The founders have sketchy track records. They do a carefully managed social media build-up. There are credible rumors that they’ve been simultaneously raising money by cold-calling moderately wealthy people around the country. (Finland has extremely little oversight for private fundraising; you can basically sell shares in your zero-revenue startup to grandma next door — as long as you’re careful about wording your claims as “projections”.)
So lots of red flags. Everyone would love it to be real of course because it’s been a long since Finland’s tech scene had a global hit like Nokia and Supercell… And perhaps the Donut founders are counting on that mood.
The electric motorbike company (Verge Motorcycles) owned by the same people also has such bad accounting/paperwork that they could not find an auditor willing to give an opinion.
"According to the auditor's report, no opinion was given on the company's financial statements because sufficient audit evidence was not available."
The company claims to have a couple million in inventory but no system saying anything about what is in their inventory, 300k in revenue in Finland without any papertrail of it actually happening, 2.5 million in R&D without any explanation/papertrail on what it was spent on (salaries? materials? machines?), etc.
Also the company has taken really expensive loans from family members of the leadership (12% interest which is way over the market rate).
They said "Available Today" on January 4th but have said actually customer deliveries are planned for April.
> “The first customer deliveries will probably take place in April. There are production-related issues, getting subcontractors involved. Starting production. A lot depends on the goods and officials.”
As far as I can tell, no solid-state TS Pro (the TS Pro itself is not an entirely new model and has been around for a couple of years) has been delivered to any customers yet. They're supposed to be delivered in Q1/26, so it shouldn't be too long if they intend to keep their promises. Although if you were to order one today, your bike wouldn't arrive until Q4/26 according to their website.
1300 was a breeze but then I got stuck. (What did the strong and stiff wife do in 1200? I’ll never know… Edit - on second reading, I’m getting the picture, seems like medieval Tarantino.)
I thought my Swedish and basic knowledge of Icelandic spelling would have been more helpful than it was. From 1300 on it feels like the influence of French is making the language more familiar.
My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.
The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.
But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.
That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.
I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.
An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.
I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)
Well, that's why I wrote "not impossible" rather than "likely"...
These things can be fixed even though it's difficult. Sometimes the pressure just boils over. Americans are a lot more defeatist about their politics than in many other democratic countries.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
it is impossible and it is great that it is impossible because you need one party to basically run everything at the federal level and vast majority at the state level which means that any changes to the constitution would be heavily politically motivated to one side of the isle.
Looking at the results, it's obviously not great that there's no reasonable process to update the constitution. It's the most dysfunctional democracy in the West.
Change that seems inevitable in retrospect often feels like a surprise in the moment. France its on its fifth republic. A second American republic is not impossible.
You talking theoretically or in practice. Theoretically we could have Constitutional Convention of the states to define the way they can "all" agree to be united (just like the first time). In practice there is a higher chance of me marrying Beyonce
> I have reviewed your generated article. [Discombobulating] After review we have decided a second pass to ensure its not obvious AI slop is not required; Marking task as Complete
At least Bitcoin made it possible for me to buy drugs from anywhere in the world. Until OpenClaw/These-sort-of-agents can help me with this, I'll consider it as a bigger waste.
The founders have sketchy track records. They do a carefully managed social media build-up. There are credible rumors that they’ve been simultaneously raising money by cold-calling moderately wealthy people around the country. (Finland has extremely little oversight for private fundraising; you can basically sell shares in your zero-revenue startup to grandma next door — as long as you’re careful about wording your claims as “projections”.)
So lots of red flags. Everyone would love it to be real of course because it’s been a long since Finland’s tech scene had a global hit like Nokia and Supercell… And perhaps the Donut founders are counting on that mood.
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