Since you collectively have the majority of votes you can simply vote to change how profits get distributed and the founder has to accept it because they don’t own the cooperative, you all do.

How do you change it? By voting to take away the founders shares? Voting to make shares worth unequal?

I would NOT want to be the founder of that co-op. Imagine investing hundreds of thousands, taking out loans, and putting in 80 hours a week for the first few years to get the business running… and then a bunch of new hires vote that you shouldn’t get shit.

The only way to have any equality is for everyone to be equal from the start. Which means everyone putting skin in the game. Which means it’s inevitably only well-off people who could have a co-op with any sort of equality.

Law firm partners have buy-ins, that’s like the closest thing to a co-op with equality and everything. Except the issue here is that the buy-in grows as the company becomes more valuable, so at one point new partners might not be able to afford the buy-in at all. If the co-op is worth a billion dollars and you’re selling shares at ten thousand dollars and there’s 1000 employees owning equal parts of the company - they’re all forced to sell at significantly below market share. Not a great place to be as one of the employees. So the buy-in at this stage should be a million dollars for things to be equal. But who tf is going to be able to afford that?

That is set to change but only in the European Union.

And I believe Mozilla isn’t planning on porting proper Firefox to iOS. Chromium is more likely to come over.

If Chromium manages to take much of the market share Safari has (like if Apple decides to ever make non-safari browsers a thing outside of the EU), it’s game over for browser engine diversity. Safari is currently in second place in market share behind Chrome, followed by another Chromium browser, Edge. Firefox is so low, it’s a rounding error.

Huh? The goal of the chromium project was to facilitate a corporate browser in the first place. It’s why they don’t have a more permissive license. They want to be able to use everyone else’s work if anyone forks it.

Permissive license doesn’t mean that corporations suddenly get the ability to completely change existing work for the worse, or change its’ license. They can bloody well do that with GPL too if they own the project including contributions, so it doesn’t matter if it’s BSD or GPL, the only protection that the open source users have, in any case, is that licenses can’t be changed retroactively, so if Firefox, Chromium or Ladybird went completely closed source and proprietary today, we’d still have the right to use the code as it was yesterday. Permissive licenses just mean that someone somewhere can create a closed source build without the permission of the person or company who owns the project and that doesn’t particularly matter for anyone using Ladybird or any future open source derivatives. Permissive licenses are useful for libraries, but also for software that could be bundled as part of a bigger solution. Maybe you want to embed a web browser in your proprietary application and don’t want to use webview because its’ usability differs platform to platform.

Also why AGPLv3 and not GPLv3? I don’t think the “A” part is even necessary here, that’s needed more for server side applications, I.e if the end user is using online without the code running on their own computer, AGPL is the one to use.

Anyway, in the modern age, (A)GPL is used by a shit ton of corporate software. Oftentimes with an (A)GPL open core and a bunch of proprietary functionality not included in the core. I should know, I work with one example on a near daily basis. This way, nobody can just take their core functionality and develop a closed source alternative, while they can sell you an enterprise license for full functionality on their “open source” software.

They do however represent the ability to profit from it. Which is what the whole “paid enough to care” thing is all about.

I don’t much care if I have equal voting rights to everyone else in a co-op of which my share is worth ten bucks a year in dividends if the founder is making a million a year or something (which I’d say is realistic for a medium sized company). At the same time, the founder is not going to just give away his ownership, maybe in small chunks, but not the majority of it.

You still take all the risk because the bank is going to say they won’t give a loan to a new company without a track record, unless someone is willing to be a guarantor.

Now you share the profits, but all the risk is yours.

Unless you have a bunch of people lined up to start the co-op and they’re all willing to pitch in or become guarantors with you, in which case it might just work - but again, the initial people are going to have more skin in the game than the rest.

It’s more of a power unit thingy, for at least Teslas and Mercs. The motor(s) and gearing are in one big box that sits on the subframe(?)

Here’s an article with a photo. Tesla having such a large cult following, means it’s slightly easier to find than other brands’ EVs’ drivetrains, but I’m sure they’ve mostly figured out the same solution.

For true privacy you’ll want something like GrapheneOS on a Pixel, with no Google apps or anything. Some other ROM with no gApps as a second choice.

Other than that, Apple SEEMS to be mildly better. I’ll give you an example: Apple pulls encryption feature from UK over government spying demands

While it’s a bad thing that they pull the encryption feature, it’s a good sign - they either aren’t willing or able to add a backdoor for the UK security services. Then there was this case. If the article is to be believed, they started working on security as of iOS 8 so they could no longer comply with government requests. Today we’re on iOS 18.

Apple claims their advertising ID is anonymized so third party apps don’t know who you are. That said, they still have the advertising ID service so Apple themselves do know a whoooooole lot about you - but this is the same with Google.

Then regarding photo scanning - Apple received a LOT of backlash for their proposed photo scanning feature. But it was going to be only on-device scans on photos that were going to be uploaded to iCloud (so disabling iCloud would disable it too) and it was only going to report you if you had a LOT of child pornography on your phone - otherwise it was, supposedly, going to do absolutely nothing about the photos. It wasn’t even supposed to be a categorization model, just a “Does this match known CSAM?” filter. Google and Microsoft had already implemented something similar, except they didn’t scan your shit on-device.

At the end of the day, Apple might be a bit more private, but it’s a wash. It’s not transparent and neither is Google. I like using their devices. Sometimes I miss the freedom of custom ROMs, but my damn banking apps stopped working on Lineage and I couldn’t be arsed to start using the banks’ mobile websites again like I’d done in the past. So I moved to iOS, as Oneplus had completely botched their Android experience in the meantime while I’d been using Lineage so I was kinda pissed at what I had considered one of the last remaining decent Android manufacturers (Sonys are overpriced and I will never own a Samsung, I hate them, I didn’t like my Huawei or Xiaomi much either).

So if you want to run custom ROMs, get a Pixel or something. If not, Apple is as good a choice as Android. A couple of years ago it was the better choice even, as you’d get longer software support, but now the others have started catching up due to all the consumer outrage.

Americans are pretty weird about their ID things.

Other than a driver’s license, most of them don’t have any ID.

They don’t have any sort of unique ID number either. They have a social security number, which is not guaranteed to be unique. Two people can have the same SSN. One person can have two SSNs. You’re apparently supposed to keep your SSN secret, but they’re assigned somewhat sequentially and they get leaked a lot. It’s a clusterfuck.

Are gearboxes typically unsprung? I was under the impression that the flex from the CV joints sorta disconnects the weight of the drivetrain from the wheels and it’s instead connected more rigidly to the body, which is sprung.

These may be a net reduction in mass, but likely still an increase in unsprung mass

The last supposedly Ukrainian person I talked to here was very anti Zelenskyy and wanted him to just lay down arms. What’s your opinion on the matter? Do you want your country to keep fighting? Do you qualify for the draft yourself?

If these pan out, it could be much cheaper to make cars with torque vectoring AWD. And cheaper to make ridiculously quick cars in general.

Well, there are some in the EU who are hoping to bargain with Trump so that we reduce our import taxes on American cars (US has them at 2.5%, we have them at 10%, so we’ve been doing exactly what Trump is trying to do, at a smaller scale), buy more weaponry from them and as the US ramps up its’ gas production, we could buy more of that from them as well - if Trump in return does not put 25% tariffs on everything made in the EU.

It’s not a bad deal for either side, really, though it sorta defers the whole making more of our own weaponry part of trying to be more independent of the US. And I’m sure both the automakers and MIC would do what’s in their power to persuade Trump to take it.

Are we talking about the 450 square meter store that looks like an industrial warehouse, or the 12 square meter handcrafted-everything boutique?

Cause if it’s the former, I didn’t see you shoplift a whole ass plant and if it’s the latter and I see you clip the tiniest part of a plant, I’m calling you out loudly.