This is why it's more important than ever to maintain friendships/acquaintances/etc. with professional colleagues. I haven't gone into an application cold in about 20 years, because if I don't have previous coworkers/bosses actively trying to recruit me, I at least have lots of people to ask.

The problem I see is one of scale. The places you describe often have 30+ gas pumps, and around here, we have Bucee's that have about 100 - with usually 95%+ in use during peak times. You need 5-10x as many chargers to keep the same car throughput, so you're looking at 150-1000 charging stations. At 300kW each, that's 45-300MW of electric service for one business. Not only do you need 10x the real estate, you need room for a pretty sizeable substation, and access to pretty hefty power lines (probably 200-300kV, from some cursory research).

The problem with that plan is that collectively, those companies have a lot of resources to develop other solutions. It's only a matter of time before they form an industry group that duplicates VMWare with open-source tools, that's just as easy to use. Someone will also sell support for it. At that point, VMWare as a platform is done.

I suppose it's possible that Broadcom sees that happening anyway, and is just trying to squeeze as much out of it as possible before then.

I think this is also due to cars becoming more aerodynamic for fuel efficiency. My newer cars will get bugs on the flatter areas of the front, but rarely the windshield anymore, unless it's a particularly large one that the slipstream can't get out of the way fast enough.

So if no one hires entry-level coders, then in 10 years, there won't be any experienced programmers, either.

We'll either be totally dependent on AI, or software quality will go (more) into the toilet. Probably both.

"Normal" is just the average of everyone's individual crazy...

I'm mildly autistic, with an official diagnosis. This is considered a disability under the ADA, and thus employers must provide reasonable accommodation.

My employer recently started requiring everyone within 50 miles of an office to come in 2x/week, but the offices are all high-density shared workspaces - a nightmare for anyone on the spectrum. I talked to my manager, he talked to HR, and surprise, surprise, the most logical accommodation was to continue to work from home full time.

If there's one thing HR is terrified of, it's exposing themselves to lawsuits stemming from discrimination or disabilities, so use that to your advantage!

The thing is, in a global economy, you can't just look at two parties and call it a trade imbalance. It's like Trump has forgotten why currency was invented.
I want to buy WidgetA from Mr. A, but I don't have the WidgetB he's looking for, which only Mr. B has. Mr. B doesn't want WidgetA - he wants WidgetC. And so on around the world until you get to Mr. Zed, who wants my widget, but doesn't have the WidgetA that I want.

So either every transaction requires orchestrating a complex, multi-party barter, or I just give Mr A 10 clams for his widget, he uses them to get Mr B's widget, and so on until I get the 10 clams backs from Mr. Zed. No trade imbalance at all, unless you're so shortsighted as to only look at Mr. A and Zed.

Or the cards for people with low credit will just charge annual fees instead. Which is actually worse - at least you can normally avoid the interest by keeping it paid off, but you can't avoid the fees.

The only thing that we know for sure is that the companies won't accept at hit to their profits.

The problem with this is that it doesn't pass the "what if everyone did it" test (or what happens when everyone has an electric car). No restaurant is going to install enough charging stations that a significant percentage (assuming it's along a heavily-traveled-by-long-distance-trippers route) of its patrons can charge at the same time. So what are you going to do? Jump up and dash outside to try to get a charger every time you see someone leave? Leave the car at a charger somewhere else and taxi/uber to your restaurant? Go through a drive-through and eat in your car while camping the chargers until someone leaves?

Well, it's China, so it's possible that they could be infested by the digital equivalent of rats. Cheap hosting for state sponsored hackers and malware.

is so that you can't use your purchase until you've agreed to some kind of one-sided contract that says you can't sue them, etc.

Appliance companies have tried putting that sort of thing on the boxes, stickers, etc. before, but since they tend to be professionally installed, it's too easy for the end users to claim they never saw/agreed to anything. So enter mandatory phone app/cloud connectivity.

Seems like this would be a case of "it's great for one person, but won't work if everyone does it."

Did some searching, and found that utilities start thinking about dedicated substations for customers drawing more than 10-12MW. So basically, anywhere that wants to charge more than a few cars at a time will need insanely expensive electric service. At the 4.5MW standard, that's only 2-3 cars.

When I had to go to the office, I'd have to wake up around 0630 to get there around 0830.

Now, WFH, I get an extra hour of sleep AND log in 45 min earlier. Waking up at a more natural time (for me) could probably explain 2% extra productivity by itself.

Starting earlier naturally leads to quitting earlier. I'm guessing there's more than enough people like me these days to move the average.

We've gotten to the point that we're having two data centers talk to each other via a less-than-modem-speed link? :P

Use the tones to exchange API endpoints and session IDs, then hang up the phone.