They also fired all their park workers during covid and gave themselves 10 million bonuses while their workers were surviving on food stamps. Some workers had even signed non compete clauses so they literally could not use their talents elsewhere to feed themselves.

There are plenty of things to hate Disney for, especially as they approach super-monopoly status, ruin nearly every franchise they touch, and have trouble telling what’s good or not. As a company, Disney’s morals and decisions grow more concerning every month. Disney is basically a disaster in progress.

However, this specific complaint seems bad: it’s the wrong scale. Many companies were in the wrong during COVID, but it’s hard to look at these numbers and say the layoffs here were bad decisions based on $10M in bonuses. The scales are just too different.

Disney laid off 32,000 park workers At a measly 40 hours per week at their “minimum wage” (formerly $15/hr, now $24/hr): that’s $83.2 million PER MONTH: $998M a year. A $10M “bonus” is 1% of that, and even smaller compared to the $6.4B of park revenue they had loss.

The former CEO “gave up” their salary ($3M) and “bonus” ($45M in 2019), had 20-30% pay cuts to the executive staff, and a few other items. The CEO did get “$10M” in stock awards, but stock awards don’t get you off food stamps. Those stocks become nothing if the company posts bad financials, which would hurt more than just the execs.

The $1.5B dividend payout in April 2020 looks much worse. Abigail Disney ranted about it on Twitter (now X). His rant is at the appropriate scale: Disney paid out billions before they chose to save millions. The execs got quite a bit of that dividend payout. That’s the greed.

Did you purposely miss the first and last questions: Which laptop is the good value?

I never said people need to run LLMs. I said Apple dominates high-end laptops and wanted a good high-end to compare to the high-end Macbooks.

Instead of just complaining about Apple, can do what I asked? Best cheaper laptop alternative that checks the non-LLM boxes I mentioned:

If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.

Is there a particular model you’re thinking of? Not just the line. I usually find that Windows laptops don’t have enough cooling or make other sacrifices. If you want good cooling, good power (CPU and GPU), good screen, good keyboard, good battery, good WiFi, etc., the options get limited quickly.

Even the RAM cost misses some of the picture. Apple Silicon’s RAM is available to the GPU and can run local LLMs and other machine learning models. Pre-AI-hype Macs from 2021 (maybe 2020) already had this hardware. Compare that to PC laptops from the same era. Even in this era, try getting Apple’s 200-400GB/s RAM performance on a PC laptop.

PC desktop hardware is the most flexible option for any budget and is cost-effective for most budgets. For laptops, Apple dominates their price points, even pre-Apple-silicon.

The OS becomes the final nail in the coffin. Linux is great, but a lot of software still only supports Windows and Apple; Linux support for the latest/current hardware can be a hit or miss (My three-year-old, 12th-gen Thinkpad just started running well). If the choice is between Mac OS or Windows 11, is there much of a choice? Does that change if a company wants to buy, manage, and support it? Which model should we be looking at? It’s about time to replace my Thinkpad.