Gaming is pretty minor relatively speaking. My take: they were the only viable option other than Mac. Apple for a while were weirdos with PowerPC machines, then a while later still weirdos with PowerPC machines that were then obsolete. They switched to intel but never really had anything at the same price/power point as you could get in the high end on a PC, or at the bargain basement consumer or small business level. Basically Wintel had no real competition.

Post PC centric: they've done a good job being #2 in the cloud, #1 in cloud office, leaders or at least up there when it comes to server software (SQL Server, exchange, IIS, AD), still hanging on to the PC market, not huge but nice little businesses in gaming, surface machines, and PC peripherals. Basically if you are from an Apple fan prospective there's Apple and everyone else, and 95+ percent over everyone else is MS. Basically they've diversified and everywhere they've gone other than phones they've either become the #1 or #2 paid option (ex Apache or MySQL might have more users but in terms of paying customers ...).

This system even if it worked would have issues too. First there are more guns than people in the US now already, so even if new guns had this feature what about all the old ones? Second the majority of gun deaths are accidents or suicides. They always throw out school or other mass shootings in the debate but they are very rare. There's around 200-250 deaths at mass shootings (and a lot of those are gang drive bys not school shoot ups) out of around 40,000 total. It's the gun control equivalent to the justification for government spying to prevent child pornography. So for the vast majority of gun deaths suicide and murder, how many wouldn't happen and how many would just find a different tool for the job? The only real benefit I think is its rare to have an innocent bystander get stabbed or hit by a hammer. Generally you hit who you're after. Not to mention I'm not 100% against suicide, euthanasia should be legal imo, short of it being available and regulated they'll be a "market" to do it yourself, and mental health help is a better solution to help people make or not make a reasoned choice to end their life.

Oh an obvious example of this military. Not sure if still the case but the Canadian army used to have a mandatory promotion date for officers. Say 4yrs for a LT, you are either promoted by then or let go because you are not-promotable. Basically if you aren't good enough to promote you aren't good enough to keep around because you are taking a spot that could be filled by someone else that would be.

Interchangeable cog issue I think. We need "developer" to be "team lead". I know a "developer" and he's nice and wants the job so ...

People issues generally are hard. People often don't know whether or not they'll like a role, and the role can change out from under you. You're a team lead of 6 smart independent devs everythings gravy. Then 3 leave and 10 newbie's get hired, now you got 2x the people and it becomes a handholding exercise, and a bunch of stupid mistakes for different reasons start happening. Now you're spending your days re-estimating projects, trying to convince adults that they have to pay attention to details, or ask if they don't know etc. Now life sucks. Or hell you want to try something but then find out you aren't good at it, or something you thought would be mildly annoying really really sucks.

Mythbusters scenario I think: failure should always be an option. Ie it should be ok to try management or whatever role and if it doesn't work go back to what you were doing, but some places are up or out. There's no such thing as going back to your old role. I haven't worked at any but have heard that's the case at some places. Basically stack ranking: if you are good we want to make you a team lead since we are growing so quickly and need people to train up the new guys. If you are a good team lead you need to become a development manager/and or PM, if you aren't going up you aren't good so why are we keeping you around?

I guess it's kind of political advancement versus competency in role issue. It shouldn't be a contrast but face time with the boss does get people promoted even if they aren't necessarily the top person for the job. They are around when the decision needs to be made, the boss knows them and likes them ... and they win.

Conversely competent management will let people have and office with a closed door when they need too, or a desk in the middle of the cubicle farm, or work from home whatever is needed for the employee to be the most affective. Maybe I'm more sensitive to it than others I don't know but my biggest annoyance, fairly minor because I like my work for the most part, is management that always dictate the style of communication. They send you an email asking a complicated architectural question and insist on a one sentence answer. Send them two sentences and they are at your office door right as you are about to leave for the day for a one hour chat about it. They can't just growk that complicated things might take an hour to think about and you need to write down your reasoning as you go. No lets have a football huddle about SAAS vs on prem and estimates of effort on the fly at 5:05pm.

Probably factored in but other things besides just transitioning from fossil fuels to green energy, ex as the developing nations develop the birth rate tends to slow and they transition from quite literally burning shit in their hut to at least a natural gas power plant or something. Still bad but less bad.

Also different in that the majority of the time you are likely jumping into the math problem with already 3 pages of math and an answer highlighted. How you figure out where your new code goes, or which piece of the architecture needs to change to accommodate the new thing isn't a straight forward thing. A lot of people that know the language backwards and forwards can't growk the abstractions or suck horribly mentally putting several "pins" in spots where the cuts need to go. Add to that the common failure to understand the business domain and what changes are likely to happen in the future and it's a mess. I think to be really effective at programming you need both skillsets. Missing one you wont' write anything useful at all, missing the other you'll need to be micromanaged to make sure you are making reasonable tradeoffs as you design the solution.

My guess would be if coding is like "language" it's not like having a random conversation, more like constructing the pieces of an essay. In my experience at least, coding seems to be less down in the weeds with a single algorithm, and more jumping back and forth through layers of abstraction and control flow while you work within the current one you're building/fixing. I've ran into a lot of good "programmers" that if you give them a function with clear inputs and outputs they are fine, but they need to be spoon fed. They just shut off if thrown into the middle of a system with a problem to go fix. Sure you could argue that's why you have team leads and architects but it's a huge handicap and seems a very hard skill to learn/teach.

Nope don't find it very reliable. More times than not I spend more times trying to dismiss the damn thing and search for the thing that I wanted than I'd save if it had typed it in. Doesn't help that the few times a day that I'm away from a desktop I'm in public often with background noise. Don't want another reason why I'm the crazy guy on the back of the bus apparently talking to myself.

Exactly. I know people do it but browsing on the phone isn't what I buy them for. The browser on a phone is like a sniper: need the phone number for that restaurant ... and done. The site can and often does render as shitty as it wants on the phone's browser as long as I can get the one piece of info I need and be done with it I'm good.

Sorry did the same confusion: illegal because they are wrongs, regardless of what the punishment ends up being. Government could just pass a law saying they'll start whipping people that break an employment contract. The cause of action remains the same, just the consequence different.

Kind of a confusion in how we use language. We think of illegal as something that'll send you to jail, but really that's confusing the consequence with the action. Contract/tort law is a civil wrong which results in the party committing it having a legal liablity. Criminal wrongs result in the state punishing you. IMO both are "illegal" they end up getting you punished, just one's considered a punishment and the other just creating a liability (ie pay for the damages caused).Meh.

Hey can go negative, at least its value to miners google says estimates between 5k-8500 to mine a coin. If the price people are willing to pay goes below that ... there still might be zealots pumping money into mining because "next year it'll be 100k I know it".

I'm sure varies widely around the country and world. But at least where I am it really hasn't been laws its been mandates. Oh thanksgiving is coming up things are going to get hairy: lets lockdown the gyms again just to be safe. Oh a bunch of 20 somethings had an illegal rave last weekend, lets ban serving booze everywhere from 10pm-5am. It's that governments aren't saying that the thing that the business does is harmful, but the fact that they exist and people might assemble there creates harm so they got to go. In the US that's effectively saying your business can't be open because people might first amendment themselves to death. Not sure when I hired the government to be my babysitter, must have been sometime after 10pm when I was drunk.

Issue I think is both the uncertainty in the cause/and affect rules not being universally applied. Like closing bars but restaurants that don't serve alcohol open. Government is basically saying: you create risk that someone might have something bad happen to them so you need to close. But this other place that also creates risk can stay open. That the risk of getting covid is worse than the certainty of unemployment, lack of social outlets etc. So to that I'd say that what governments are doing are objectively not the right thing to do. They are managing risk on behalf of the public at a scale at least in our lifetimes is unprecedented. They haven't asked us what we want they've told us when we can drink, how many people if any at a party, if kids can go to school, if protests are ok but funerals not etc.with imo little care given to the fallout. Oh they might throw some tokens our way to keep us quiet, but are they going to give us all back our enjoyment of our life for the last year?