One thing I've been listening for in the podcasts is a discussion of equity. I'd love to get the company's perspective on equity, options, liquidity, etc. The Silicon Valley Way (tm) of using stock options to "juice" compensation while injecting large amounts of risk and drama into the employee's tax returns is certainly something I'd like to hear Bryan's (and Oxide's) take on.
There is effectively no difference internally than externally here. There’s no like, big list of who exactly has what amount of equity. Of course, talking about compensation with your coworkers is a legally protected activity, and I have discussed the topic with coworkers before.
Personally, I don’t really care how much equity my co-workers have.
This implies that the goal of compensation transparency is to satisfy people's curiosity. I don't think that's the case. Regardless of how it's denominated, I think the goal of compensation transparency is ... uh... equity... no pun intended.
I don't think so, unless you're talking about professional-grade printers for businesses who print a LOT and look at the TCO of printers before buying them. Consumers buy literally the cheapest printer available at the store. Manufacturers have had to start shrinking the amount of ink in starter cartridges just to get consumers to buy any cartridges at all since otherwise people would buy a new printer instead of buying cartridges.
A printer that's actually profitable without any ink sales is going to cost hundreds of dollars more than any consumer would be willing to pay.
Here's how a printer company could go bankrupt immediately:
- Fixate on open firmware and force all third parties to open source their code (because yes, third party firmware vendors are necessary to develop a working printer system)
- Make a puny profit on durable hardware
- Miss out on the only true recurring revenue you can have
I'd love to see it, but realistically that's not the world we're living in. 99% of people will just pick whatever box in the store that looks snazzy and is cheap.
Plenty of homework assignments in graduate level aerospace engineering courses that are right up the alley of this paper. Star trackers as backup for GNSS would be of great interest to maritime vessels worried about spoofing. So there are plenty of non-military use cases for these algorithms.
Just imagine how fun life will be when the cop at the end of your street has to enforce the politics of Washington, and then someone you don't like gets into office.
Previous civilizations were able to own their cultural myths. Modern civilization's cultural myths are controlled by giant faceless corporations with legions of lawyers. No one can tell a new story about Han, Luke, and Leia without permission from the House of Mouse.
At least in the case of the Maya, literacy was carefully guarded so that a small class of priests could exercise precisely this kind of control. In fact, this is believed to be one of the reasons why modern Mayan languages are written in the Latin alphabet, even though there's a complete Mayan script that was the most developed writing system in the Americas until the conquest.
I still can't believe that everyone alive in the 21st century has been damned to forego a vibrant public domain because some lawyers were afraid Mickey Mouse might fall out of copyright.
Free Culture by Larry Lessig was an excellent book on the subject. He fought the copyright extension in the Supreme Court and founded the Creative Commons. The experience showed him the degree to which money has corrupted the US political system, so he moved his expertise from intellectual property to election reform. He was briefly a protest candidate for president, who vowed to make his reforms and then resign.
Until they are not... it's still permission, instead of 'always allowed'.
I'm quite convinced they will not like it if you make a star-wars themed porn-parody (with the character names as-is) and try marketing it ;)
Lucas was friendly towards fan works, so Disney kind of got that situation handed to them and were smart enough not to go against it. When nerds are your core audience, you have to accept them doing nerd things. WB took down the Hunt for Gollum fan film and ended up reversing course. Would Disney and WB still make a ton of money if they tighten the reins? Probably, but why risk it?
I agree that the way things were along time ago was more natural and definitely more creative. Things today though are way different though. A huge difference is that media wasn’t an industry back then. Most people couldn’t even read. The retelling of myths would mostly happen in the form of poetry or drama performed publicly, and the performance schedule was tightly controlled in the form of contests and festivals to honor various things across the calendar. There’s not really analogue to that now. We are truly in uncharted territory, and that was the case since the printing press. Throw in the invention of the internet and it’s a giant mess. I’m optimistic though that we can resolve it and pave a way forward.
Storytelling was both a profession and an industry in antiquity. Just as rock concerts and bar bands exist today, amphitheaters weren’t the only way people would watch performances.
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