Yes, though the air pocket is there right from the start. If you pierce the bottom of the shell with a pin before boiling then the egg will have less of a dent at the bottom after boiling, giving a more uniform shape.

The egg always has an air pocket on the bottom, at the blunt end. This is an air pocket that the developing chicken embryo uses for gas exchange. See the diagram:

Source: Bird eggs on Wikipedia.

I doubt luck had much to do with it! This just seems like a convenient way to embezzle a few hundred million of investor money as a favour to a friend.

Somewhat, but not formally. Epic did keep those 1000 staff on Fortnite until now. They would’ve laid them all off years ago under the Hollywood model (gone as soon as filming completes).

It would be a win in the short term for the developers who unionize but I think it would be a long term loss. The AAA games industry is already in a pretty precarious position. Hollywood (which I think is a preview of things to come for game studios) is practically moribund.

The issue is that the bar keeps getting raised on production costs. That means spending more and more money up front which involves bigger and bigger risks. This in turn leads studios to take fewer and fewer risks in gameplay design, story, and all the other innovations that people want.

At the same time, the indie game world is getting better and better at innovating and capturing more of the many small niches that people are looking for. This further adds to the pressure on big studios to spend more on artists and level designers. It’s a vicious cycle!

I think unionizing will lead to the closure of a lot of game studios for the above reasons, so those developers may find themselves in the indie game market (which offers zero job security and is really feast or famine in terms of success).

I feel like that would change video game development to be like filmmaking. In Hollywood, everyone working on a movie is unionized but jobs are not steady. You have to get a job on each movie separately and once filming wraps up you’re out of a job again.

Game publishers seem to already want that sort of model anyway. They don’t want to hire 1000 people full time. They want temporary workers until the game releases, then a small staff for maintenance and updates.

I don’t think it’d be hard to leave if you had. You can export your issues to CSV. Everything else is just git.

A lot of investors are passive investors. They put their money in ETFs and call it a day. Those ETFs in turn buy stocks in companies on a cap-weighted basis (bigger company => buy more of those stocks).

I have been moving some of my investments out of ETFs that buy American stocks (because these are heavily dominated by AI companies) but I think most people don’t care or are afraid to (in the general sense of being afraid to manage their own investments, rather than trusting their bank to pick for them).

In my town restaurants come and go so fast the yellow pages are basically always obsolete.

Apologies are an admission of liability in the corporate world, therefore extremely rare. Corporate-speak non-apologies (with sweeping changes to reverse the damage) are just about the best you can hope for. If you’re looking for someone to blame for the non-apologies, blame lawyers. Otherwise blame Microsoft for everything they’ve done to screw up Windows (which is far worse than a silly non-apology).

It will always go up in nominal terms. That’s true of everything, due to inflation. It’s not always true in real terms, adjusted for inflation.

I would say that, but… there are a lot of, for example, Japanese companies that have been around for decades or centuries making great stuff the way they always had. Unless you’re saying Japan isn’t a capitalist country (I’d love to see how that argument plays out), I’d say there’s some difference in company culture that leads to enshittification.

I’ve heard in some cases it happens when a new CEO takes over and they have no respect for the existing culture, and just want to “make their mark” by chasing short term profits.

HP used to make a lot of great stuff. Their spectrum analyzers were the best in the business. At some point they flipped a switch and went into full enshittification mode. They burned all their bridges with their most loyal and informed customers.

It’s easy to get mad at people for not knowing the things we know. It’s incredibly frustrating. But then they know things we don’t. Turns out there’s way too much stuff to know and we can’t all know everything.

Modern life is unbelievably complicated and everyone is failing to manage that complexity to a level that would satisfy all the idealists. In light of all that, I find it hard to blame them for it.

Mango is delicious but where I live the fresh stuff is never ripe. I have much better luck with frozen mango chunks!

No, these people are rare. The problem is that their impact is outsized. One person can harm many over the course of several years. It doesn’t take a lot of bad actors like this to cause a lot of harm in society.

Investment funds, not companies. A $150,000,000 fund sounds like a lot but it’s smaller than the pension fund of a mid-sized company (3,000 employees, $50k total contribution per employee on average).

The loopholes seem super obvious to me. Just have a bunch of $149m real estate trusts, whose shares are owned by another fund.

Didn’t you know? Billionaires eat hundreds of millions of steaks a year!

Far from it dude! I’m in Canada.