You know whether people should or not they do. I've more than once come across somebody using Excel like a database application. It's exactly as bad of an idea as it sounds but people do it and for the most part despite time spent debugging problems it does work.

I guess what I am saying is the answer to, there isn't a tool that can do what the customer wants to do, should not be, tell the customer to knock it the fuck off.

Antitrust is mostly how Microsoft stays in power but they do one thing. It's called the 80/20 rule and the idea is that 80% of your features are used by 20% of your customers but it's a different feature for every single customer. So you can't just take features out because you will rapidly start losing customers even though on paper very few customers are using those features. Basically when you have a sufficiently complex application it has a ton of features only used by a small group of people but you keep adding those groups up and suddenly you've got market dominance.

Before the industry consolidated that was part of what put Microsoft on top. Of course nowadays they just don't let anyone compete

Headline is they refuse to give up Instagram reality is that they refused to gag order.

I just got a article in my feed that the lead actress for the Asoka series at Disney refused to do another season because she wasn't paid enough.

The actual facts are that season 2 filming is already done and one of the other less important characters didn't come back because they didn't offer her enough money to afford to live in London where the shooting was.

I'm so sick of clickbait. Lately it's being written by shitty AI so it's gotten even worse.

And then having people check it. The result is every single update can randomly break shit that doesn't get caught.

Having people check the AI code at slop doesn't really work because the entire point of AI coding is to do it fast and cheap so there's going to be enormous pressure to do as little checking as possible.

Not that it matters. Microsoft has a monopoly. Any viable competitor will simply get taken out by well-known and well understood anti-competitive tactics. And because we refuse to enforce those laws because we refuse to vote for politicians who will enforce those laws Microsoft can basically do whatever they want. With the occasional bribe to some of the larger governments that might try to regulate them.

I think Europe is actually trying to quit the habit but I don't think they will be able to. I can tell you right now that there is no alternative for Microsoft Excel when you're doing large complex spreadsheets. Open offices nice but it just doesn't cut it. Some of that's because of shitty little patents Microsoft has but the system is designed to let them keep generating new patents that make it difficult to compete. And some of it is just that it's rough going writing office software so it's tough to compete with someone who can pay people to do that kind of boring dreary work.

And of course you have the aforementioned anti-competitive tactics that work like a charm.

I'm not even going to say we need to decide what's more important, software freedom or whatever bullshit that makes us vote for pro corporate anti-capitalist political candidates (and mark my words pro corporate is just as anti-capitalist as any socialist or communist just in a different direction)

It doesn't matter what the reasons are the end result is we don't enforce laws.

Is right wing governments directly interfering with colleges for political reasons.

Critical thinking and right-wing politics do not mix. The core fundamentals of right wing politics are trickle down economics and a blind faith in authority. Hierarchy basically. The idea that there is a natural order with some people at the top, some people in the middle and some people in the bottom.

I can see why this theology would be appealing to some people. It implies that there is an order to the universe and that you have a place in that order. Although I never seem to meet any right wingers who believe their place is at the bottom..

The problem is that in the real world it doesn't work. Trickle down economics is pretty obviously bad news. But granting absolute power to a handful of individuals is equally bad. You would think people who grew up being told about checks and balances would understand that but well, here we are. We still lionize Kings.

Because of that it is absolutely essential that anyone who wants to climb the ranks in the right wing undermines public education. You can't have people getting well educated because they're going to start asking the kind of questions well educated people do. Like, why is America bombing boats in Venezuela or why does the United Kingdom use child protection laws to go after pro Palestinian groups... Oops I just triggered somebody.

That implies rot from within but this was really just top down Intel firing anyone and everyone in order to make quarterly targets.

That was fine when AMD was struggling but AMD got their shit together in 2017. Intel kept firing people they actually need it all the way up to well, now.

The problem is that your engineers are rotting it's that you don't have them because you fired them. Worse it's not as if you got to assassinate them or anything so they went off and got jobs at your competitors.

This is why Nvidia has always been so strong they hire the hell out of engineers in order to keep them out of the hands of competitors. It's a bit problematic because it's why AMD and Intel have such a hard time competing in the GPU market space. They simply cannot afford to hire enough of the kind of engineers they need. Not with the budget the CEO gives them

Next will be incredibly tight regulation on VPN access and use. Leading up to government-run vpns and a Chinese style great firewall.

This is a authoritarian power grab and once authoritarians start grabbing power they don't stop.

I don't think it's anything that can be stopped because voters are too distracted by the culture war bullshit.

The next step is to ban vpns. They will be more tightly regulated than guns.

Not that it matters because human civilization is collapsing but all this think of the children bullshit is just a power grab by authoritarians.

We can't do anything about it because we're too busy worrying about woke trans drag queens forcing us to say happy holidays while playing Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis.

You're not thinking about the trillions of dollars and cheap imports that being the world's primary currency gets you. It's a form of economic colonialism and China would love to have it. So would any European country.

America is very close to handing nuclear launch codes to religious lunatics. One more election and it happens.

These people believe God will protect them from literally anything. I know because I have family like this.

They will launch those nukes. And is America's empire fails we are going to have to start doing military expansion to maintain our economy. We are already moving into Venezuela to take the oil for exactly that reason. Canada and Mexico and the rest of South America will follow. Europe will be next and eventually we'll try our chances with China.

The rest of the world ought to be interfering with the Russian interference that's getting us into this mess but they're all hoping that America will collapse letting them take over as the primary world power and letting their currency take over as the world's de facto currency. If they can pull that off then they're a billionaires get to become the first trillionaires instead of our billionaires becoming the first trillionaires.

The problem is everyone is underestimating how fucking crazy my country is. We will launch those nukes folks. Especially if the religious lunatics who are currently running our government finish the project 2025 work they've been planning for 60 years and end up in total control.

it has detailed arguments in between making fun of idiots who think hyperloop is real.

If you can't be arsed to learn things though I can't help you. Maybe reddit's "conservative" forum is more your speed then. They'll do a good job of protecting you from knowledge.

Did you know they had a week long gap in new posts when the voting on the Epstein files was going on?

That's part of it but you need to remember that every single one of those Rich fuckers is a crook.

This means they fully expect their kids to be the target of a wide range of scams and ripoffs and they want their kids to be able to think critically so that they don't fall for that shit.

Some of them are so dumb they still do like Trump. But if that happens the elites have solidarity and they take care of each other.

Occasionally you will get somebody like Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes that manages to get through that system but when it happens and they get caught they go to jail for decades.

You know there are people who do this thing called being born and then they grow up and then they have to buy things because you're not born with a 32 GB memory kit. At least I wasn't maybe that's a birth defect...

Away from the build-out being finished. The bubble isn't a bubble it's not going to pop. The infrastructure isn't going to get shut down and sold off it's going to get used.

Like I mentioned on another thread the problem AI solves is wages. Paying wages.

This means that AI isn't going anywhere. Now a whole bunch of companies will collapse and the banks will be in trouble because they would have loaned those companies hundreds of billions of dollars. But you're just going to have to bail those Banks out or they will take the entire economy down with them and you will lose your retirement and your job.

There are solutions to all of these problems but none of them are acceptable to the average voter.

Even in the current environment they are objectively wrong. All the study proves is that propaganda works.

The ruling elite has decided they do not want you to be educated. They have spent a lot of money to convince you that you do not need to be educated.

You can tell they're lying because they don't tell their kids to go become plumbers. They send them to very expensive schools with a lot of humanities courses so that they can be taught critical thinking

I know tech nerds don't like the humanities but when you are dealing with someone who does not automatically think critically about information that is how you teach them to do it. This is why you will always find lots of humanities classes at expensive schools.

It's not about cost it's about dependency. As it stands if you're a billionaire you are completely dependent on employees and consumers for your wealth and prestige and power

They don't like that. They don't like that at all.

So they are more than happy to spend more resources especially since they have unlimited resources because we let them have unlimited resources.

When I say that they are dismantling capitalism this is what I mean. It means that profit and loss are no longer the driving motivators in human economic interaction.