Most people selling their shares in a company do not know who is on the buying side, and that is generally the case here. This goes for retail and institutional investors. And the buy-back programs are done slowly to avoid slippage, which can make it even harder to track down in the moment.

Someone who wanted to sell was selling anyway. They don't profit any more than their gains (or losses) already covered. The people who get "value" are the ones who did NOT sell their shares, and their "value" is only realized down the road when they do eventually sell.

This is the same concept as you owning a home and someone builds a nicer home next to you. Your home value just went up. But you don't have a cent of that money until you sell your home, and then you are taxed on the gains (unless you roll it into another home, but that's a separate discussion).

Edit: And carryover losses, etc

https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman

So while the US Western grid can time shift one hour in the way you describe, Texas is isolated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

https://www.texastribune.org/2011/02/08/texplainer-why-does-...

Non-conforming and no-doc loans weren't the only problem in the 2007s. ARMs were a big issue too because everyone thought they could refi before the initial period was up and that ended up not being true.

Re friends opting out, no, you would just need the system to exclude individuals who have the opt-out attribute from the graph search. But I do also have timeline review turned on and have for years.

I get that I am probably a minority user of Facebook, in that I have very customized security and privacy settings. To me, there has always been value in choosing with whom to share certain information. It isn't a global binary function.

For email, one can pay for their google apps tier, which doesn't have ads, but it is obviously targeted to business users, so the value prop is completely different anyway.

Can I subscribe to facebook and opt out of all advertising and any data sharing exposure with third-parties? That is totally worth $8-10/mo to me.

Edit: I get it. You don't like this idea, or you don't think it will work, or you don't think facebook's investors will like it (full disclosure: I am one). Why on earth should that stop me from putting my obviously flawed opinion out there that I am sick of being the product and I'd love to opt out of that process?

Step 2: Pick the one thing you do the worst. Hire one person (probably a part-time contractor) to do that.

Step 3: Do everything else until you can't.

Step 4: Goto "Step 2"

To some degree, you may be correct, that there will be companies that refuse to upgrade for many years. By and large, I think most people will start to switch:

* Small orgs will begin to see costs of maintaining legacy code skyrocket as it becomes harder and harder to get 2.7 interpreter support for newer kernels. Those that aren't already transitioning now will eventually bite the bullet.

* Medium orgs will probably be the laggards. They have enough funds to pay someone else to make compatible interpreters for them. Your observation about manager authorization very likely applies here so many probably won't bother to upgrade without an internal skunkworks-style initiative.

* Large orgs will upgrade. Their infosec departments will freak out that an old, "potentially insecure" language is being used, regardless of third party vendor support. I see this a fair bit now in the PHP space; where RHEL supports and backports patches for old, insecure versions of PHP, but the infosec people still can't stand it. These days, infosec is getting more and more pull in every huge organization, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to see them start to treat 2.7—or the old, un-updated packages that are locking someone to 2.7—as a possible attack vector and force a change.

All that said, you are right about jobs. If someone knows 2.7 inside and out, they will start to see higher and higher paying contract gigs over the next 15-20 years. Just like the COBOL programmers saw.