The court’s decision also introduced the concept of systemic failure, which holds providers liable when they fail to adopt preventive measures or remove illegal content. Now, platforms will be expected to establish self-regulation policies, ensure transparency in their procedures, and adopt standardized practices.
Pretty sure this would cover Lemmy and most traditional forums as long as they have a written policy and standards that are consistently enforced.
In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.
https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos
Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.
Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.
Taxes can go either way. It depends on how they were written.
The tax code after the Great Depression allowed for massive expansion of public projects in the U.S. It was 63% for the top earners. During WW2 the top tax bracket was at 94%.
When the boomers were all born the tax bracket was above 70% for the top earners. This high tax bracket is what fueled the creation of a large middle class, public infrastructure, schools, research, space exploration, and the massive military buildup and wars. It also acted as an effective anti-minopoly/oligarchy system because the tax system discouraged it.
Then in the 80’s Reagan slashed the taxes for the top earners down to 28%. its never gotten above 40% since then. Most high earning companies have so many exeptions today that the real tax rate is often 0%.
Because of it the infrastructure built during the 50’s-70’s is degrading and falling apart. Public services are declining and the middle class is shrinking as people become more impoverished.
I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.
I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.
Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.
Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.
City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.
My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.
They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.
Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.
Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.
Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.
The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.
My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.
Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.
A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.
The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.
Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.
As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.
The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don’t give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can’t get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn’t eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.
Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn’t start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.
Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.
Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.
Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan… See above.
Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.
There are many more of these that are around.
Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a “Theoretical” $200K max.
Tech tends to goes through stages:
A need or idea is created. Usually by a small independent entity.
A proof of concept is developed and starts to gain ground.
Investors pour money into the concept to an extreme degree. Tech grows in functionality, matures and develops into a useful tool.
The the investors demand a return on the investment and the money dries up.
Company either goes bankrupt or their product goes to shit.
Then use the library for the rest of the series if needed. :-).
Have played every version of BF since it came out. Haven’t purchased or played BF2042 since they abandoned BF1 & BF5 still full of bugs.
EA doesn’t give a fuck about the quality of their games anymore. To be fair, none of the major studios do anymore. They are too big and try to race through development to make sure that this years sales numbers are bigger than last year’s.
If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
The last major antitrust action on this scale in the U.S. 8 years to process.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
This type of lawsuit is why the billionaire bro’s are backing the senile rapist and felon. Making them play somewhat fair ruins their business plan.
Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.
Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.
So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.
They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.
illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.
Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…
I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.
Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.
The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.
Large corporations rarely innovate and try new things. Most innovation comes from smaller players with limited market share taking risks.
Large companies buy out smaller ones who create cash cows from taking large risks. The large company then milks the cash cows until they are completely dead.
The consolidation of studios to a few megacorporations has led to this inevitable end. The solution is simple: break them up. If we have 30 or so similar sized studios competing, we will get better movies/TV again.
Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90’s.
Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90’s. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.
Microsoft’s business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don’t need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.
Why is basic math.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
No that never happens /S
I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team he was an idiot and to have fun looking for a new job a few months.
The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own “consulting business.”
1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.
After a couple years “consulting”, the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn’t bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.