I agree, nice and thick, with lots of butter! Don't listen to the advice in the article :-)
> The trick is not to spread it thickly like peanut butter; instead, you take about a quarter of a teaspoon’s worth and scrape it thinly over the entire slice.
There's an interesting and detailed PDF linked from the first page that is packed with history and statistics about Russia's present and past manufacturing of missiles.
It's an interesting report, but it has too much loaded language, totally misses what the USSR manufacturing was intertwined between it's republics and whoever made the graphs should be shot.
Economic redress is perfectly reasonable when there's an international agreement like the Sino-British Joint Declaration in place, deposited with the UN, which is clearly being violated. That treaty states that basic policies regarding Hong Kong "will remain unchanged for 50 years", including the promise that the city would retain a high degree of autonomy.
But that's to be acted upon in cooperation at the international level. Surely the US had enough sway at the time to result in more action than the sternly written letters and an executive order to 'retaliate' by giving China exactly what it wanted -- US officially acceding to the fact that HK has lost its autonomy 30 years earlier than agreed and scheduled.
At home, I'd have started by opening up immigration from Hong Kong quite a bit more than we did. We eventually broadened eligibility for people from Hong Kong, but only made the visas valid until February 2023, which was a year and a few months from when we got around to it under the next president.
And that wasn't enough. People leaving under such a visa would only place targets on their back for their eventual return. We should have made much such visas longer with a path towards permanent citizenship attached.
Beyond that we should put a lot more effort into fighting transnational repression. Not just limited to things like the bounty placed on a US resident by the new HK leadership, but across the board. If you want a list of examples, China features quite heavily on the list of example incidents from the FBI:
I'm interested in portfolio theory when I see something like this.
Let's say that the $1B is invested and reliably earns 8% when inflation is 3%, therefore leaving 5% to distribute as tuition. That's $50M for the first year, allowing for each following year to distribute 3% more than the previous year to account for inflation.
Tuition is $59K and there are 1,258 students [1], so the cost is $74M a year.
With my assumptions the endowment would slowly bleed away, but it would fund students for a long time. Perhaps less time, if the school added capacity. Or perhaps more time if there is some other endowment money or other funds from somewhere, or if not all 1,258 students get the benefit for whatever reason.
Whenever I read something like this, my jaded mind wants to think that the benefit being claimed is clearly not matched by the amount of money contributed. But in this case, the amount of money contributed is approximately the required amount of money needed to achieve the claimed benefit. So, good for Ms. Gottesman! She will have a good and achievable result.
I read a similar article a few years ago about Californians moving to Idaho. Californians were making Idaho even more red, because the ones that are moving are self-selected to be conservatives.
My favorite example in English is this sentence: "I peered at a pair of pears on the pier."
As a native speaker, the sounds in peer/pair/pear/pier are slightly but detectable different. But non-native speakers can almost never say or hear these differences.
As a native English speaker (American) I think "peer" and "pier" are pronounced the same, and that "pair" and "pear" are pronounced the same, but that the 2 groups are pronounced quite differently.
I'm sometimes amazed by how many people work at some of these companies.
Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
This comes up every time a company’s employees is listed, in the software world.
If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... )
But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this.
What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.
I think Walmart is a bad example because there are thousands of giant stores across the United States full of employees. I think most people assume they also do their own distribution/fulfillment shipping of goods to their stores and customers, which requires warehouses also full of employees.
eBay doesn't do fulfillment, or payment processing, or really anything other than running the website/mobile apps/api, customer service, marketing, etc. There has to be a lot of waste there.
The way people bring up "X is basically fine" on this site (not you, other comments) drives me insane. It's gone through multiple seriously breaking issues, its valuation has plummeted, and there's no indication that it's solved the bot and misinformation issue Musk was very loud about before purchase (but some indication it's worsened.) Regardless of your political leaning it's hard to imagine the site being a better experience than it was three years ago (unless you were chronically moderated for posting ToS-violating content.) Maybe nobody can speak with certainty yet that the layoffs have contributed to those issues. It's not hard to imagine that some of this carnage could have been avoided by not slicing out everyone with domain knowledge so the new owner could go on some extreme ideological warpath. Yes, the domain resolves to an IP address and renders a page in the browser. If this is the baseline to justify laying everyone off, we've gotta expect more from the web.
> I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!
It's interesting that I had the opposite reaction. eBay is a _worldwide_, multi-billion dollar institution. They've been around for about 28 years (~1995) - since the start of it all...
I really thought the number of employees would be higher.
I turned to Wikipedia for some numbers (apple to oranges comparison, I know... but I was curious).
Walmart : 2,300,000 : Jan 2022
Amazon : 1,684,853 : Nov 2023
Target : 440,000 : ??? 2023
Microsoft : 238,000 : ??? 2023
Alphabet : 181,798 : Jun 2023
Best Buy : 90,000 : Jan 2023
B&N : 24,000 : ??? 2019
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
(People really have the audacity to compare eBay to Amazon)
I didn't realize that eBay was so small. Now they lost 1k. I haven't visited eBay in eons but a 9% reduction in their workforce from such an already low number is devastating (to me).
Are we looking at the end of eBay? They may have become staid... old in their thinking.
I constantly see Amazon, for example, open up new territories in other areas. They went from eBooks to general ecommerce to servers to hardware to voice AI to home gadgets. There seems to be nothing this company won't consider. They think like a startup.
eBay may be another Xerox (or Mozilla...) unless they can get their management team thinking outside their comfort zone.
Replying to myself. I wanted to include other companies that are somewhat similar to eBay as far as what OP implied. I only looked at companies between 6k - 22k employees.
Ubisoft : 20,665 : video games
Yandex : 18,004 : search
Equifax : 14,000 : credit bureau
Autodesk : 13,700 : software
EA : 13,400 : video games (electronic arts)
Netflix : 12,800 : video streaming
Shopify : 11,600 : eCommerce
eBay : 11,600 : Dec 2022
Unity : 7,703 : video games
GoDaddy : 6,910 : domains, websites
It's hard to make sense of these numbers without lots more info but it's interesting - as a first pass - to match number of employees with expectations.
And it's quite a horror show to use, click around your settings/profile/account type pages in particular and it seems that your thrown through 3+ different apps from different eras.
I think about this a lot as well. The massive value multiplication provided by software allows companies to become insanely bloated. At most companies where I've worked you could do it 20% layoff of the tech staff and not notice it. Lots of dead weight.
11,000 people can’t make a database/schema that can store their data such that they stop purging listings! They literally have to purge listings due to their design. It’s so annoying
I remember being an electronics store once and seeing some cables intended for audio that described themselves as being "low oxygen" cables. My god, the nonsense that people fall for!
Out of all the ridiculous things, this one is actually not completely ridiculous. For low temperature physics applications, Oxygen-Free High Conductivity (OFHC) Copper is the only material that is sufficiently thermally conductive at low temperatures. I’m not an audio person, but I have a hard time imagining it would make much of a difference at room temperature; maybe similar performance with a slightly thinner cable?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Roach_Underground