• 1 Post
  • 38 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: December 13th, 2024
  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Futo updates their website, removing logos, clarifying micro grantsEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    your local arts events are often sponsored by local businesses and philanthropists

    Do you or they necessarily approve of those businesses? Is that implied?

    but if you or I donate $10 I wouldn’t call that a sponsorship

    Then are people getting carried away with their imaginations? When I see a “we sponsor” section with logos/names, I don’t assume a substantial amount: could be token for all I know. Quibbling over that when it’s true feels like arguing over inconsequential merit badges.

    Donation recipients should be able to take money from donors who should be able to declare that truth.

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Futo updates their website, removing logos, clarifying micro grantsEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    look we’re sponsoring them

    spon·sor

    verb

    1. provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out).

    My disapproval of FUTO notwithstanding, that is the dictionary definition.

    I never looked at those “we sponsor/donated to” sections on organization pages as implying a relationship of reciprocal approval. Are idiots online thinking that?

    Anyone should be able to assert “X gave Y money” when that’s true. Taking money from people we disagree with shouldn’t be a problem: less money for them, more for us. Do we want them to spend on shit we definitely disapprove of?

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Elon Musk says he needs $1 trillion to control Tesla's robot army. Yes, really.English
    9·
    3 days ago

    I learned some advisors at firms who usually follow Glass Lewis recommendations are taking unusual steps to request investor input specifically on Tesla. Apparently enough passive investors are dissatisfied enough to want a direct say on Tesla.

    It was interesting to learn about shareholder voting.

    • Apparently, shareholders get a non-binding vote on executive pay due to say-on-pay legislation.
    • The SEC carries juicy documents on shareholder voting proposals & letters to shareholders by other shareholders urging them how to vote.

    Voting proposals from shareholders & their letters reveal great dissatisfaction with Tesla.

    Major shareholders (investment groups, pension managers, state treasurers & comptrollers) wrote a scathing letter urging other shareholders to vote against directors up for re-election & to vote against proposals the company favors.

    We write urging you to oppose the reelection of Directors Ira Ehrenpreis, Joe Gebbia, and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson (Proposal 1), the Amended and Restated 2019 Equity Incentive Plan (Proposal 3), and the 2025 CEO Performance Award (Proposal 4) at Tesla’s Annual Meeting on November 6, 2025.

    Since the last annual meeting, we have unfortunately witnessed both the erratic performance of Tesla, Inc. (the “Company” or “Tesla”) and the Board’s failure to provide meaningful real-time oversight of management. The Board’s relentless pursuit of retaining its CEO seems to have harmed the Company’s reputation, led to extraordinarily high levels of executive compensation, and delayed progress on meeting key goals like full self-driving (FSD). The Board, a majority of which is made up of directors with close ties to the CEO, now asks for Tesla shareholders to approve a series of proposals that grant it broad discretion to execute an estimated $1 trillion pay package, as well as grant awards through a new reserve created specifically for Elon Musk. These pay packages provide so much discretion to Tesla’s Board that shareholders cannot be confident of impartial treatment. In summary, there is an urgent need to address these issues to preserve long-term shareholder value for all Tesla shareholders, which we believe justifies voting against all directors up for election this year, as well as the Amended and Restated 2019 Equity Incentive Plan (the “A&R 2019 Equity Plan”) and the 2025 CEO Performance Award (the “2025 Performance Award”). We believe that approval of these items is not in the economic or financial interest of Tesla shareholders for the reasons set out below.

    Their clarifications are interesting: they highlight issues with the conduct of the board & CEO

    • declining company performance (sudden decline in sales) & waning competitiveness with rivals like BYD & other manufacturers
    • board’s lack of independence from CEO jeopardizes shareholder value
      • board members are CEO, friends of CEO, or have served long tenures
      • the CEO lacks focus on the stable, sustainable returns of the company & its shareholders while the board still awards him extraordinary pay packages & shares at discount
        • has leadership roles in several companies
        • leadership of US DOGE negatively impacted company’s performance & brand
      • the CEO fails to focus the company’s own resources on the company (diverting them to other companies), and the board “seems uninterested in getting concrete commitments from Mr. Musk, and unwilling to develop a CEO succession plan of their own”
      • the board of directors is overpaid by earning 8 figure compensation when the “Average director compensation in the S&P 500 in 2024 was $327,096.13”
    • the board ignores mandates from previous shareholder votes, and acts to weaken accountability (supermajority voting rules, not all board seats up for reelection each year) & erode shareholders rights (adopted a Texas law to increase requirements for shareholders to sue the board for breach of fiduciary duty prohibitively far above federal standards)
    • their proposal for a $1 trillion award in shares to the CEO lacks stringent conditions
      • undemanding product goals
      • vague terms
      • conditions open to board discretion

      Given the Board’s historical willingness to allow Tesla to commit substantial resources to projects that are personally beneficial to Mr. Musk but that fail to produce benefits for Tesla shareholders – most notably the Solar City acquisition – we lack the confidence that this Board will only recognize the accomplishment of these goals by the CEO in the fullest and most demanding way.

    • the award increases power of an unaccountable CEO at substantial expense to shareholders of earning & voting power.

    outside Tesla shareholders could experience a dramatic long-term dilution in both their voting power and the value of their equity relative to opportunity cost

    If Tesla were to experience similar ups and downs over the next decade, outside shareholder value would increase at 10.8% per year, inferior to the price return for the S&P 500 from August 2015 to August 2025.

    If Proposals 3 and 4 are approved, this year may be one of the last times that public shareholders have a meaningful voice in the Company and its leadership given the level of dilution that is likely to take place. Beyond that, the Company’s own disclosures make clear that the motivation to deliver these pay packages is driven by increasing Mr. Musk’s voting power, with no formal commitment to focus his time, attention, and Tesla’s own resources on Tesla. Further, we lack confidence that this non-independent Board can oversee the CEO toward a future that maintains stable and sustainable returns for Tesla shareholders.

    This SEC 14A filing lists all the proposals up for shareholder vote. A good number of shareholder proposals the board opposes concern board accountability to shareholders

    • assert shareholder rights: either repealing restrictions or safeguarding them from restrictions enabled by Texas that would disqualify the vast majority of shareholders from submitting proposals or suing the board for breach of fiduciary duties
    • elect each director annually
    • require only simple majority approvals.

    The others concern better public reporting & oversight on senior executive pay & transparent audits on child labor dependence throughout the supply chain.

    To promote an independent board of directors accountable to shareholders & to restore shareholder rights, I suspect Glass Lewis and ISS will vote against all board members & company-favored proposals and vote for all shareholder-favored proposals. Seems about right to follow their recommendations & oppose Musk on this.

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comtoNews@lemmy.world•Advice to feed babies peanuts early and often helped thousands of kids avoid allergiesEnglish
    4·
    6 days ago

    tread lightly and do rigorous research on the topic

    Did you?

    Duh, I knew that before you, stupid Mr./Ms. Scientist.

    The problem is the scientists already knew the answer, too. It’s pretty well known by the evidence-based medicine community as a massive fuckup by the medical establishment that sets guidelines. A director of the Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health Research Group at Johns Hopkins dedicated a chapter on it in his book.

    That chapter explains that pediatric immunologists already knew guidelines for young children to avoid peanuts weren’t supported by science (they violated immune tolerance, a basic principle of immunology) and advised physicians they trained to ignore it.

    full explanation

    The book establishes that medical science can be susceptible to dogmatism & groupthink indolent to examine & update knowledge once it settles into established practice even when it lacks rigorous, scientific evidence. When they discover they are wrong, the establishment tends to be slow in recognizing it & correcting itself: rather than boldly & openly admit they were flatout wrong, they often prefer a face- (& liability-?) saving approach that quietly updates guidelines, slowly backpedals, and lets new practices overtake old with time. The mixed track record of major health recommendations in modern medicine follows a pattern established in the book:

    When we use sound scientific studies to make recommendations, we shine—and help a lot of people. But when we wing it and issue recommendations based on opinion, we have a lousy track record. Sometimes you’ll see that consensus is not driven by science, but by peer pressure.

    The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2000 recommendation

    for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy

    is a case where they did not follow evidence-based medicine. It’s a case of copycat guidelines: they copied a 1998 UK health department recommendation. That recommendation was based on

    one sentence stating that moms who eat peanuts are more likely to have children with peanut allergies

    and referred to a single study lacking support for that statement.

    The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study. So I pulled that up and took a close look.

    I couldn’t believe it.

    The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.

    Bewildered by how the study seemed so badly misconstrued, I called its lead author, Dr. Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics in Dublin. He shared the same frustration and told me he had opposed the peanut avoidance guideline when it came out. “It’s ridiculous,” he told me. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

    He had not been consulted on the national guideline.

    Predictably

    Peanut allergies soared. More concerning, extreme peanut allergies, which can be life-threatening, became commonplace in America.

    Suddenly, emergency department visits for peanut anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic swelling of the airways — skyrocketed, and schools began enacting peanut bans.

    As things got worse, many public health leaders doubled down. If only every parent would comply with the pediatrics association guideline, they thought, we as a country could finally beat down peanut allergies and win the war.

    Immunologists had objected.

    Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, challenged the UK guideline. It “was not evidence-based,” he wrote in The Lancet in 1998. “Public-health measures may have unintended effects … they could increase the prevalence of peanut allergy.”

    Two years later, the same year the AAP issued their peanut avoidance recommendation

    Then they tried to dissuade with a study.

    They found that Jewish children in Israel had one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared to Jewish children in the UK, suggesting it was not a genetic predisposition, as the medical establishment had assumed. Lack and his Israeli colleagues titled their publication “Early Consumption of Peanuts in Infancy Is Associated with a Low Prevalence of Peanut Allergy.”

    However, their publication in 2008 was not enough to uproot the groupthink.

    The medical community maintained the guidelines & wouldn’t fund studies to corroborate.

    Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. Many in the medical community dismissed Lack’s findings and continued to insist that young children avoid peanuts. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate the recommendation, to see if it was helping or hurting children.

    Several years later

    As things got worse, a dissenting Lack decided to conduct a clinical trial randomizing infants to peanut exposure (at 4-11 months of age) versus no peanut exposure. He found that early peanut exposure resulted in an 86 percent reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation. He blasted his findings to the world in a New England Journal of Medicine publication in 2015, finally proving what immunologists like Buckley had known for decades: Peanut abstinence causes peanut allergies. It was now undeniable; the AAP had it backward.

    Lack is now recognized as a hero in the field of allergy. But when he did his big study, he was heavily criticized.

    It would take the AAP two years after Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents. It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.

    It was “an embarrassingly simple study” the AAP failed to demand.

    The whole ordeal is the predictable outcome of medical guideline associations correcting a well-documented disaster they recklessly created & hope to quietly sweep under the rug. How those associations haven’t been sued into oblivion for incompetent negligence is a real mystery.

    The comment above yours is right: it entirely is as stupid as it seems.