Adderbox76

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

All business have to care about profit or they won’t be in business for long

Businesses have always cared about profit; just reasonable profit. They would make a product, determine the cost of manufacture, apply a modest profit margin to it (usually about 30%) and factor in things like employee raises and benefits, expanding the business, and building up a financial safety net.

Businesses were run by humans, for humans.

Hedge fund managers and venture capitalists in the 80s changed that. Rather than assigning a fixed profit margin each year to try to maintain, the rule became "how much profit can we squeeze out by sales and (most damning) by systematically dismantling anything that we pay for that benefits our employees".

This is the end result of having taking human stakeholders out of the business decisions and replacing them with shareholders that are mostly other businesses, hedge funds, and venture capitalists. Profit becomes the ONLY motive, rather than one of many.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 53 points 4 months ago (4 children)

So he's basically telling the other billionaires to eat the cost of the tariff themselves and NOT pass them on to the consumer.

Trump really is stupid enough to start biting the hands that gave him his current position, all because Musk tells him to.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Apocryphally, CEOs have committed Seppuku for far less.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 24 points 4 months ago

The chef's kiss on this photo really is the ancient Toyota beside him that you just know has been chugging along for literally DECADES probably requiring nothing more than oil changes and tire replacements.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago

TIL Jon Lovitz isn't dead. His career was just doing a damn good impression of it.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago

DJs use the tools to express THEIR talent. They don't just say "create a composition that sounds good". That's the difference between an artist and a fraud.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Everything you've mentioned are tools for an artist to use to express THEIR talent. A typewriter doesn't come up with the words. a Synthesiser doesn't compose the the music that its playing. Comparinging AI (which requires zero talent) is disingenuous.

To put it another way, if you're a carpenter using hammers and saws (tools), and then some engineer creates a robot that can be programmed to do that job and allows them to fire all the carpenters. Does that make the programmers carpenters even though not a single one has used a circular saw.

The line between "tool" and "crutch" is drawn by how much talent and training it takes to use it.

AI is NOT used as a tool in that traditional sense, its a shortcut to fake talent in ways that hammers, paintbrushes, typewriters and even just good old fashioned traditional Photoshop aren't..

You have to have the training and talent to get use out of a real tool. And AI certainly potential for use in that regard; proofreading, background removal, grammar checking etc...

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 months ago (5 children)

AI art is fine being used as a tool. What I have a problem with is it's users calling themselves "artists".

A person who types a prompt into an AI is no different than a person who hires a painter and describes what he wants them to paint.

Just because that "painter" in the first case happens to be a computer, that doesn't mean that by default the title of "artist" defaults back to the person who wrote the prompt. That person is still just someone telling someone (or something) what to draw.

In other words, you don't become the artist just because you eschew paying an actual artist and instead have your computer do it for you.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 12 points 4 months ago

Oh no no, my friend. Newcomers are obligated to provide massages for their first week. We will not ignore...

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 months ago

Are they getting DOGE to look into whether the tickets were non-refundable?

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago

hmmm...upvoted for being an idiot. My ego doesn't know which direction to go...

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

I don’t know what the solution is… But I feel like I’m watching America repeat in Canada.

I'm cautiously optimistic in the polls so far. We seem to be, almost universally, looking to the south with horror, and then watching Poppinfresh's polling drop every time someone compares him to Trump in public.

The reality is that most of the Maple MAGA are a very small subset of one or two particular provinces, with the majority of people even in THOSE provinces not having none of Trump's shit.

We always have to keep in the mind that the loudest person in the room isn't automatically the most poplular.

view more: ‹ prev next ›