Ah, I had missed Trump accounts because they originally couldn't hold individual stocks according to how congress defined them in the legislation. I was not aware Trump and co were trying to do an end-run around the legislation by arguing that the law doesn't prohibit corporations from donating individual shares.

However, that's a pretty new development, is controversial, and its unclear how it would really work, especially in tandem with the other rules.

Its a little tricky too, as children generally don't have suitable investment accounts that can hold publicly traded shares. I'm doubtful they even legally can open those accounts.

So what are they going to do, issue a gazillion single paper share certificates? What a shitshow that would be, the fees and shipping alone around dealing with that for a single share would be nuts, not to mention the hassle of redeeming them, and the untold numbers that would be misplaced or destroyed. And I'm still not sure children can own them, or sign the agreements required to get them.

What else could the do? Create beneficial trusts for every child? Whose going to administer that? and again the fees and management expenses around it would be nuts all for a $150 space-x share?

It might be reasonable for him to set a bunch aside, and as children reach adulthood, let them claim them at that point.
If the idea is that the kid can't sell it or whatever until they're an adult anyway, its probably fine. It'll be income maybe when they receive it, so that could work out badly for some kids though, if they have to sell it to cover the taxes on it, because they don't have a job yet. Especially if its appreciated to a couple thousand or something. (How are splits etc handled, do they get one or more? Or worse... reverse splits on a single share?)

Eberhard and Tarpenning had filed incorporation paperwork and had a business plan and a high-level strategy. No physical prototype, but they had a few concepts coming together about how they might build a prototype that mostly involved licensing from AC Propulsion and Lotus and using off-the-shelf Li-ion batteries. Guess they did have something physical - they had bought some laptop battery cells to test performance in parallel and series wiring scenarios. They were up to a total of one employee.

The COTS batteries were the one idea that fully survived contact with reality. The Roadster used them. They had pivoted to making their own cells with COTS form factor but custom chemistry for the Model S and pivoted to their own proprietary form factor for the Model 3.

The Lotus partnership yielded some useful chassis bits - I have never found an estimate more than a single digit percent of the final chassis used Lotus components/designs.

The AC Propulsion drivetrain components proved totally not a fit and all of that part of the Roadster was redesigned from scratch and built in-house.

Musk had been on board for over two years before the first prototype was unveiled. Their first funding round prior to that unveiling had Musk personally providing $6.5 million of the $7.5 million raised. Round 2 had the Musk-to-others ratio being $9.0 million to $4 million. Was not until the third round that the ratio finally flipped at $14 million to $26 million.

Other than money, Musk pushed for aesthetic and structural changes to the licensed Lotus chassis. Had the body panels swapped to carbon fiber. Set the interior requirements in order to move away from a kit car vibe to a premium sports car feel. Won the debate with other founders to optimize the drivetrain for high- end sports car performance (which is amusing as the others were the ones who had sports car performance as part of their original plan but had since changed their minds when they found COTS was not going to cut it). A lot of these changes came because Musk actually would test drive their early tech integration prototypes. His biggest contribution was possibly bringing in employee number five, Straubel, who is considered a co-founder, was CTO for over a decade and is still on the board.

Just bought it is a gross simplification.

And 'likewise with his other accomplishments'. Disregarding all the other entities he has founded, tell more more of him just buying SpaceX and Starlink.

Bit of an acocunting misunderstanding there. There was a lot of guesswork when SpaceX was private about how their accounting worked and what, if anything, they were charging themselves internally for Starlink launches.

Now that they are pubic and the books are open, we see the answer is 'nothing' in this sense. Their is no arbitrary internal fee that makes it into their books the launches. They are running the business as an integrated entity with the rockets being a cost of business.

That 20% of revenue coming from the government is 20% of total revenue coming externally into SpaceX as a whole. The full pie is 61% Starlink customers, 21% government (NASA and the panoply of military/intel agencies) and 18% commercial launch.

I read that a lot. In any situation where costs to a business are going to increase.

There are three big pricing methods.
* cost plus Company decides their markup and adjusts prices to ensure that markup remains consistent.
* competitor Looks at what others are charging and adjust your own prices. Can vary according to how the company wants to be perceived.
* value How much is my customer willing to pay?

Value is the closest to of oft perceived view that businesses are universally squeezing every penny they can out of a consumer. In general only 15% to 25% of businesses work primarily under the value pricing model. 10% to 15% do so for goods, mostly in the luxury or very very specialized spaces while in services value pricing is up to 35% to 45%. Not surprising there is much variation based on factors relating to particular market segments. Additionally, companies that are considered as using one pricing model will often put a few thought cycles into the considerations of other models.

In this particular case, the pricing does have more a value component that it often does. The video game market is considered a luxury, is rather elastic and there are many competitors. Prices for video games are relatively consistent across studios. Base prices. In this market the cost plus can, and will, be expressed via bundling, increased shifts to subscriptions and the joys of additional pay to play and (is there a word for pay for cosmetics?). Or just plain quality cuts - no need for a cinematic there and let's just ship with two starting classes. That would likely negate Blizzard's moderately surprising pause in their slide out of the premium studio tier.

You really believe this or think that lying is justified because you are on the side of all that is good?

a) Tell me who Musk bought SpaceX from? Otherwise he really kinda sorta looks to be the one and only founder. Was curious so did some digging and found he didn't even take an outside investor until six years after he founded the company.

b) You know SpaceX has gone public and their books were opened for the prospectus and for each quarterly report? SpaceX is getting 20% of their revenue from government contracts. If you want to broaden focus, the best estimate I can find is that every Musk enterprise ever has benefitted from $38 billion in government money - that is tax credits, loans, direct contracts, credits to consumers for buying electric. Compare that with $650 billion in total estimated revenue. Care to do the 38/650 math and tell me if it is above fifty percent?

I note you do not link to the man's actual words, but instead to rants about his words where a long direct quote would be two words. In isolation. With no context. Surrounded by paragraphs making claims of his horribleness.

For those who care to read and decide for themselves:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolv...

Reminds me a lot of the Damore 'Google Manifesto'. Lots and lots of denunciation over claims of what it said and again, very small snippets circulated as evidence. Yet a whole lot of changed minds when you could get someone to actually read it. "Oh, that is all he said? Shit, I agree with him."

Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.

3iob - its metal. it just won't be on mainstream radio, and metal is niche enough I'm not sure canada has dedicated metal fm radio stations?! They don't around here. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone listened to a lot of metal on spotify in canada that 3iob would be suggested in their discovery queues or whatever; thanks to cancon promotion.

French is an optional language credit to graduate in much of english speaking canada already, and many english language universities i've looked at don't require it.

As for your daughters reading assignments. Those artists aren't simply because "cancon + woke ideology" - oh a first nations person wrote it? Who cares what's in it. Its on the list! That's not quite it. (Although I'm sure you can find exceptions, people are people, and im sure someones on the reading list because they "know" somebody or some other nepotism/wokeism/or even plain old corruption.)

But in principle they are also chosen on the basis of the stories they actually tell. The school system explicitly wants to highlight and expose students to a variety of canadian perspectives and canadian experiences in canadian settings. That's an explicit goal. They want students to read about an immigrant from the middle east moving to thunderbay and navigating making friends and integrating in canada while maintaining their own cultural heritage, they want students to read about an inuit growing up in nunavut, or a small town in rural quebec overcoming lifes little challenges and celebrating its little victories. Even if they aren't subjectively "the best books", these are the types of stories and perspectives and ideas that they want students to be exposed to and to spend time thinking about. Then they include some of the more "important" works, like Animal Farm, the Hobbit, Romeo and Juliette, etc. Its a deliberate part of the breadth of the education.

To layer on top of that, of course its also a good use of public money to buy local, and circulate the money in the local economy; and for learning reading and comprehension, and thinking and writing about structure, plot, themes, allegory, etc, its all fine, and having as much "canadian subject matter" underneath it as possible, just makes sense.

I think you are perhaps a bit too cynical here.

That's the facility that will be attached to the existing Starlink dish factory in Bastrop. That one will be optimized for satellite solar panel arrays. The big solar panel factory, 100GW.proposed, is in a different county. That is a nutty number. It very much would be the single largest plant int he world. Currently in permitting so will have to wait a year or two to see if dirt actually moves.

Yes, the original original poster was incorrect on the PCB factory. That Starlink dish factory is the largest PCB manufacturer in the United States. Dwarved by the monsters in Asia.

Barges? No. Years ago they bought and then sold a couple old oil exploration platforms. No current plans for ocean launches. I think the fury of that first full stack launch excavating their hardened heat resistent concrete like an M80 in a pile of flour disabused them of the idea.

Guess how many people speak welsh in Wales, or Finnish in Finland? 10 million is a LOT of people. And lets be honest here, its still french. Sure its a dialect, but if you know Canadian french and put in a bit of effort, its not exactly hard to pick up Metropolitan french, belgian french, swiss french, etc, etc, etc.

French class is basically a 'a bit of exposure to even the idea of an another language (in this case french), a bit of canadian history (esp french canadian), oh... and its a bit of an art and drama class too'. For fucks sake its 30 minutes a few times a week in grade school.

Nobody is expecting you to learn conversant or fluent french from gradeschool french class.

If they dedicated the the time to arabic or hindi or mandarin, it would be just as ineffective at producing speakers of those languages. Meanwhile, french has some canadian significance in terms of heritage and culture, and its an official language... so what are you really on about here??

Heavy metal isn't mainstream. What part is confusing you?

It is exactly that. Its abused by many actors, and imperfect, and there's plenty of canadian crap as a result. There's also quite a bit of good stuff, and plenty of it is even made by white men (a tragically marginalized group, according to you apparently.)

Being worth consuming doesn't mean you'll hear about it. Wasn't that your very own argument about 3 inches of blood??

Lots of canadian content worth consuming wouldn't gain traction without the promotion. Your right, a lot of it isn't worth much, but frankly, a lot of is. So lets hear about it. What's the real problem here? You can't find enough quality american content to consume because canadian content is crowding it out of the marketplace? For realsies?

Meanwhile, take a look at all that top tier quality we're missing out on thanks to all that canadian content rules. American TV is full of promotion for low rent garbage reality TV, cake baking contests, hoarders, absurdist dating contests, and so on. American netflix is full of cheap comedy specials and low budget subtitled filler from their foreign studios, American spotify is full of AI slop music.

So yeah... if some of that is getting pushed below the surface some canadian crap is getting promoted instead. So be it.

He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.

OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.

But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.

The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.

Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.

All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.

There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.

Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?

China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.

And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.

Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.

Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.

When I think about it, I can see a clear difference.

There were all manner of places where human eyes were accepted, but still/video cameras were not, long predating "smart glasses". From changing rooms, saunas, locker rooms, and bath houses to performances like plays and concerts, and movie theatres to executive board room meetings, and even court rooms in many cases.

There are lots of scenarios where everybody accepts and consents that other people will see/hear them, but do not accept or consent to be recorded.

  Are you really incapable of seeing the multiple clear and obvious differences between "seeing/hearing something" and "recording something" ?