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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Here’s a nice quote from The Communist Manifesto:

    What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

    It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen…

    We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate… Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people…

    A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation.

    Ah shit, never mind. This was from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations













  • SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.

    That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.

    Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.




  • droans@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    11 months ago

    Only way I’m using most shopping sites is if I know they’re trustworthy and if they support PayPal or one of the major payment processors. I’m not going to type my CC number into a random website and trust that they aren’t hacked.

    There are a lot of issues with PayPal, but at least it makes it easy for me to get a refund if the seller refuses. The last time I had to get a refund, it was because the seller told me I had to ship my $20 product back to China in order to get a 50% refund. This was despite the returns agreement explicitly requiring them to cover return shipping and that shipping it to China would have cost me about $150.


  • droans@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    11 months ago

    The details for Prime explicitly refer to it as Two Day Delivery, not shipping.

    Prime Membership Benefits

    Delivery benefits

    FREE Two-Day Delivery: Millions of items delivered fast and free.

    FREE One-Day Delivery: Available on more than 15 million items with no minimum purchase.

    FREE Same-Day Delivery: Available, in select areas, on over 3 million items for qualifying orders that meet the minimum threshold of eligible items, in as fast as five hours.


  • droans@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlMust win
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    11 months ago

    They haven’t had an expansion franchise since 2002 and it’s unlikely it’ll happen any time in the near future. 32 teams is perfectly balanced - each conference has 16 teams and four divisions. Each division has four teams.

    It would also be very expensive.

    You’d need a stadium that met the NFL standards. The average stadium costs about $2B. Fortunately for her (and unfortunately for the rest of us), taxpayers on average pay about $1.2B of that. We’ll be very generous and assume they paid even more or she received a substantial loan that will be paid off otherwise, leaving her with about $250M out of pocket.

    It should be noted that the opposite is more often true for expansion teams, though. Cities don’t want to pay for the stadium because there’s more risk with new teams. They could decide to leave very quickly, the owners might not have the capital to keep the team afloat, etc. The Texans were the last expansion team and nearly all of the cost for their stadium was privately funded.

    Now, the NFL also charges a fee for expansion teams. This mostly has to be a guesstimate because we haven’t seen one in two decades. The Texans paid $700M at the time so we can assume it would be closer to $1.5B now.

    After that, you have the practice facilities and offices. Cities don’t usually cover that. You might be able to get away with using local facilities for a couple of years, but that won’t be enough to actually create a competitive team. A safe low-end estimate for this would be $150M. The Cowboys paid $1.5B for their facilities, but other teams have paid as low as $125M.

    Finally, the last big cost is payroll. This by itself would sink any chance she has.

    The NFL requires all guaranteed contracted salaries to be placed in escrow. I’m not sure where that rule came from, but I can probably guess Al Davis is to blame. A single year’s salary would be $225M for 2023 and around $240M for next season.

    However, most of the big name players have guarantees that would destroy that. The most common is a signing bonus. Teams love them because the salary cap rules would allow them to amortize it over the length of the contract, including “void years”. Your QB would receive about $200M immediately upon signing. The expansion draft picks and early draft picks would be another $300-500M likely. In the end, the salary escrow plus bonuses would be about $500M-1B.

    So assuming everything goes her way, she’d be on the hook for close to $2.5B immediately plus the reoccurring costs.

    It should also be noted that the NFL isn’t really a great way to make money as an owner. It’s really just a long term retirement hobby for billionaires. They could just go invest in companies or whatever, but they buy NFL teams because they like football and it occupies their time. Yeah, they’ll make money, but not as much as they otherwise could. There’s a reason most owners hate the idea of a super-billionaire like Bezos owning a team.