television, say, or the rise of YouTube and other online content in the 2000s — and that happens for a reason. Historically, executives and management use a disorienting new technology to try to justify lowering wages of their workers, and they have done so since the days of the Industrial Revolution.

    As I understood it, the article just wants to explain why this is happening now, because historically it seems to happen in waves.