Yeah, if not for me the government would have responded appropriately and bankrupted the company.

I bought a bit of BP shortly after the oil spill.

I was hoping to lose it all, but had the feeling I’d end up making money. I did make money.

All those shareholders should have been fucked.

I have never seen them used well. I expect there IS some use case out there where it makes sense but I haven’t seen it yet. So many times I’ve seen factories that can only return one type. So why did you use a factory? And a factory that returns more than one type is 50/50 to be scary.

Yeah, I went through the whole shape examples thing in school. The OOP I was taught in school was bullshit.

Make it simpler. Organizing things into classes is absolutely fine. Seven layers of abstraction is typically not fine.

OOP is great, and can be much simpler than what you’ve seen.

It’s Java culture that’s terrible. The word “Factory” is a code smell all on its own.

Just like any tool, don’t overuse it. Don’t force extra layers of abstraction.

I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.

“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?

Because they want to merge with another company and need regulator approval.

I used to work at a third party store that worked on a different model and was pretty incredible.

The owner took all the commissions and paid everyone a straight (decent) salary. This caused a number of changes in how the place was run.

Better customer service. It didn’t matter to us if you were coming in to buy a phone or for a problem with your bill. I’ll happily spend two hours on the phone with the company trying to fix your bill without selling you a thing.

We had strict standards for process, and our paperwork would be reviewed by someone who did entirely executive stuff. Our stuff always had 'I’s dotted and 'T’s crossed. What I learned from this is that the company was regularly and routinely trying to scam agents. Every month we’d have to reconcile payments with the company and there would always be discrepancies.

Interestingly, we’d have you sign a separate contract with us instead of the company. If you cancelled service within six months (the charge back period), we would fine you up to $400 and require return of the equipment. This would cover any legitimate charge backs. We had a lawyer on retainer and would regularly sue people for breaching this contract and not paying the fine.

We kept a stock of loaner phones. If you broke your phone and couldn’t immediately replace it for whatever reason, we’d loan you a phone for a few days.

Our customers were loyal, and we had a special relationship with the company.

This was back when the companies were paying agents well. Over time, the company got more and more greedy, and squeezed any decent business model out of the market. The execs who knew our situation loved it because we beat the hell out of any other places for customer service, and we had several large contracts with local companies.

Of course these execs who knew us were slowly replaced MBA penny pinchers who didn’t know and didn’t care about our unique circumstance.

One of the earliest squeezes was that the company confiscated accounts that had more than a hundred lines. Those would be now run by the company’s B2B department instead of the agent(s) who landed the contract.

Oh, and another interesting tidbit. We’d often waive paperwork fees for one reason or another. We got a corporate email that said our competitor had higher fees and didn’t waive them. So you can guess what we did. Raise the fees and stop waiving them. This is how competition works in the real world. Why would anyone go the other way?

I don’t think our stores exist anymore, but they were pretty great while they lasted.

Honestly I’ve never thought about it this much. I’ll have to make an effort to stop writing in past tense.

Usually just start with the verb.

“fix a NULL pointer dereference in …”

Steam recently removed their arbitration clause, largely because paying for a thousand arbitration cases is worse than dealing with a class action.

Yeah, and fuck that. If I perform well on the job, I’m sure as hell not being there for mandated bullshit. Fire me if you want.

Guess what those policies do? They drive your good employees away, and you keep those who can’t find somewhere better.

Why do they need to work these two weekends on a project that has been ongoing for years?

He notably didn’t say they needed to do better for the American people or that they needed to have better policies.

He said they needed to do better to earn our trust. They don’t want to change what they’re doing; they just want to make us agree with it.

Vance over performed slightly. I’d say Walz underperformed slightly. Walz was too nice.

In the end, I think Walz wins by a fair margin. Plus Walz got the biggest two soundbites that will be played for the next week ad nauseum.

Vance had absolute shit to work with. Walz could have given the Independence Day speech.

I actually appreciate the part where Walz went off script and responded directly to Vance and the question asked. It was about Congress making the laws, and not the Vice President. They’ll likely use that to attack Walz and Harris, but I appreciated him dropping a bit of the show and just conveying reality.

The changes they were talking about require a vote from Congress. Vance dismissing that and saying it can be done through executive action should be concerning. Technically, it might be true, considering the President can just start shooting/jailing congresspeople until they vote his way. But I don’t think that’s what they wanted to express.

Weird that it costs them so much to produce as much content as they do, isn’t it?

I’d happily pay for YouTube if they didn’t want such a ridiculous price for it.

https://sell.amazon.com/pricing#referral-fees

I guess, according to you, it costs more to host files than it does to ship you a physical USB.

Maybe all these apps stores need to look into physical delivery in order to bring their costs down.

Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss

Bullshit. Epic’s loses are in paying for exclusives and giving away games while ruining their PR.

Steam could operate at 15% if they wanted to. But… why would they do that?

I wish more people on Reddit and Twitter would recognize that and use more discretion with who they’re creating a product for.