Piezo switches like the one you linked have a minimum size to generate the power necessary, and that minimum size is larger than the entire current ring.
The power generation portion of that switch is around 1.4x1.4cm and can power the transmitter to send a signal over 40m. I think it’s likely that it could be adapted into a ring form.
Yes, that's the major difference between the public and PE companies that OP was highlighting. The owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures. They have to sell it off to someone else to do that.
Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders.
> owners of a public company can't raid it to fund other ventures
This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
> Selling off a public company like that is generally not trivial and is not surprise sprung on shareholders
Merger law is largely state corporate law. If you have a Delaware C corporation, you're operating under more or less the same merger rules irrespective of how your stock is traded.
What may be misleading some folks is that in a private company, these deliberations are typically covered by NDAs. In public companies, it happens in the open. With private companies, someone needs to get pissed off enough to sue. Herego the understandable availability bias.
To drive home how misleading this purported delineation is, consider that some of the largest private equity managers (e.g. Blackstone and KKR) are themselves publicly traded.
Private equity has tons of issues. Tons. In some industries (e.g. healthcare) it shouldn’t exist. But this tripe about public companies having duties to shareholders which private companies don’t is nonsense.
> This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.
Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…
This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food.
The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.
Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick.
The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.
That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence on historical stories and myths?
- The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by Jacques Cauvin (1994/2000)
- Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods by David Lewis‑Williams & David Pearce (2005)
- Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth by Walter Burkert (1972/1983)
- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion by HC Peoples et al. (2016)
- Subsistence: Models and Metaphors for the Transition to Agriculture by H. Starr (2005)
—————————————
Myths didn’t juts reflect the shift, they were also one of the cultural tools that made the shift psychologically possible.
For instance, the H&G worldview is cyclical (time repeats) but the agricultural worldview is linear. H&G myths emphasize eternal returns, cycles of creation and destruction, spirits of rivers, trees, animals. Agricultural myths introduce beginning of time, progress, destiny, apocalypse.
As animals became domesticated, their spiritual status from H&G mythology declines, while the status of plants and land rises under agriculture. There’s agricultural symbolism in Christ’s body being bread and his blood being wine.
The shift the agriculture produces surplus, property, inheritance, kings, priests, and so myth arise to justify social structures that don’t make sense in nomadic foraging bands.
Sacrifice is an agricultural logic. Classic pattern: god dies, god’s body becomes food, eating is communion. It is directly agricultural: plant dies when harvested, seed is buried (like a corpse), resurrection in spring. Sacrifice becomes cosmic agriculture.
The Garden -> Exile story is a pattern we see in Genesis (“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread”) but also in Greek mythology; Kronos’ Golden Age changes when Zeus forces humans to work.
In H&G, the trickster gods (Coyote, Raven, Loki, Anansi) are central, but with damaging they become dangerous, marginalized, punished because agriculture requires law, calendar, taboo, not chaos.
Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process of carefully building up and storing for the future. Rather than a neutral technological innovation, it embodied the psychological shift.
No, it was easier. Not just lower risk. It gave you advantages both in terms of self defence, resources and even aggression toward surrounding group if you were collectively assholes.
It was easier to make your numbers go up, raise more kids which made you stronger.
> People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
Agriculture began from a convergence of climate stability, resource abundance, sedentary living, population pressure, and co-evolution with useful plants and animals.
Hunting and gathering alone cannot feed everyone. Farming is harder, less healthy, more labor-intensive but yields more calories per acre.
As a population grows, farming becomes the least bad option.
It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe, for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic history.
The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
It is actually the plants (barley, grain, grapes, millet, potatoes, taro, maize, rice, sorghum, manioc) that tricked the humans into cultivating (reproduce) them/
I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately.
Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.
At the same time, it's arguable that certain observations such as "commercialization and commoditization have become stronger" are true. We're certainly living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades.
>living in an era where a lot can change in a few decades
So were people in 1910. You could say the printing press set up the following industrial revolution and things have been accelerating ever since. People talk that in the future there will be a technological singularity that things will go so fast people won't be able to keep up, but really in many ways we've been in it for a while already and it's still accelerating.
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.
Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.
The Covid deaths were measured in thousands before they could find a single individual under 18 yrs old who died from it. The only reason to vaccinate kids was to try to prevent them from spreading it to adults. Right from the beginning (eg. With the cruise ship that was infected), it was extremely obvious that the main factor in survivability was age. The younger you were, the safer it was. Weight was also very important but we learned that later
Considering there have been over 7 million deaths directly from covid, saying "covid deaths measured in the thousands before X" is another way of saying "X happened right at the beginning of covid".
Plus, there's a big difference between "young people tend to have less risk of death" and "young people have a 0% chance of death" like the person I replied to claimed.
No, we also vaccinate children to prevent non-fatal illness, which is a reasonable choice to make if adverse effects of the vaccine are very small (they are). People get flu shots annually for this same reason.
Edit: I would also add that parents regularly make choices for their children that involve larger amounts of risk.
The word "cheating" is loaded with a lot of values and judgement that I think makes it inappropriate to use the way you did.
There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation. Avoiding increasingly-overcrowded housing situations is I think one of them.
If Stanford's standards for these housing waivers are sufficiently broad that 38% of their students quality, isn't that a problem with Stanford's definitions, not with "cheating"?
The direct result of this thinking is that people who need the accommodation face difficulty in getting it.
You don’t have to return your shopping cart. You don’t have to donate to the collection plate. You don’t have to give a coworker recognition.
But when everyone has an adversarial “get mine” attitude the systems have to be changed. Instead of assuming good intent they have to enforce it. Enforcement is very expensive and very unpleasant. (For example, maybe you need to rent the shopping cart.)
Unfortunately enforcement is a self fulfilling cycle. When people see others cheating they feel they need to cheat just to not be left behind.
You may be from a culture where this is the norm. Reflect on its impact and how we would really like to avoid this.
I think you're reading more into what I said than what I intended.
I'm not endorsing the specific behavior, but I am pointing out that if there's a "cheating" lever anyone can pull to improve their own situation, it will get pulled if people think it's justified.
There's plenty that do get pulled and plenty that don't. In the US, SNAP fraud is sufficiently close to nonexistant that you can't tell the difference in benefits provided. But fraud surrounding lying about medical conditions to get a medical marijuana card is universal and accepted.
The people we're talking about here are teenagers that are told "if you have an ADHD diagnosis you can ask for and get your own room". The sort of systems thinking you are describing is not generally done by your average fresh high school graduate. This is therefore a Stanford problem.
Some levers are accessible to everyone, but the implied social contract is that you only pull it if you actually need it, because the system doesn't have enough resources for everyone to do it.
Trouble is, getting teenagers to accept and live by that isn't something that will pan out. Societies have been trying for millenia.
If your system built for teenagers relies on the social contract in this way, it's a bad system. People who are over a half decade from a fully developed brain aren't going to grasp this.
That's not mentioned in the article. Is this your personal speculation or do you have something to support that claim? The article seems to make it clear that it is the students themselves getting these accommodations, so your claim is directly contradicting the article we're commenting on.
> why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers
Well they're definitionally teenagers, and if you know of a way to make teenagers act en masse accountable to society's values, that would be a novel development in social human history going back to Ancient Greece. So barring that, we should treat the teenagers whose brains have not yet developed enough to grasp society-wide consequences for personal actions as such.
The problem is that people simply have no investment in a community anymore. This is a direct consequence of globalization and capitalism. Travel to a foreign land, exploit the locals, and return home. Westerners are just now realizing that they're on the receiving end of it now.
> There's a point where it's not immoral to leverage systems available to you to land yourself in a better situation.
That sounds loaded with a lot of value judgment. I don't think it's inappropriate for you to suggest it, but I think you'll find that a lot of people who value equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources might not share that perspective with you.
It turns out that people just disagree about values and are going to weigh judgment on others based on what they believe. You don't have to share their values, but you do kind of just need to be able to accept that judgment as theirs when you do things they malign.
I live in liberal cities. Nearly every car drive and bicycle rider has the attitude "F everyone else, I'm going to break every law if I find it inconvenient to myself. Who cares if it affects others"
This is not in alignment with "equitability, collaboration, communalism, modesty, earnestness, or conservation of resources"
People claim those values but rarely actually follow them.
I worded it in a way flexible to meet everyone's morals. Absent someone trying to performatively live a truly philosophically deontological life every person has some line where they will avail themselves of some available lever to remove some awful situation even if someone else might call it "cheating".
Some recent examples where large segments of the population did this are 1) with medical marijuana cards, which make weed legal to anyone willing to claim to have anxiety or difficulty sleeping, or 2) emotional support animals on airlines, where similarly one can claim anything to get a prescription that, if travelling with a pet, opts them out of the sometimes-fatal always-unpleasant cargo hold travel.
Plenty of people would call either of these cheating, but kind of like how "language is usage", so are morals in a society. If everyone is doing something that is available but "cheating", that society deems the result for people sufficiently valuable.
No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).
Stealing from work was so normalized in the former USSR that it wasn't even considered stealing, just "carrying out". Jobs in meatpacking facilities were highly desired because even though nominal wages were low, workers could make so much more by selling on the black market. The entire system was rotten from top to bottom.
And when everybody else does it (and all assume that everybody does), it really ends up being true. That's why it's so hard to get out of this hole - telling people to "start with yourself" won't cut it, they need to see that others are doing the same as well rather than trying to benefit from the opportunity.
The problem is the promotion of values and behaviors that plague a low-trust society. I think making excuses for it is truly inappropriate and immoral.
If you lie (or exaggerate) about a disability and claim a benefit, you could be denying somebody with more serious disabilities getting the help they need.
My understanding is that the requirement for the benefit being discussed here is "has had a diagnosis of ADHD, anxiety, etc".
The problem lies in the combination of overdiagnosis and lax Stanford disability requirements. The teenagers honestly mentioning they have an ADHD diagnosis to get the benefit are not the problem, they are a symptom.
I agree with you that cheating is a loaded word, but the question at the end here that the rules or standards enable users to work around it therefore it's not cheating is a bad semantic argument. We can use the exact same argument to excuse every kind of rule breaking that people do. If a hacker drains a billion dollars out of a smart contract, then they literally were only able to do so because the coded rules of the smart contract itself enabled it through whatever flaw the hacker identified. That doesn't make it less illegal or not cheating for the hacker. It feels like victim blaming to point the finger at the institution being exploited or people who get hacked and say its their problem not the individuals intentionally exploiting them.
Google: China Cheating. Stereotype or not, it's a well documented characteristic of some social systems. This isn't to imply a moralist view. This cultural phenomena is a recognized pattern of behavior across industries, as well as the education system. It's viciously pragmatic. A key part of their rapid industrialization and digital transition. It's not surprising, given the success, nor is it necessary to pretend otherwise.
It's just irrelevant and ignorant to bring up in the context of this article. These things aren't correlated. I can name countries where academic fraud (fake papers, fake data) is much more rampant than the US, yet faking a disability to get a single dorm room is unthinkable. You're oversimplifying things and making connections that aren't there.
As per the following discussions, I would say pointing this out is relevant. China has been a leader in this respect. The cultural trends have shifted, regardless of the specific mechanisms. I suspect the cause to be multidimensional. The erosion in confidence of both institutions and process, across the US and world, have contributed to an ends-justify-the-means philosophy. There's almost palpable economic strata that are increasingly difficult to ascend, causing a great deal of stress and pressure. Granted, foreign influence is probably far down the list.
I was pointing out how the "stereotype" fits, not that it has somehow corrupted higher education by exposure. I think there's a good comparison here, which is why it was initially mentioned.
> We elect leaders - people with skills, knowledge, and expertise.
I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so.
We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe.
If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...
You're using the same words to talk about different things.
You're right, in the world we would like to live in, this wouldn't be a thing. People shouldn't expect that a business sale means a quality drop. That would be a good reality.
However, next to that good reality is the one we live in. Where people should expect quality to drop on a business sale, because that's the structure of the world we live in. Wishing the world were different isn't sufficient to make it so.
But it both hasn’t always been the case and still isn’t in large swaths of the country and the world. The 5x + enshittification phenomenon is both recent and a result of PE and “activist investors”.
“We” collectively should demand better. You act as if government is some omnipresent being that makes its own decisions. If citizens start demanding the government act in their best interests by enforcing things like anti-trust laws, it will.
reply