stephen_g

In a leveraged buyout you actually buy out the company so you take the risk of the debt and the sellers get the cash... Trying to do a 50% cash, 50% share deal, (where the shares hold the debt that generated the cash) is asking eBay's shareholders to be paid with cash borrowed from themselves!

> That was the hard part of the deal: will (enough) eBay shareholders want to be GameStop shareholders.

There is no upside for eBay shareholders - a leveraged buyout makes sense if it's for 100% cash, because the buyers are taking the risk and the debt, and the sellers get the cash. But in this deal, Gamestop need to borrow the money to pay 50% to eBay's shareholders, but then the other 50% eBay's shareholders get is shares in the company that holds all that debt!?!

It would be better for eBay's investors if eBay themselves just borrowed $20bn to do share buybacks. I mean, it would still be dumb and make absolutely no financial sense (because they still hold shares in the company that holds the debt) but at least they wouldn't have the extra liability of Gamestop's dwindling business on the side.

I like browsing stuff in stores too, but that's not what eBay is for - I'm in Australia, the whole point is I can buy stuff from other states in my country, or from the US or other countries if I need, and in the same way I can sell stuff to people in Europe or the UK or Canada or the US from home.

Seeing stuff in person is cool but for an 'eBay Store' you're only going to have a tiny assortment of items, and likely hardly anything you really want in any one physical location... These kind of things already exist (e.g. pawn shops, or here in Australia we have a chain called Cash Converters but it's mostly disappearing) and eBay's value proposition is different in that it opens that up from just items from people within driving range, to anyone around the world.

So having physical stores doesn't add much value for eBay.

They did manage to ride the meme stock insanity to build up $9bn in cash (their market cap is $10bn so it's not worth much more than their cash in hand, because their business has been declining for years).

They propose to borrow $20bn, twice their market cap, to buy a company worth five times their market cap. And 50% of it would be in Gamestop shares, which would be insane for eBay investors to accept. Yes the combined company would now own eBay, but would have the massive baggage of Gamestop's dwindling business plus $20bn of extra debt - a recipe for collapse.

There's no upside for eBay's shareholders, even if Gamestop was capable of pulling off the transaction, which is extremely unlikely even if eBay was crazy enough to be willing to accept it.

Nobody is saying Iran is good, this war if anything has solidified the rule of the hardline ideologues in its Government, by killing off a bunch of the more moderate ones. And all this bombing is definitely going to convince the local population that you are the good guys, right? Is it any wonder why the people haven’t risen up against the Iranian regime? And all that is not to mention that the war has handed the regime control of the Strait.

And it’s fair for people to point out that the the US and Israel starting the war was illegal under international law and exactly the same crime most of the world is sanctioning Russia for… Just because you don’t like the target, you can’t ignore the facts.

The 'outdoor unit that looks awful' is an interesting quirk especially with US equipment - most Japanese and European residential units actually look fine, I'm not sure why American ones have tended to look especially ugly.

I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!

Yeah, I think it's overall bad for society, but on an individual I'd definitely do it too (within reason) for certain services if I had kids that age.

But it feels like by making silly laws like this that aren't likely to be respected by much of the population is bad for the rule of law, which is bad for society. But fair enough, the rule of law is only a good thing as long as the laws are (on the whole) good.

We have a lot of this problem in Australia because as much as we pretend not to be, we're pretty authoritarian in regulating personal behaviour. For example in my state they're currently criminalising riding EN15194 compliant e-bikes above 10 km/h (literally 6 mph, slower than a jog) in my state on 90% of the bicycle path network (90% of the network are 'shared paths' so you'd only be allowed to ride at the bike's full 25 km/h (15 mph) motor limit on the small amount of dedicated bicycle paths). That and requiring anyone with any e-bike to have a drivers license - which cuts out people who can't have a license due to disability, medical issues but who could still ride a bike, or anyone under-16.

It's very silly, almost completely unenforceable and again just going to create huge non-compliance and further teach people that laws are silly things to be ignored... I really don't think that is good for society, and I've observed that the more Government has tried to regulate our behaviour, the less responsibility people seem to take, and the more the Government tries to further regulate.

So I think a big criteria of evaluating any new bill is "are most people actually going to respect this law", but all my experience with politicians is that they prefer magical thinking of believing that anything you make a law will immediately be fixed, even if it's impossible to adequately enforce or even technologically impossible to implement. Every time I've been involved in public consultation processes I'm constantly arguing practicality of the actual bill and they're arguing about the ideals that drove the poorly thought out laws...

That's the legal loophole that I'm sure a tiny number of people are using. In the real world, reportedly around 3/4 of kids under 16 that were using social media still are by either having changed their age during the window and using a sibling or older friend to do face scans for age recognition, or by creating new accounts and again using an older friend/sibling/relative etc. for the age verification. I heard about the ways children of some of my cousins got around it at Christmas, and their parent's didn't care!

The most embarrassing thing is that our Government thought the idiotic idea was workable in the first place... But of course now they've gone and made things worse, because now kids' profiles pretend to be older, so more inappropriate stuff (like gambling ads for those who put an over-18 birthdate) can get targeted at them - great job, eSafety Commissioner!

> Because right now for mere mortal it's impossible to find out if some law or paragraph is still in effect.

Where and how? Pretty sure our Federal and State Governments here in Australia publish the current in-force law (original Act amended with all amendments) - I assumed that was normal, do they not do that elsewhere?

See for example the Telecommunications Act (1997) [1] but current version amended to October 2025 (the most recent amendment). Then you click ‘All Versions’ and you can read any of the 116 or so versions back to the original in 1997.

1. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A05145/latest/text 2. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A05145/latest/versions

Of course I realise that, but that’s irrelevant to my point.

The point was that I’m surprised how many real 2G networks there still are, and that one still exists in Canada at all.

Sorry not sure what books would be good (I learnt the bits and bobs I know mostly on the job from grey-beards!) but I always like to chime in when people talk about black magic that part of learning about RF it's not that crazy - just unintuitive if you think in terms of the lower frequency and DC stuff - because once you lean about it, it basically turns out that really low frequency stuff and DC are basically a special case of RF, and you can see the RF effects in all sorts of things, like any decently fast UART or other signals.

So yeah, I would encourage any EE to look into it, because having an idea about RF can make any electronic design better (especially around things like EMC!)

Yeah, I mean if you think about why do LLMs use this kind of phrasing so much, it's just because it was already a common sentence construction in the training data written by humans!

That's incredible, here in Australia they not only shut down all 2G networks almost a decade ago, but they've already shut down 3G as well!

Although now looking at Wikipedia there are a lot more 2G networks sticking around than I realised, still hard for me to believe given what's happened here!

Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).

Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!

Wow, I didn’t know you could kill these in the registry, will definitely do this. They are absolutely maddening in my case, which is where I only boot into my Windows SSD sporadically, so there seems to be some time out so I get it basically every single time I boot Windows. It’s really not making me want to use it any more than the absolute minimum…

I don’t get how anyone thought that would work… From (medically necessitated) experience it doesn’t really make much difference in that respect!

I don’t know what’s going on with this kind of stuff in the US - similarly I’ve heard stories of people getting quotes in the States for anything from US$10-15K for the kind of air source mini-split heat pumps you can have supplied and installed for US $1200-2000 in Australia! (That is ~3.5 to 7 kW range - super common and cheap as chips here).

I think it’s the opposite of what you’re implying - instead I expect that a response that was boringly in line with prevailing opinions would be marked as a poor response. As would one that was counter but only controversial for controversy’s sake.

The idea would be to present well thought out and interesting arguments, not to be an ideological filter to make sure people agree to prevailing opinions!

Just upgraded to the Linea Mini after dreaming about it for almost 10 years - I actually used to have a two group ex-commercial machine in my kitchen that I got 15 years ago, so people are shocked when I tell them this machine was a big downsize from my old one!

Part of the reason I bought new is that they are so expensive on the second hand market here - so I’m not too worried that I’ll get most of my money back if I upgrade to something else in 10-15 years.

I’m going to overhaul the old commercial machine and will probably get a bit more than what I paid for it so not complaining!

The Super Jolly is fine, I have a used one at home that I’ve had for 15 years (which I use now with a Linea Mini that I just a couple of months ago) and get really good results.

The point is that investing in such a crazy expensive machine but not a much better grinder is really foolish, because the machine is going to be limited by the grinder so they may as well buy a machine that is 1/3 the price.

But really it sounds like 80% of the problem in the case tow OP is talking about still would have been the poor skills of the baristas, because they should still be able to pull very decent shots even with the mid-range grinder.

That’s ignoring a lot of other losses. Like in air travel you’re instantly losing 10-15% of your fuel generating lift, then you have to add in the fuel used for carrying the other fuel required throughout the flight. Whereas with high speed rail, rolling resistance (which we could say is the equivalent of lift in aircraft) is less than 1% from a quick search, and for a lot of passenger rail and almost all high speed rail you don’t need to carry fuel which is supplied as electricity from an overhead line.

Hyperloop of course was always a non-starter because the kind of energy that would be required to pump down such a huge volume would be ludicrous, maintaining the low pressure extremely difficult, and the amount of materials needed for the tube would be ridiculously large.

Geography like that does help a lot, it’s part of the reason it’s so easy to do really good high-speed rail in Italy over somewhere like Germany that is way more spread out. But it’s only half the picture, you also need the political will to get it built!

I mean it’s not just that, the current administration have destroyed a bunch of the US’s oldest and most important alliances…

I’m not in Europe but in another allied country, the feeling amongst people here is that the US is not able to be trusted as a partner anymore.

And with ways the Government can apply pressure to US companies (CLOUD Act etc.) that extends to IS companies too.

Proxmox can do containers too and has other benefits like really good ZFS support. I only have a couple of VMs and everything else in containers on my little Proxmox server.

I stoped using Twitter (around when it was changing to be X) because 60-70% of the accounts I cared about left the platform. More and more people will look elsewhere as more organisations and people who aren’t into Musk’s politics leave.

The headline is perfectly accurate… I’d say what you’re saying is a kind of whataboutism about stuff everybody knows…

Milestones like the one here are notable and interesting to most people!

What tripping curve do your RCDs have? That is not normal if they are the right type, really sounds like something is wrong!

What I’m trying to say is that with 7 slots and being more than double the size that it needed to be, it was way more machine than 95% of the market who might actually want it would buy, with a price that was correspondingly way too expensive…

I never understood the point of the Mac Pro for the last decade or so - especially after the Mac Studio was released, Apple should have worked out what professionals actually want - basically a Mac Studio but with three or four PCIe slots and a few SSD slots. That’s literally all it should be!

The Mac Pro was at the same time bizarrely over the top while also weirdly limited in some ways - while also being way to expensive…

That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.

Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.