I lived in a world without billionaires - Eastern Europe pre-1990.
It wasn't a world without powerful people though: party nomenklatura and their friends ruled us with an iron fist. Not billionaires in numbers but in lifestyle, power and ruthlessness.
Together with actual billionaires, we also lost all the products and services their work created in process of making them billionaires, so we were all cold and hungry.
I learned then to cherish societies where one could become billionaires: it meant there was enough economic freedom so that the tiny insignificant me could carve a honest, dignified living for me and my own without begging politician mercy for handouts.
Great response!
Its very trendy to say things like "capitalism is gross" or "billionaires shouldn't exist" but the truth is, capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than anything else in the history of the world.
Moreover, billionaires (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc) didn't "steal" anything from you to get there. No one forced you to buy an iPhone.
“Sneeze” or “喷嚏” is a pretty difficult word to write in Chinese in terms of number of strokes and its internal components. I’m not surprised people wouldn’t know it off the top of their heads. It’s like if someone asked you to spell “unnecessary.”
The other dimension is that the second character 嚏 in particular is obscure: it's virtually never used in any other word than 喷嚏.
In Japanese, it's a hyogai kanji not taught in school, meaning most people would spell it phonetically. Alas, this is not a practical/socially acceptable option in Chinese.
The first, 喷 "erupt", is not exactly common either but is at least used in a few other compounds like 喷水 "fountain".
I don't think anybody is proposing that Chinese people are not normal humans making normal mistakes. The difference is that if somebody asked people to spell "unnecessary", there would only be three common mistakes they would make (based on whether letters are arbitrarily duplicated or not), and all would be easily understood by readers if written.
English orthography is terrible (i.e. a single vowel can be a half-dozen letters), but there's a limit to how complicated it can be to write a word that one knows how to say.
Wiyul I took migh yot to Luffbruh (acting az a cooryer surviss), I inshored my dissertacion woz cerrect bye revuwing the seilerfoan musick. Suddenly, their was a laud noys. I rush't too the sighed of the bote, but I sore the wartre fludding inn. "Quick! Sumbody hasta seel the hoal!" I cryde. Fourtuneatley, the glew oonder the bought's scin maid the holl cloaze up, sow we kepped floting, butt we terned arowned buy mesteak. Immajin mie shock wen wee woshed up in Lossymuth! Eye wonet fourget thatt deigh enny thyme sune, that's fore shur.
(I'm pretty sure this isn't eye dialect: I consulted the rhyming dictionary a lot, to make sure I was swapping spellings between two words with the same phonemes. I also tried to avoid reanalysis, though some of these words might not quite achieve that.)
The graph is percentage of total production. You can see Chinese production ramps up significantly, which can presumably imply that US production as a percentage of total world production falls off, even if absolute production increases.
WhatsApp servers have been blocked in China forever. I lived there for 13 years and the only time I recall using WhatsApp without VPN was in the early 2010s.
Guys, it’s chapter 11 bankruptcy. Wework is not going out of business. One of the top uses of chapter 11 is to renegotiate/break commercial leases. Wework is going to continue as a company though it may shut down some locations. It is absolutely going to use chapter 11 to pressure landlords to renegotiate leases.
During the second quarter, WeWork lost $397 million. It said it had $680 million of liquidity, $205 million of which was cash.
The company had net long-term debt of $2.9 billion as of June end and more than $13 billion in long-term leases, at a time when rising borrowing costs are hurting the commercial real estate sector.
I don’t know even if they want to continue operating the math isn’t mathing. And commercial landlords are also hurting badly so not sure they are in a position to make some sweetheart deal with WeWork.
WeWork doesn’t own any buildings, has the code base website and brand for its booking site, list of members, and some staff. Cheap 11 will likely remove executives, so all that’s left is the leases as far as a ‘business’. Which are worthless because new ones negotiated now would be way more favorable.
So it’s stripped to a brand and website and soled to Regus I bet.
I don't believe Chapter 11 has a very high survival rate, and whatever would emerge would not resemble WeWork except in name. They're essentially out of business in my mind (but have been for some time now).
market valuation depends on the consensual negotiations of all the stakeholders and consumers of a product don’t have 100% power to control the price. movie studios would love to price content creation at 0 if possible.
i love my iphone mini form factor, but i have to charge mine twice a day. and if i'm traveling, i have to carry an external battery pack, which severely diminishes the form factor advantages.
