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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • There are a lot of examples recently of respected legacy companies being turned into hollow husks of their former selves (or even going out of business entirely) due to finance bros. Sears, Paramount, Toys R Us, Warner Bros, Red Lobster, Twitter, Reddit (ok maybe stretching the definition of “respected”), and now Boeing, among many, many others.

    Will it change anything among that class of people? Probably not. The spectre of Jack Welch still looms large over the business world, incentivizing short-term slash-and-burn flash over long-term productive smolder. The type of person who’s inclined toward this kind of con will still pursue it, and there are enough people of low scruples who will get the dollar signs in their eyes.

    But with any luck, it will take the luster off enough that people will stop playing along; and they’ll run out of money sooner or later.

    It’s already starting to happen. The Onion was bought back from private equity earlier this summer, and the new owners are taking a lot of steps that no PE would ever consider; essentially they’re just looking to stay afloat, not trying to cancerously pursue unchecked growth.










  • I have five guesses:

    (1) That would require more diagnostics than an LED on a monitor is able to provide at a reasonable cost, (2) if you’re leaving the monitor on in a situation where burn-in is likely, you’re probably not at the monitor when it matters, (3) monitors are a mission-critical piece of hardware, meaning that them turning themselves off (or even just turning off certain pixels) randomly is not a great idea, (4) it’s probably the OS’s job to decide when to turn off the monitor, as the OS has the context to know what’s important and what isn’t, and how long it’s been since you’ve interacted with the device, and (5) it’s in the monitor manufacturer’s best interest for your monitor to get burn-in so that you have to replace it more often.

    The actual answer is probably a combination of multiple things, but that’s my guess.

    Honestly, setting a screen timeout (or even a screen saver!) is the solution to this problem. So the problem was more or less solved in the early 80s.