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Science and Technology thread

I updated my MacOS to Monterey. I now have to turn my volume to max for my headphones to be loud enough. Before, I could have my volume just barely above zero and it would be plenty loud.

I found complaints about this all over the internet. No one seems to have a solution. It's been four months two updates and they still haven't fixed it. I guess I'm going back to Big Sur.
 
I always wait forever to upgrade because I rarely care about any of the "improvements" and am always fearful of something like that. That's crazy that it's been a known issue for so long though.
 
Grit said:
I always wait forever to upgrade because I rarely care about any of the "improvements" and am always fearful of something like that. That's crazy that it's been a known issue for so long though.
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The only reason I upgraded was because I was having issues with my copy of Logic (my music making software) and was hoping it was a compatibility issue with the latest Big Sur update. Not only did it not solve my music software bugs, it added this new issue.
 
Accidentally wiped my laptop in a non-recoverable way while trying to outsmart Apple and reinstall an older operating system. Fortunately, I do have backups of everything. But pissed that I now have to take it into the Apple store, and they're no doubt going to put Monterey back on it, which was precisely what I was trying to wipe it to get away from to begin with.
 



This happened a week ago and I’m just realizing. What a game changer. I only watch TV on my phone these days. Miserable lifestyle.
 


So presuming the current shares are all owned by Blackrock and other institutional investors with trillions under management, they have to accept a 30% share price premium right? Taking into account if they rebuff Musk and the shares subsequently tank, I don't see how this isn't a fiduciary duty slam dunk that would open them to lawsuits if they passed. Especially since from my point of view there's no logic to this site supposedly ever returning a reasonable profit to justify such a valuation.
 
Market is only reflecting around a 50/50 chance of the deal happening at Musk's offer price, so they must think there's a chance Musk is bullshitting.
 
Even worse is how revered he is (although I think the shine is wearing off)
DurhamSon said:
So presuming the current shares are all owned by Blackrock and other institutional investors with trillions under management, they have to accept a 30% share price premium right? Taking into account if they rebuff Musk and the shares subsequently tank, I don't see how this isn't a fiduciary duty slam dunk that would open them to lawsuits if they passed. Especially since from my point of view there's no logic to this site supposedly ever returning a reasonable profit to justify such a valuation.
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Twitter was trading above $70 in July 2021. If you're a long term shareholder who held on to the stock then because you thought it still had more intrinsic value than its price, you would think Musk's current offer is a low ball based on recent market turbulence negatively impacting the price.

If you're interested, Matt Levine covered the whole thing really well in his Money Stuff newsletter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-elon-musk-might-buy-twitter.
Well that was weird. On Tuesday I wrote a column saying it was unlikely that Elon Musk will buy Twitter Inc. On Wednesday I left on a family vacation. On Thursday, for my sins, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash. 420 is a weed joke.

I suppose this increased the probability that Elon Musk will buy Twitter? By a little? Yesterday Twitter’s stock managed to close down 1.7%, at $45.08, suggesting that the market puts a somewhat lower probability on Musk buying Twitter after he formally proposed to buy Twitter than it did before.

Musk has some history here: In 2018 he pretended that he was going to take Tesla Inc. private; he wasn’t, and eventually he settled fraud chargeswith the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Ordinarily if a billionaire chief executive officer of a public company offers to buy a company, the odds that he is kidding are quite low. When it’s Elon Musk, the historical odds are, like, 50/50. (He really bought SolarCity.)

By Thursday afternoon, Musk went onstage at a conference — honestly itself a weird thing to do in the middle of a hostile takeover or whatever? — and said words that I think a connoisseur of mergers and acquisitions, or of Elon Musk, will interpret to mean “okay sure I was kidding a little”:

“I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it,” the billionaire entrepreneur said Thursday at a TED event in Vancouver. Musk said he has a Plan B if Twitter rejects his offer, without offering more details. …
Musk said his intent “is to retain as many shareholders as is allowed by the law in a private company.”
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When Musk was pretending to take Tesla private, he pretended that he was going to let all of Tesla's existing shareholders remain shareholders of the new “private” Tesla. This is not a thing, and it was never going to work, but it was a nice friendly promise for Musk to make given that he was never going to take Tesla private. And now he’s doing it again, saying that he will take Twitter private while also keeping as many existing shareholders as he can. Sure buddy!

One problem with Musk’s offer is that it is pretty low. Musk points out that $54.20 “represents a 54% premium” over where he started investing in Twitter, and a 38% premium over where the stock was before he announced his position. But Twitter was in the $60s in October, and a lot of its big long-term holders seem unlikely to be sellers at $54.20. “‘No board in America is going to take that number,’ said Jefferies analyst Brent Thill.” And here are the Saudis:

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal rejected Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter Inc. for $54.20 per share, saying the deal doesn’t “come close to the intrinsic value” of the popular social media platform. …
A 2015 regulatory filing showed that Alwaleed, along with his Kingdom Holding Company, owned a 5.2% stake in the social media platform. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates the position is now about 4.4% of Twitter.
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This is notable because, when Elon Musk pretended that he had financing to take Tesla private, the Saudi public investment fund was who he pretended was providing the financing. In fact, on Tuesday I made a grim joke about the Saudis providing pretend equity financing for Musk to pretend to buy Twitter. Apparently not!

To be fair to Musk, in this deal, he is not pretending to have financing. His offer to Twitter’s board is contingent on “completion of anticipated financing,” and when Musk answered questions at that conference yesterday, one of the questions was of course “do you have funding secured,” and his answer was “I have sufficient assets.” Which means no! “Yes” means yes. “I’m really rich, surely someone will give me the money” means no one has yet.

...
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A 30% premium is pretty blah for a tech stock.

EDIT: As already covered, I see. Yeah, premium is a very elusive concept. But even without the fluctuations, it doesn’t seem very sexy to me. PE firms routinely offer double-digit premiums for garbage companies. 30% is maybe a step up from that?
 
One of my obsessions is headphones. I particularly like open-backed, over-the-ear headphones. Probably not so useful for public transit or an airplane, but amazing for home use.

I've already discussed it in this thread, but my favorite brand is Sennheiser. I've had the HD535, the HD555, and the HD559 models. Today, I got the HD650 model. They're in a different tier, price and quality wise. They take a pretty good headphone amp to power them because of the impedance. But man, they're incredible. They're supposed to be $500 new, but you can find them a ton of places for under $300. I paid $250 for mine off of ebay. They came brand new in the box.

Even Amazon has them for way under their full price.

https://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-650-Professional-Headphone/dp/B00018MSNI/ref=sr_1_3?crid=LVWAJIG6BGF&keywords=sennheiser+hd650&qid=1650325960&s=electronics&sprefix=sennheiser+hd650,electronics,101&sr=1-3
 
Sennheiser is the best. I've been using their various over-the-ear models for years and years. I bought the HD280PROs in college and it changed the game for me.
 
Yeah, the 280s are an insane value.

I own some other commonly praised brands and I don't like them nearly as much. I got some Beyerdynamics because everyone loves them and they're often on sale. They sound way too tinny, and the design isn't that comfortable to wear for long periods.
 
My recommendation would be to pony up for Bluos speakers. They are fucking great, and no wires.
 
Anyone have the new M1 Mac? I've gotten to the point where my music production is so CPU-intensive that I need to upgrade. My laptop is only three years old, and it was the best Macbook Pro at the time. But I'm getting sick of dealing with latency.

I have a Quad Core. I believe the best new M1 Macbook Pro is a 16 Core. A mixing engineer I know was saying that it's much more than four times as powerful.
 
rome8180 said:
Anyone have the new M1 Mac? I've gotten to the point where my music production is so CPU-intensive that I need to upgrade. My laptop is only three years old, and it was the best Macbook Pro at the time. But I'm getting sick of dealing with latency.

I have a Quad Core. I believe the best new M1 Macbook Pro is a 16 Core. A mixing engineer I know was saying that it's much more than four times as powerful.
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Yea, I've got an M1 max and use it for video editing. It's amazing. I have a decent desktop computer and the MacBook outperforms it.
 
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