How "temporary" is overhiring? I think that they could probably cut quite a bit from the company, and it might actually improve their output.

Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:

> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.

These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).

> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.

If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.

Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.

Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.

If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?

If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?

Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.

For me it's fine as I still only charge once a week and I still have around 70%-80% usually, unless I visit remote relatives. I could probably stretch and recharge every other week if I really wanted to, but I prefer to have it ready as we sometimes do have longer drives.

Is it better than a Tesla? Probably not - there are clearly places in the software where I know that Teslas are more polished (e.g. the "360" parking view which IMO could be a bit better, although I feel like I'm parking in gta 2), and the acceleration won't blow your socks off. However, they're much cheaper and it's a good family car (for us) - definitely for the price.

Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.

I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.

Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.

The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.