This article actually had a lot of good points, that were legitimate. However, the fact that printed book sales are globally around 64 billion for 2023 in revenue makes it so the headline is totally wrong.

I experienced this firsthand. Here's my story. I had a client that seriously asked if I was poor because we (my software company of 10+ people) needed to get paid. He was not joking. I'm not poor, but like most people I need money to pay my staff, and the vast majority of my bills. I do have SOME (relatively) passive income, and I could maintain a broke-graduate-student lifestyle off that indefinitely, but it would be pretty close to poverty for me, my wife and three kids. My preference is to earn money.

This guy is a VC out of San Francisco. To him, and all of his friends, anyone that needed to earn money for their work was poor. He had a successful exit, and told me he could only bankroll two or three more companies before he started dipping into his principal, so this time things really needed to work! That was a similar situation for all his VC friends. I think I explained to him that I was most definitely not poor, but somewhere between "poor" and "rich enough to fund multiple companies for multiple years with zero productive output."

He wasn't dumb, and he's good at sales. His exit came from being the first sales person at (what later became) a publicly traded company, and helping them grow all of their sales in about a quarter of the world. For me, it was a first hand lesson in this level of disconnect.

This type of thinking that comes out of San Francisco is something to be aware of, and very cautious around. The polices that result from it are similarly disconnected from any type of reality most people experience on a day to day level.

Sure, but why use the Amazon Linux on Amazon's infrastructure? We use Ubuntu on Amazon's infrastructure, and Ubuntu locally, to avoid incurring hourly charges from Amazon. Amazon's fault is that it was impossible to update the image. Even after EOL, we've had good luck updating Ubuntu images in-place (after installing new SSL certificates, manually, or upgrading SSL if it's REALLY been a while.) I do not believe that Amazon will be able to create as smooth of a package management system, and upgrade path, as Ubuntu. That's my question - why use Amazon Linux at all? Check out the below response from guruevi.

I inherited one of these from a few years ago as the foundation of an EC2 instance, and dealt with tons of outdated packages, and lots of other problems. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it would be much, much easier to reinstall and reconfigure my application inside Ubuntu, so that's what we did. What's the rational for using Amazon Linux, as opposed to a well support distro? I imagine if I needed a super optimized kernel as part of a container deployment system, this might make sense. But as an EC2 base install...?

In this unforeseen, totally unpredictable, completely surprise move, helicopter sales spike in France!

Check this out: https://www.onlineregister.com... Epson is an ink delivery company. They happen to make printers as a helpful supplement to deliver the ink, but printer sales are non-recurring revenue, while ink sales recur with predictable frequency. If you buy enough original equipment manufacturer ink, they will literally give you a free printer. For anyone surprised by this, you should learn about recurring vs. nonrecurring revenue. This is a justification to shift production from less profitable laser sales to more profitable ink jet sales, with some calculated loss due to transition costs. The same with their bricking of older (less profitable) printers remotely. I like Epson and think they make awesome products. Despite that, anyone actually analyzing these articles needs to have a shred of economic knowledge to make sense of them. Or it's just the same as watching a pro sportsball match. Or American Idol. With my super dinky businesses, I calculate recurring vs. nonrecurring revenue separately, so I can focus on the recurring component. Epson has entire MBA types to do exactly this type of analysis on the data Epson Rewards provides, and similar sales data from their laser product lines, to make recommendations that result in these actions, and then greenwash them, since saying "we can make more money by doing less work by abandoning this entire product line" isn't as trendy as "the environment" right now.

Apple's dream may have been to destroy other people's dreams, and stifle entrepreneurship that threatens them. In this case, they've managed to sacrifice many small dreams, in order to feed into one, larger, nightmare. I am pretty sure Neil Gaiman wrote about something like this in "Sandman...?" I may be confusing the comics and the Netflix series though.

4.0? I still remember 3.0 with Minesweeper and the clock. Or was that 3.1...?

Yeah, I don't understand why they didn't wipe, install AOSP, and run ALL of their data through a VPN, and run encrypted messaging. Ultimately, this idea is based on the Android Open Source Project. I suppose there are opportunities in providing tech support to criminals.... It sounds like there is a market for actually secure, not governmental compromised, phones.

Experts exchange...

As a CEO of a company, I care about my workers and my customers. If I didn't, I don't think I'd have many workers, or customers. This is the basis of competition.

Even if I didn't care about my workers, turnover is expensive. Even for something as basic as box unloading, there are costs associated with bringing someone onboard (getting them into your accounting system, making sure they have their documented training, etc. etc. etc.) as well as costs associated with their leaving, and finding a replacement.

These people probably really work for Amazon. I imagine they are being paid by Amazon, just not to stock shelves... I wouldn't call them "fake" workers, since they're doing very useful work for Amazon, really working!

I believe the term you are looking for is investment opportunity. Both BeauHD and msmash want to make sure everyone is aware of the investment opportunities available.

Your statement is accurate and makes sense for a well functioning organization. Unfortunately, small startups do not normally fit this bill.

What happens in a startup is you can give people whatever title you want to make up. Titles are very inexpensive, and easy to change. What probably happened is the founders created a CTO title for someone, impressed them with the title, and then used that and equity (also inexpensive) to avoid actually paying a large number of people with a varied collection of roles. I've actually had this offer, multiple times, for startups that want to save on their web development costs. My response is normally "No, I'm not interested in becoming your CTO so you can save on your web development costs. We can put together a contract, and I can delegate these issues to my team members that focus more on this level of challenge daily."

I've seen someone go from "intern" to "CEO" because of this. It was actually not a good thing, since this woman's expectations were totally unrealistic afterward. It would have made more sense to call her a "marketing coordinator" or "evangelist" but that probably would not have motivated her as much as "CEO." She's actually taken this off her LinkedIn, as I'm sure she realized how crazy this is. It's probably not a good idea to have a student as a C-level executive...

People are motivated by lots of different things. Sometimes those things can be good, and sometimes those things can result in problems later.

I believe this argument should be taken to the limit.