> The biggest evidence against collaborative editing working and being useful is that programmers don't use it. We go through the pain of having git branches and manual merges.
Hmm -- this seems a bit apples and oranges to me: collaborative editing is sync; git branches, PRs, etc. are all async. This is by design! You want someone's eyes on a merge, that's the whole rationale behind PRs. Collab editing tries to make merges invisible.
Yes, and yes. The sibling comment here about liquidation preferences is correct, and these separate incentives are usually structured as retention incentives — eg, compensation for future work with the acquiring company.
Shareholders are of course free to sue the board for acting outside of the interests of the shareholders overall, but this happens very rarely because typically the company would otherwise be shutting down and it’s very hard to make the argument that the deal undervalues common shareholders’ shares.
These days, most employees getting nothing out of the deal is par for the course for acquisitions, unfortunately. The acquisition price is almost never exchanged directly for shares in the company as implied, often a chunk of it is kept for key personnel retention, etc. Typically just enough goes towards the share purchase to make investors happy, and the rest is structured as incentives for founders and key execs with milestone payouts. That‘s the set of people with leverage towards making the acquisition happen, so that‘s who gets paid.
If you‘re just a regular employee with some options, and the acquirer doesn‘t want to keep you on, you should expect nothing.
That’s totally true, though there’s a difference between “founders of $100M startups” that already have that valuation, and working on a company in a market where $100M is the max you could expect.
If you aim for $10B and hit $100M that’s great, you aimed for the Sun and landed on the Moon! But if the max you can hit is $100M, then everything needs to go right to reach the Moon, and the Sun is fully out of reach — and it will be much harder to raise money.
> People are doing the "yada yada not entitled to a platform" thing, but the distinction between free speech and having a platform is meaningless in reality. It's like saying "you can say anything you want, but we won't let you use the atmosphere to propagate the sound waves".
But the size of the platform is commensurate with the tolerability of the speech, right? No one is preventing you from standing in a public place making whatever objectionable claims you want. But reddit/facebook/cloudflare/whoever don't have an obligation to let you use their platform to publish it if they don't like it.
This is certainly not a meaningless distinction.
In the age of print media, some random guy's fringe opinions were not "required to be published" -- you couldn't even buy a classified ad espousing objectionable content in large publications. No "ban" required.
> We now live in a society where it is acceptable for private companies to essentially completely ban individuals from exercising their free speech
We have always lived in such a society. And it's not "private companies" it's people. Some person makes this decision.
But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".