First, VCs don't get paid when "dogshit startups" get acquired, they get paid when they have true outlier successes. It's the only way to reliably make money in the VC business.
Second, want to give any examples of "shitty, hype-based compan[ies]" (I assume you mean companies with no real revenue traction) getting bought out for "a few billion".
Third, investment banks facilitate sales of assets, they don't buy them themselves.
Maybe sit out the conversation if you don't even know the basics of how VC, startups, or banking work?
Not my experience. I’ve tried (and am still trying) texts and not once I was able to have it just work. Constantly messages not showing up, accounts not loading, or something else missing. I’ve been submitting heaps of feedback to the Texts team.
It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.
I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup.
Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.
(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)
I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/
"it clashes with deep values of the people who aren't shareholders, but are no doubt vested in the product the company produces, mainly the customers. It ignores their needs completely because they don't own stock."
Presumably companies generate value for shareholders by selling things to customers and generating profits, which makes customers the ultimate beneficiaries. What companies are you thinking of that ignores their customers' needs completely and are still quite successful and valuable for shareholders?
"quit or stfu", not being able to meaningfully bargain at place of employment or anywhere else, is not dignified. If you got better solution for this than unions, fine, just say.
That's not what I said nor was responding to. The GP asserted that companies have a fiduciary duty to avoid unionizing, and my counterargument is that such activity could be illegal which is actively detrimental to a company's fiduciary duty.
Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.
Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.
I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.
That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.
Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".
That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.
> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...
Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.
We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.
What's the principle? I should get anything I want for free as long as I can get away with it? I shouldn't have to pay for anything if I don't want to?
Genuinely curious what the principled argument is here.
Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade. Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade. Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
I strongly disagree with that argument.
A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.
> A related argument with which I disagree is the one that people sometimes invoke to respond to accusations of exploited workers: arguing that the workers' lives were still generally elevated over what they would be, were the factory not there and exploiting them.
If you look at what was going on in the electric car industry from 2003-2013 (heavy focus on plug in hybrids, very poor sales of the few existing EVs, etc) and compare the marketing strategy of the Model S and roadster to that of e.g. the Nissan Leaf, it’s a pretty obvious conclusion.
Re: your 2nd point, nobody is forcing the workers to work at the factory. Try coming down from your ivory tower to touch grass sometime, might be good for you.
> Re: your 2nd point, nobody is forcing the workers to work at the factory. Try coming down from your ivory tower to touch grass sometime, might be good for you.
And "nobody is forcing this exploited person into that bad situation" is one of the other common arguments with which I disagree.
> Tesla accelerated the mass adoption of electric cars by at least a decade
That is a VERY bold claim given that Tesla sedans only began sales 11 years ago.
> Tesla’s workplace safety stats and their rate of progress are inextricably linked. If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
That claim is even more bold. Other car companies are ramping up their electric assembly lines even faster than Tesla did in Germany with even less experience in electric car production. Shouldn't it follow that they should be maiming their workers at an incredible pace?
Is there any reason to believe that design and technology innovation is linked to a higher injury rate in serial production? Shouldn't TSMCs chip factories be veritable slaughterhouses with that logic?
1. That virtually none of the progress made on Electric vehicles in the past decade would have happened without Tesla. This is unfalsifiable, but I can see that Ford, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nissan, Mini/BMW, Fiat and others were already mass-producing electric cars for sale in the US in 2012. Do I think that Tesla accelerated the idea of electric cars being cool? yes. Do I think that Tesla alone are responsible for getting us from the electric Ford Focus, to the Mustang Mach E? No. I'm pretty sure that was Ford.
2. That highly innovative, fast-paced workspaces are necessarily more dangerous to workers. We can point at the numerous innovative, efficient workplaces that are known to 'move fast and break things' where that isn't true. We could use the company that popularized the phrase, Facebook, as an example. Working for Facebook isn't notoriously dangerous. If you prefer hardware we can point to the company that used to own Tesla's Fremont factory, Toyota, who famously innovated higher quality and cheaper assembly at that very factory.
> Perhaps you disagree with the statement that when you move fast that progress happens faster?
When it comes to physical processes, I would push back on that. Moving fast can just mean doing shitty work. Turn the speed of the assembly line up to 11 and see if better cars come out.
Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible, and judging by the state of other car companies, unnecessary. I've worked in dangerous manufacturing facilities. They weren't faster or more innovative.
1. lol, wow a bunch of failing EV models whose sales were dying. Can you now compare the sales growth of the Leaf or Ford Focus electric to the Model S, or the later Model 3. The 3, S, and Y all signifiacantly raised the stakes for electric cars. The legacy automakers were not even close to mainstream adoption (patently obvious to any independent observer, just look at the sales numbers).
2. Not sure why you would reference a role with 0 occupational hazard to begin with and then data about quality and cost (not safety) here, maybe you are confused about the point?
> Maiming people so rich westerners can have cool cars is indefensible
Do you think Tesla’s only benefit is they are cool? Have you considered the climate impacts?
Maiming all of humanity so you can protect hundreds of factory workers (who knowingly and willingly took a somewhat dangerous job) from injury is indefensible. It’s clear you only can wrestle with salient tradeoffs and more abstract or statistical ones are too difficult for you.
> If a 3x injury rate vs similar companies is cost of such progress, definitely worth it.
put your money where your mouth is: go work there, taking the risk yourself, but it is at least unethical to talk about other people's health this way.
Letting people take risks is not unethical as long as the risk is disclosed.
Put your money where your mouth is and throw out all your electronics, which are definitely not assembled by workers who on average make more than the median household income in the area they live (as Tesla factory workers do).
Ah yes. It reminds me of the tech libertarians that I’d so often come across in the Bay Area. Those who adopted Lord Farquaad’s philosophy that other people getting screwed over was a sacrifice they were willing to make. It doesn’t surprise me they are one of the blue checkmark people.
Ah yes, because anyone not seeing Elon as the guy who's brought an entire decade's of progress with electric cars and space travel and as the guy who's going to save humanity must be deranged, never mind what he says about things he's clueless about and how he treats his employees, those are media lies of haters and jealous people anyway, all hail the almighty Elon with his beautiful face and muscle and tremendeous sexual energy!
And you have a hard-on for him, you do realize that right?
lol, no I’m just capable of more nuanced thought than “Elon treats employees bad and sometimes says dumb things thus Elon bad and incapable of doing good things”
How many people's lives do you think would have been ruined by delaying the electrification of something that accounts for ~25% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by a decade or more?
An extremely well funded company willing to lose money on every sale thus delaying incumbents' investments by years could actually be blamed for slowing adoption just as easily as praised for speeding it.
(Parent comment was dead, but I vouched for it, even though I disagree with it. It represents some not-unusual beliefs, and I think we'd be better off if those beliefs were talked about.)
Second, want to give any examples of "shitty, hype-based compan[ies]" (I assume you mean companies with no real revenue traction) getting bought out for "a few billion".
Third, investment banks facilitate sales of assets, they don't buy them themselves.
Maybe sit out the conversation if you don't even know the basics of how VC, startups, or banking work?