jqubed

I don’t think there’s any legislated law that states that, but some courts treat it as a basic principle (especially in the state of Delaware). What I’ve usually seen as an early example of this is Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. from 1919. Henry Ford had amassed a surplus of more than $60 million (equally to more than $1.1 billion today) and wanted to reinvest that money in expanding the business with new factories while continuing to raise wages and cut prices on the Model T. As part of this he wanted to cease special shareholder dividends he had been playing out of the surplus. Brothers John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge owned 10% of Ford and sued to keep the dividend payments coming.

The court ruled that Ford had to pay out a dividend of more than $19 million (more than $360 million today) to the minority shareholders. In the ruling, in a non-binding section, the judge wrote:

A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of men to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.

Ford was accused of trying to turn the business into a charity. Behind the scenes, though, one of his main motivations for not wanting to pay the dividend was suspicion that the Dodge brothers were using the dividends from his successful business to setup a rival car company to compete against him, which was exactly what they were doing.

It seems the interpretation of the ruling is controversial, even as to whether “maximize shareholder value” is actually enforceable or what the judge meant. I continue to think that the more investors a company has, the less the company will be able to focus on what’s best for the company, customers, and employees in the long run.

One company I worked at gave us all BlackBerrys (at least those of us who needed phones). BlackBerry was a little outdated at that point but then they released the BlackBerry 10 OS. It was actually decent, but the build quality on the Q10 I had didn’t match their earlier phones. It came too late to save Research in Motion, but I always felt if they’d developed it 5 or maybe even fewer years earlier then they might’ve survived at least as corporate phones. They were so far gone at that point, though, that BlackBerry put out a press release celebrating our company committing to buy a couple thousand phones.

I had an odd and rare one: the LG AX490. Most of the phone was unremarkable, other than being somewhat car-shaped when closed, but it had an innovative keyboard system. There was a normal phone keypad, maybe slightly shrunk, but at the corners of each number button was a tiny raised button for each letter of the alphabet. It made anything text-related in the phone a breeze while keeping the normal flip phone shape.

I had the original Droid and Droid 3, both great phones for the first year then rapidly declined into junk. That first year was great, though!

I don’t think I’ve ever unsubscribed from someone or a channel just because they stopped posting. Like you said, it costs nothing, and if they’re not posting it’s not like their lack of posts is cluttering anything. Then if they ever do come back, I’ll be one of the first to know.

According to Reco's writeup, the common thread across every technique is the same underlying issue: a guest identity that was granted more access than the site actually needed to serve the public. Salesforce Experience Cloud sites and ServiceNow portals both maintain a persistent guest user that unauthenticated visitors execute as, and that user cannot be deleted, only restricted. If the guest profile can read a record, the record is effectively public, whether or not the site requires login to view it in a browser.

[…]

Remediation, per the research, centers on tightening the guest profile rather than the endpoints themselves, since both the UI-API and the ServiceNow search endpoint are working as designed. On Salesforce, that means reviewing guest sharing rules, stripping unnecessary object and field level access from the guest profile, disabling self registration where it is not required, and turning off the Experience Builder setting that allows guest users to reach public APIs. On ServiceNow, the fix is mapping which search sources are exposed to public facing portals and auditing the Knowledge Base read criteria that decide what an anonymous search actually returns.

I wonder how many other services have the same problem? This sounds like something that could be common in the ERP/CRM/related spaces if they include a customer portal.

We always think we’ll get it out for some special occasion, we just haven’t hosted one ourselves in a while. We think we might after we settle from this move, but who knows.

I guess I had one or something like it when I first moved out. My parents gave it to me along with a matching dining table, all of which had been sitting in their basement. My wife wasn’t a fan of it and when we moved out of the house we listed it for sale, eventually selling it for a few hundred dollars, after sitting on the market for close to 2 months and dropping the price a few times.

My parents were upset when they found out; it turned out they had had that table custom made earlier in their marriage when they could finally afford new furniture. They said they would’ve bought it back for more than we got had they known. But a couple days later they begrudgingly realized they didn’t have room for that furniture and it wouldn’t have made sense for them to buy it.

A few years later they moved into a smaller home since all of us kids had been grown and moved out for years. As they tried to sell furniture and other things they weren’t going to have room for, it became depressing to them to see how little these things were worth that they had spent a lot of money on new. They had a set of china for each of us kids, one they bought or received as a wedding gift, others they had inherited from dead relatives. But it became apparent that we all preferred the same set, the one with the simplest design, yet it also was clear that we would only rarely, if ever, use the china and it’s largely a waste of space for any of us.

I think we might even have our set already, but we never use it and it’s not on display. If we have it it’s in the bottom cabinets of a console my wife loves. Also there are a couple very nice crystal bowls my uncle bought us, that my wife is almost terrified to get out of their box out of fear of breaking them. We understand they’re all nice items and expensive, but we might’ve preferred to have that money spent on things we’d get more use out of.

Better than Kit Kat and no Nestlé? Color me intrigued!

!taneggs@lemmy.ca

Better [Home & Finance] later faced a whistleblower lawsuit that was dropped, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that produced no action, and a disastrous 2023 SPAC merger. The company’s stock fell 93% after the merger, while losses continued to mount.

[…]

Better’s annual sales dropped from $1.5 billion in 2021 to $70 million in 2023. Garg says the company is now on track for $200 million in sales this year.