We gave some atomic scientists enough time and caffeine and they came up with the Hydrogen bomb which is far more dangerous than Plutonium :)

Until it built, no new if it could be done

I hate that sort of attitude. The engineers knew it could be done and they had rigorous enough math to convince very conservative people to give them the money to do it.

Age old story of outsourcing - you still need to retain enough people to watch the contractors so they can't cut corners on the expensive bits.
One blatant example I saw was with non destructive testing of welds in high pressure pipework leading to portions of a turbine in a coal fired power station. At those welds it was done by spraying on thing white paint, using a magnet and spraying on a fluid with suspended magnetic "dust" that would collect wherever defects disrupted the magnetic field. Access was a bit tight so the contractors tested the top of the pipes and they ran the magnet around the bottom of the pipe without looking at it so that some scratches would be left to show that the magnet had been used. The lazy pricks were caught doing that so we had to send someone along as an observer and make them do a couple of weeks worth of work over again, because with their scratch trick we had no way of knowing is any inspection had actually been done or not.
So MBA types - that person standing off to the side not doing anything during a concrete pour may be there solely to reduce fuckups due to dishonest contractors.

I stand against genetically modified crops because I don't want fucking multinationals to own the intellectual property rights over basic foodstuffs.

Then maybe we should change the GMO laws so that someone other than a multinational can afford to get a GMO plant certified as safe to eat. At the moment not even a university can afford it unless they are likely to see huge financial returns, so they don't even try. Thus monsanto stuff but no vaccines delivered via chunks of banana or even a tomato that can be transported but still tastes like great grandmas tomatoes (there's some very slow research happening along those lines that the researcher said is just the long way of approximating what he could have achieved with GMO ten years ago).

"Hate" is such an overused term.

But entirely descriptive of many of the posts about CLF here over the years.

As for the reduced life that's where "just good enough" starts to dominate a market that had been established via reliability.
It took me more than ten years of using CFL bulbs to find one that explained the hate that had been expressed on this page, and that's because fashionability had a greater role in it's design than function. If IoT devices can avoid that criteria there may be more hope, but I suspect you are correct that once they become a commodity there may be a race to the bottom.

Do I have to spell it out?

It's a toytown.

Reality is very different there to the rest of the country. The price of contracts is a thing that would be laughed at in other places. There are no homeless and few unemployed because who would be in Canberra if you don't have a job?

Yeah, my browser has a lot of opinions on my writing, but it's less judgmental than a lot of the feedback I get on my computer, so I ignore it a lot :)

I think your post achieves peak pun-ish meant.

Yep. Very much so.

Every once in a while Illiad sticks in a new story line, but it's getting more and more rare. I was just struck by the reference to goatce.cx.

Run Windows VMs and keep adding them until the boxes are under some level of resource contention (3:1, 4:1 vCPU:pCPU). If you don't see a difference, I'd be highly curious of your workloads and configuration.

This is exactly correct. I myself replaced a SQL Server cluster that was using boxes with dual 12-core AMD procs with one using dual 4-core Xeons a couple years ago. Performance and responsiveness went way up while the bill to Microsoft dropped massively.

I was a solid AMD enthusiast from the original Athlons all the way up until about 5 years ago. They went from huge underdog to reigning champion for a long time while the marketing guys ran Intel's product offering into the ground with everything from Northwood to Prescott and all the stuff in between. But the landscape has shifted for AMD. They've simply gone downhill. As of the last couple of years, I can no longer justify buying AMD procs at work and I'd already switched at home. That AMD could boast significantly more cores was the last leg they had to stand on in the server market; now they're a has-been.

I sincerely hope they recover and blow past Intel as they've done in the past. I think that's healthier for the market and I think we all win when that competition heats up. But at this point, there's little to justify their existence in the server space and the market share numbers reflect that (dropping from >25% share to ~3%).

I must have got you while half asleep or something. It means the people who clean the buildings, work in the supermarkets etc reside in less fashionable areas nearby which pushes the average of "Canberra residents" up. It's also a very artificial salary environment by being effectively a "one company town", and like some mining companies in such a situation the employer is very generous (due to historical linking of MP and PS salary plus paying people enough to relocate from Sydney, Melbourne and those other parts of the country which most of the government holds in utter contempt).
I'm sure you already are very much aware of all this which is why I'm wondering why you are making me spell it out.

there must be a massive market for low quality unimaginative copycat games that take at most 2 or 3 weeks to hack together

If you look at the list of MAME ROMs you'll see you are also describing a big chunk of arcade game history.