Indeed, employees often effectively sell their stock to existing owners via share buybacks.
This seems entirely rational to me - I've bet a significant part of my career on the success of the company I work for, why should I also bet my savings? Diversification has real value, and going all-in on one company is just a bad bet.
At the end of the day, an employee is just a special class of vendor -- scrape away all of the normative cruft that gets injected into these discussions, and you have a fee-for-service relationship between a customer and a supplier.
And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold out for a long-term upside that depends on lots of stuff they have no control over working out for the best.
Well, they're different in that they're vendors and also vendees. The theory behind employee ownership is that it makes them better vendees on top of maybe making them better vendors.
nit: With a buyback, the buyer is the corporation itself, and the cash comes from the corporate treasury. Transitively this is "selling to existing owners", but it's not like their shares are transferred to other shareholders. Rather, the shares cease to exist and the value of all other shares increases to reflect the reduced number of shares outstanding.
Mechanically it's pretty similar to if the company had just paid out cash as salaries (cash leaves the corporate treasury and enters the employee's brokerage account at market values), but the market is the intermediary, and the tax and accounting treatment is pretty different.
From what I can find online, the lifetime of a BD-R disk is only 5-10 years. Those recordable Bluerays you're holding on to may _already_ have gone bad.
I think that's much shorter than real life outcomes.
Just last week, I was looking for some old data. I dug through a small collection of cheap CD-R backups from 30 years ago (hard to believe the tech is that old!). Probably 12 discs in total. No problem physically reading any of them. The only issue is that one of them was recorded in an old pre-OSX Mac format that my Linux laptop struggled with, but I was able to access it on my 2015 MacBook.
I didn't want to sound like an advertisement, but I use M-disc media. It's basically Bluray, but should last a couple centuries. The M actually is for 'millennium', but I wouldn't bank on 1000 years.
I have a Verbatim M-DISC BD-R that I torture test. It was one of the first ones I burned. I burned it in 2018. I flex it all the time, use it as a coaster on my desk, leave it out on my patio in the sun for weeks at a time. I rinse it off with pool water and wipe it off with paper towels. It has yet to lose a single bit.
If this 20ish gigs of data hasn't had a single bit of corruption, I doubt most of the other discs in climate controlled storage in multiple locations have had much errors either.
There are many sources saying that BD-R discs should last decades if not a 100 years. One of the main reasons why BD M-Discs never took off was the fact that they didn't offer any substantial advantages over regular BD-Rs.
I also hope to last decades, so to me there is a world of difference between media that lasts 30 or 40 years, and media that lasts 100 or 200 years. For better or worse, as long as we both avoid accidents, an M-disc will outlast me.
From my research into it some time ago - BDXL quad layer(128GB) BD-Rs are made basically in the same technology as M-Disc, so they should last hundreds of years, so that's all I've been using for my archival needs so far. Getting them from Amazon japan is pretty cost effective too.
It depends on the dye used. Older CD-Rs had a really bad dye formulation. Better formulations were created but most of us just bought blank disks based on what was cheapest not what dye was used.
Even the newer ones will still degrade quite rapidly in direct sunlight, so the method of storage is also important (spindles in your bookcase that get hit by sunlight = bad).
FWIW I archived all my CD-Rs and DVD-Rs when the oldest ones were just about 15 years old and aside from one ultra-cheap disc where the top was literally flaking off they all read fine in ddrescue.
I was part of an effort at my last job to archive some of the source code for our oldest projects(from the 90s), they were all on CDs stored in a vault with an external storage company, we retrieved the boxes and found that 1 in 5 discs didn't read at all. The blue verbatim discs had a 100% success rate, but any disc with that green hue underside was a toss up whether it would read or not. Interestingly though, over hundreds of discs I found that either the disc read and would rip correctly all the way, or it wouldn't work at all in the first place.
Practically all the CD-Rs I burned on good media have lasted over 20 years now. Only a few have had noticeable issues of the ones sold as "archive-quality" media.
Sure, almost all my cheap ones have died out, but even some of those are still pretty OK.
> For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one.
Having actually gone through this process in small claims court in California, I will say that your miles may vary. I completely won my case except for recovering the fifty dollar late fee (written into the lease) that I paid because rent was once a day late. The judge said it seemed "reasonable" and didn't listen to me talk about California "liquidated damages" language on the subject, which is the supposed law that makes late fees illegal.
Fact is, most places I've rented from have had late fees, and recovering them sounds like a huge crapshoot at best.
Demand did change though - people weren't pooping as much at offices, restaurants, and retail stores. All those places tend to use "commercial" toilet paper that is not available in your average grocery store.
If you looked at commercial suppliers during 2020, you were much more likely to find available supply, though it may be a bit awkward using one of those giant rolls at home when it won't fit on a standard dispenser.
When crime gets to the point where a police tactic as simple as "putting out a bait bicycle, waiting for it to get stolen, and then following it to a warehouse of stolen bicycles" results in a huge reduction of actual crime committed, then maybe the solution isn't purely about wealth inequality.
Sure sure but when it turns out 90% of crime is from 11 people it stops making sense to pass laws punishing all people of a certain class and/or giving police incredible amounts of power with little or no oversight.
There is no reason to withhold it or turn off cameras in a situation like this.