jqubed
@jqubed@lemmy.world
- Comment on How common were video game scalpers in the 1990s? 1 day ago:
I believe they’re referring to buying up all of the copies of the hot new game or console, then reselling them above MSRP to make a profit in a time of scarcity.
I don’t remember scarcity being as much of a problem back then, nor was demand high enough for scalping to be common. It might have been less legal, too. As far as tickets to sporting events and concerts, back then it was illegal to resell them for more than face value in my state. That changed 10-15 years ago thanks to lobbying from Ticketmaster and affiliates.
- Comment on Hideo Kojima's PHYSINT Game Moves to Xbox From PlayStation 1 day ago:
Xbox was actively angering large swathes of the gaming community. All Sony had to do was sit back and let them implode. Instead they’re trying to outdo Microsoft.
- Comment on Incoming! 1 week ago:
Drives us crazy when we go visit my wife’s family in France
- Comment on Incoming! 1 week ago:
Do you not have screens on your windows?
- Comment on When I see people starting to deanpost: 1 week ago:
Weird, it doesn’t show if I click the image and maximize it
- Comment on Anon meets the candy man 1 week ago:
I suspect the rich kids had a line of credit where he’d just send the parents a bill at the end of the month. My understanding is many grocers used to operate that way, especially before credit cards.
- Comment on Would SpaceX continue to be immoral without Musk? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think there’s any legislated law that states that, but some courts treat it as a basic principle (especially in the state of Delaware). What I’ve usually seen as an early example of this is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. from 1919. Henry Ford had amassed a surplus of more than $60 million (equally to more than $1.1 billion today) and wanted to reinvest that money in expanding the business with new factories while continuing to raise wages and cut prices on the Model T. As part of this he wanted to cease special shareholder dividends he had been playing out of the surplus. Brothers John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge owned 10% of Ford and sued to keep the dividend payments coming.
The court ruled that Ford had to pay out a dividend of more than $19 million (more than $360 million today) to the minority shareholders. In the ruling, in a non-binding section, the judge wrote:
A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of men to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
Ford was accused of trying to turn the business into a charity. Behind the scenes, though, one of his main motivations for not wanting to pay the dividend was suspicion that the Dodge brothers were using the dividends from his successful business to setup a rival car company to compete against him, which was exactly what they were doing.
It seems the interpretation of the ruling is controversial, even as to whether “maximize shareholder value” is actually enforceable or what the judge meant. I continue to think that the more investors a company has, the less the company will be able to focus on what’s best for the company, customers, and employees in the long run.
- Comment on Thanks AI for the help 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on For those of you kicking it old school 1 month ago:
So many of the foreigners visiting for the World Cup have missed out on another great American culinary tradition smh my head
- Comment on Hmmm 2 months ago:
Even when it was easily proven incorrect it remained a common talking point from people opposed to EVs. Much of that opposition was for ideological/financial reasons, so facts didn’t really matter.
- Comment on Why are the SMS limits orders of magnitude smaller than data limits bandwidth-wise? 2 months ago:
I think the smaller character limit comes in from Asian countries if they don’t use the basic Latin characters that came out of ASCII. But yes, there’s no reason for the service provider not to offer unlimited SMS messages other than greed/lack of competition. I remember over 20 years ago reading a high level phone company employee talking about how the SMS plans were basically printing money for the phone companies because it cost them almost nothing in terms of bandwidth, utilizing an otherwise unused part of the connection protocol. Back then most companies charged for the messages as in @OP’s question, and the plans were relatively expensive. Nowadays most plans I see in the US and Europe offer unlimited talk and text, or limits that are so high they would be hard to reach. I think it’s a combination of competition and smart phones offering SMS alternatives that offer more functionality while using a tiny fraction of your data allowance, or none if you’re on WiFi.
- Comment on It's a peaceful life 2 months ago:
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on What is a game that you know is bad but really enjoy(ed)? 2 months ago:
Somehow my brother wound up with a copy of Crash Time: Autobahn Pursuit for Xbox 360. There are many reasons to call it a bad game, and it’s a little odd to release a video game in North America for a German TV show few people in North America have heard of. We each beat the game eventually, but we had a lot more fun not playing the game the way it was intended and just driving around the open world racing each other and crashing into things. I even wrote to them suggesting they add a mode similar to the car soccer games Top Gear tried on their show (this was several years before Rocket League was released).
- Comment on is it spelled "grey" or "gray"? 2 months ago:
My in-laws in Quebec get weighed in pounds
- Comment on What makes a man? 2 months ago:
There’s a 568C?
- Comment on How tf do people who work 8-5 M-F get any life done? 2 months ago:
Sometimes it’s using PTO or sick time (normally I’ve been able to take the time in 2 hour blocks), sometimes I’ve just been able to arrange with my supervisor for an extended lunch break, or just taking an unpaid break during the day and making up the hours later in the day or the week so that I’m not hitting my income or not completing my work.
Also, there’s reasons dentist offices often open early, or work on the weekends. Other necessary services like that may offer extended hours on certain days of the week.
- Comment on 3 months ago:
I’m going to assume that was not a test since there was a real plane in there
- Comment on Any tips on immigration? 3 months ago:
I’ve only given it a relatively cursory look in the past, but it seems like Canada doesn’t give a quick pathway to citizenship via marriage. I think you can get a residency status somewhat quickly and easily, but it seemed like you’d need to live in Canada for a decade before you could apply for citizenship, whereas for my wife we could apply for US citizenship after 3 years or after she’d had her green card for 3 years, I can’t remember which exactly.
If you have the money, a lawyer can make the process a lot easier for the US, so I’d guess the same might be true for Canada.
Also, double-check how Canada views things, but if there’s any chance you might want to get your spouse a green card in the future, the US government strongly prefers that you get married in the United States. They seem very suspicious that marriages conducted in another country might not be real and that it’s just a scam to try to get a green card. The longer you’re married the less of an issue it is, but if you decide to get a green card in the first few years it could be a problem. If Canada is not as strict about that then you may want to have the legal wedding ceremony in the United States, even if you’ll be living in Canada.
And overall, I feel like it’s most valuable to try to get both parties some sort of citizenship or permanent resident status in both countries. You never know when a family medical emergency might lead to you moving to another country, and that’s not when you want to try to establish residency permission. Canada seems to require you to actually live there for more than half the year to apply for residency, so we haven’t done that for me, but since you will be living there you should be able to. I think you can also apply for a green card without immediate plans to live in the US (but double check that) so you may want to start that process sooner than later.
- Comment on Memories of defragging your computer 3 months ago:
I felt like the difference was only obvious if the disk had gotten really bad in the first place, but maybe it was just psychological from seeing the colors move around.
- Comment on You take your dog into an elevator and they look at you funny. "Why did we get in this little room for a minute and walk back out?" 3 months ago:
My dog hated elevators the first couple years we used them when we’d travel to see my in-laws. The floor is moving? She wanted nothing to do with that. Even now I’d say she only tolerates them.
She still hates the grates inside the entrances of Canadian hotels that I think are to help deal with melting snow. They tend to sink/bounce as you walk across them. She tries to go around or leap over them, or runs across them like they’re a platform in a video game that will fall if you stand on them too long.
- Comment on -Artemis crew: I think I can hold it. 4 months ago:
“At the next natural satellite make a free-return”
- Comment on Progress 5 months ago:
For some reason they posted this on their social media account
- Comment on If I got in a collision with a car from the 70s with a car today, would not the 70s car win out since it would primarily be metal? If so why don't people buy more 70's cars? 5 months ago:
It’s interesting considering how the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety really highlights what is more important for them to reduce in a collision. Modern cars might sustain much more damage and be more likely to get written off as a total loss, but that will probably cost them $30-40k at the high end in most wrecks. But if a person gets seriously injured the insurance company could very quickly be on the hook for the full $100-300k in medical bills most people get coverage for.
- Comment on If I got in a collision with a car from the 70s with a car today, would not the 70s car win out since it would primarily be metal? If so why don't people buy more 70's cars? 5 months ago:
Featured comment on the first video pretty directly answers the question from @OP @Patnou@lemmy.world :
As a Firefighter I was called to an accident which turned out to be a head on collision between 60’s model Chrysler and a 2000 model Subaru. The Chrysler looked to have held up pretty good but the driver was taken to hospital with life threatening injuries. The Subaru was totalled back to the windscreen yet the mother and daughter in the car walked away without a scratch.
- Comment on Your mother's package has arrived 5 months ago:
It’s impossible to miss something that large
- Comment on Anon is worried about AAA sales 5 months ago:
- Comment on I think my sister asked this. But why can't we have a pirate community? Like not teaching how to pirate but just articles on streaming is raising prices, stuff from torrentfreak.com and other things? 5 months ago:
I’m misremembering, then; I trust your version over mine!
- Comment on I think my sister asked this. But why can't we have a pirate community? Like not teaching how to pirate but just articles on streaming is raising prices, stuff from torrentfreak.com and other things? 5 months ago:
There was brouhaha when they first blocked it (I think they originally defederated from db0) and the reason given was .world had received a takedown notice from a rights holder because of a thread where someone was actually sharing some sort of copyright material. They felt like they were attracting attention as one of the largest instances, even though they weren’t the source.
- Comment on Mindspring Memories – Virtual Hallucinations (1:30:29 album, 2015) 5 months ago:
MindSpring was the name of our first Internet provider
- Comment on Anon contemplates AI 5 months ago:
I think it goes back to the Reddit days. Subreddits would be referred to as r/SubredditName, which referred to the URL path (reddit.com/r/SubredditName) and was how they would be displayed on the page. I think the Reddit mobile app at least would actually turn that into a link. The equivalent to a subreddit on Lemmy is a community and their URL often shows up as lemmy.instance/c/CommunityName. It’s not actually as useful in the Fediverse to refer to them in that way, though, because it generally only works as a link if you’re signed in to that instance. Using !CommunityName@lemmy.instance is better because it should work regardless of what instance you’re on, or even if you’re using something different from Lemmy.
