Damn, munged the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Bullshit. Citation needed. He dealt (poorly) in NYC real estate, just like his future father-in-law. From :

For much of his career, Kushner worked as a real-estate investor in New York City, especially through the family business Kushner Companies. He took over the company after his father, Charles Kushner, was convicted for 18 criminal charges

His "investment firm" was just a bribe for pulling the rug over Saudi Arabia's crown prince kidnapping, killing, and dismembering a journalist that was critical of him while Kushner was in the first Trump administration. Kushner never did any venture capital investing, but it didn't stop the Saudis from giving him billions of dollars.

From the same article:

Since leaving the White House, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that derives most of its funds from the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund.

So both of the buyers are the Saudi PIF, it's just one of them has a level of misdirection.

I don't get this. It's solar. If you don't want the power then turn it off. The utility may not have that level of control over home inverters (though some do) but they certainly can control the output of any grid-scale solar install. Why would they be paying "out of state utilities" (presumably where the sun don't shine) to take the power? Utilities like money and that doesn't seem like a money-making idea. Yeah, they don't want their large capital investment sitting idle but it's better than running it and paying someone to take the output.

The only 32-bit Windows version currently supported by Steam is Windows 10, and I doubt you're going to have any better compatibility with old games running the 32-bit version of Windows 10 than on the 64-bit version.

Many laptops already don't have upgradable RAM, and since SODIMMs are limited to lower speeds, eventually no laptops will have upgradable RAM. LPCAMM and LPCAMM2 were supposed to solve this, but by the time they started hitting the market, they too suffered the same fate: they allowed faster RAM than SODIMMs, but were still a clockspeed bottleneck.

It's fine to sell a laptop with slower RAM today, but in a few years, when that faster RAM is the mainstream, it won't be.

As a Fiver (not Fiverr), gotta love the folk bragging on having (or losing) 6-digit accounts. Way to make me feel old.

Given their "self-service" business model, why did Fiverr need 762 employees to begin with?

Here's a good one: When you need to pay hush money to a porn star so she doesn't talk about your mushroom dick when you're trying to gain political office, have your lawyer pay the hush money and then have your company reimburse the lawyer and write it off as "legal expenses". You gain twice, you don't have to pay income taxes on the hush money you are paying and your company gets to deduct the hush money amount.

Or here's another one, you have your company rent an apartment nominally for business purposes but then let your CFO live there in lieu of salary. You can also have the company provide him a car, vacations, pay for his grandkids exclusive private school, and provide other benefits. The employee doesn't have to pay taxes on this compensation so you can pay them less overall. You can also use this weird trick for yourself, your family, and other close employees.

If you're so smart why don't you know about these awesome scams?

Did you miss the story earlier today? iPhone 17 Air Drops Physical SIM Slot Globally, Pushing eSIM-Only Future said in the summary that 75% of phone connections are going to be eSIM by 2030. Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate. This will make it harder to identify hardware that has undocumented cellular components, you will have to identify the actual components instead of just going "WTF is a SIM slot doing there?". It will be almost impossible to identify if the manufacturer actually is trying to hide such hardware in a SOC or something like that, the only giveaway might be the need for an antenna but those are getting smaller and smaller.

eSIM makes it much quicker and easier to swap SIMs. In fact, being able to have many eSIMs on your phone that you can quickly switch between (for example while traveling) or having multiple simultaneously active is one of its biggest benefits. It is equivalent to or better than physical SIMs in literally every way except for the ease of moving a SIM between different devices.

Oh, the guy who runs a firm investing in private capital wants you to think that there's no money to be made on public companies? Color me surprised.

Buybacks and dividends are the same from the company's standpoint. They are transferring $X to the shareholders with either method. But from the investor's POV, the buyback is better. If a company issues an investor a dividend they have to take that money right now. That means they have to recognize it as income even if they didn't want/need that income. By contrast, if the company increases the per-share price via a stock buyback then the investor can take that gain whenever they choose, rather than at the whim of the company. A dividend puts the timing of the income under the company's control where a buyback puts it under the investor's control, at least under current US tax law. That's why investors (and hence the companies they invest in) mostly prefer buybacks these days.

They can play similar games with dividends, there have been plenty of companies that continued to pay dividends right up to their bankruptcy because that's what investors expected. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of shenanigans with buybacks -- like the airlines doing big buybacks before COVID then begging for bailouts when their business tanked but they can do the same thing with dividends.

Thanks for answering, the animus toward buybacks puzzled me when from my perspective (as a retired person living on investments) dividends and buybacks are just two sides of the same coin. I prefer buybacks for the reason stated above, but any ROI is good and I'll take it in any form I can get it.

Why? I see this a lot but don't understand people's objection to stock buybacks. Are companies not supposed to ever return profits to their investors? If not, then why invest in that company? Sometimes a deep piggy bank is not in the best interest of a company -- they may end up just squandering it on something stupid like the metaverse or AI. I would much rather see a company return profit to its investors then watch it burn money while management flails and fails at something that is not in their core competence. I expect rsilvergun to be against stock buybacks because he is a perpetual victim so any action by anyone is designed to keep him on the bottom, but what's your specific beef with them?

It's not, that graph shows that Intel's R&D spend has been consistently rising, nearly triple what it was fifteen years ago. And that's consistent with the ever-rising cost of R&D on new process nodes. That never ends, you always need to be working on the next process node, and the costs to develop each node only ever go up.

It's also currently a wasted investment. Intel's been dumping enormous sums of money trying to develop new process nodes, but their 18A (1.8nm) node is suffering from unacceptably low yields, their 20A (2nm) node was cancelled entirely, and their 3nm node was so bad that Intel made their CPUs with TSMC 3nm instead of Intel 3nm. In fact, Intel's current generation of CPUs (Arrow Lake) are made *entirely* by TSMC. None of the active silicon uses Intel process nodes. The compute tile is TSMC 3nm, the graphics tile is TSMC 5nm, the SoC and I/O extender tiles are TSMC 6nm. Only the passive interposer is made by Intel... on a 22nm process node.

The SNES launched at $472 USD, adjusted for inflation. It also did not include a second controller. The Nintendo Switch 2 costs $449 USD, not $525. I'm not sure where your street price comes from, as the console is currently in stock for MSRP at all major Canadian retailers, and in the US, it's available for immediate shipping at MSRP from Nintendo's own website, so there's no reason that anybody would ever pay more than MSRP.

It's true that the SNES included a pack-in game for that price, and the Switch 2 price with a pack-in game is $499, which is a bit more expensive. But it's not that far off.

I think they're going too far as soon as they're making medical claims without some sort of medical certification. And on their residential product page, they specifically say that their air purifiers were "Developed to address COVID-19", and in their FAQ, they say "The powerful ISO-Aire filtration system was purpose-built to address COVID-19 and other droplet and/or airborne-based infections in healthcare settings."

They repeatedly mention the CDC on their website, and in most places just word it along the lines of the CDC recommending medical-grade HEPA filtration as a strategy. However, on their "Why Iso-Aire" page, they word it as "CDC and ASHRAE recommended in purifying the air with medical-grade HEPA filtration, a key mitigation strategy in the fight against COVID-19" which implies that their produces specifically are recommended by the CDC, which they are not.