If you're a company that's run out of ideas for new things to do with your income, giving it to investors isn't a bad idea. That's dividends. "Tax efficient" is between you and your government.
Companies have a natural lifetime. While they're growing, paying dividends is a bad idea. When they're mature, it's a good idea.
Anybody can give themselves "dividends" from a non-dividend paying stock, no day trading or exceptional long-term planning required. Every year, or quarter, or whatever you like, just sell x%. In most respects it's the same thing that would happen if the company actually issued a dividend.
The disadvantage is that you'll probably have to pay a fee for the sale. The (big) advantage is that in many places sales are capital gains while dividends are income, and capital gains is usually taxed less.
Google is an advertising company that occasionally develops some technology to support that. They've expanded to the point where they're dominant in pretty much all advertising except old fasioned print, TV and radio, and they're attracting a lot of anti-trust attention. Their growth is probably hitting its ceiling so dividends aren't necessarily a bad idea. Their actual payout is too small to be much more than symbolic though.
Even something that could be more accurately called a tech company is eventually going to saturate their market and stop growing. Growth doesn't mean you stop making, e.g. better processors, growth means you keep making better processors that you can sell more of for more money.
Those aren't Google's products.
Here are a list of Google's innovations in 2018. Warning: it will hurt your soul.
It's true, all the EVs I see driving around every day died last winter. Totally disappeared.
Someone probably understands just fine. You don't get nearly the clicks with stories about amortization that you do with stories about OMG ELECTRIC VEHICLES SUXXORS TO THE $110,000!!!
Apple's example code license:
https://developer.apple.com/su...
It appears there are basically two conditions:
1) if you distribute the thing unmodified you include the license text
2) you don't blame Apple for whatever happens, and if you're modifying it you don't stamp their name on it.
The fact that they're licensing the model weights themselves, and maybe some other stuff useful for training these things, means that you can fine tune, retrain, whatever the model (modify it to your purposes) and then it's yours, you can do whatever you want with it, just as if you'd written your own program based on some freely licensed example code.
Want to rebuild Tay the Nazi chatbot and sell it to white supremacist groups for massive profits? Have fun, just don't stamp Apple's logo on it or blame them for any consequences.
It's rough for a developer, or more likely Steam, when they suddenly have to refund a bunch of money. If they're doing early access to fund development they've probably already spent that money. I think early access was intended to be only for the final stages of development, but it's turned into something more like kickstarter. You release what's sometimes little more than a tech demo, get a bunch of people to give you money, and use it to fund further development. Steam probably doesn't want to continue taking on the risk of projects like that.
Really they should leave early access alone but limit it to games that are almost done, and create a separate kickstarter program where you effectively donate money to the developer in exchange for some involvement in the process and a free copy of the game if it ever makes it.
Moissanite is fairly easy to tell from diamond because it's dispersion is so much higher. Cubic zirconia is a closer match, although still considerably higher.
Moissanite is much prettier than diamond though, and since the patents expired in 2018 gemstone silicon carbide should be getting pretty cheap.
Ha, actually laughing out loud at that.
If I ever need an example of dramatic irony, I'll have to remember this one.
Lol, that joke hit too close to home for a couple of mods.
They're all LED displays. The nano ones are just smaller, which is what you need to make smaller displays while keeping the resolution the same.
Those video walls you see in stadiums and Times Square and everywhere else today are LED displays, except they use non-micro (i.e. bigger) LEDs so they're big and/or low resolution. I have a couple of the panels, they're squares with 30 cm sides and 64 x 64 LEDs. A few TV manufacturers made high res video walls with the smallest LEDs they could make, which at the time came out to 150" 4K displays. It looks like they've whittled that down to 75" or so now.
Quantum dots are hunks of semiconductor pretty much like all other LEDs except they're so small their size influences the colour they emit. You don't have to change the materials to tune the bandgap, you just change their size. So if you want to make LEDs really small you're eventually going to end up with quantum dots. To be fair, the dots are about 5 nm across, so they are nano. You'd never make single dot pixels for a TV though.
Slashdot seems to be on a tear making up headlines lately. This one is at least similar to the actual article title.
"No One Buys Books Anymore" implies this is a new situation. The article is "No One Buys Books" which I suppose might seem true to a blog author who gives it away for free: "Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that.." right down to the excessive ellipses.
This is a myth possibly originating with The Martian, where the main character goes to great lengths to bury his RTG. That was silly, he should have used the thing as a foot warmer in the hab, and to charge his iPod.
They're potentially dangerous if you crack them open and munch on the plutonium inside, but they're generally also designed to survive reentry intact so good luck with that.
Don't worry, they've decided they need to get back to the moon right now because the Chinese are interested. There was a documentary on Netflix about it.
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins
