IBM has nearly 300,000 employees. A few thousand won't dent the headcount that much.

The value of work (or a product) is based on one and only one thing: the price on which a buyer and seller agree. As applied to work, the buyer is the employer, and the seller is the employee, who sells time for money. As long as the employee is willing to work for a certain wage, that is what the work is worth.

That value is determine through supply and demand. The higher the demand, or the lower the supply, or both, the higher the value of the work (or product).

As long as there are more plumbers and electricians who are willing and able to work for "lower" wages (their wages are actually not so bad), the value won't go up.

Value isn't something that is assigned, it's the output of a negotiation between buyer and seller.

You and I seem to have very different experiences with Apple equipment. I use Apple hardware of all varieties in my work with stage lighting. The OS lags Windows by years, the hardware is often flaky. It's common to have to reboot to fix problems with running software.

No, I don't agree with your Home Depot analogy. It's more like Viking appliances, which cost a ton, but need lots of repairs. Dell and HP are the Whirlpool appliances. No-nonsense, but reliable.

WASM can't do anything JavaScript can't already do. It's just a bytecoded version of JavaScript itself.

Yeah, it was a joke, so colloquial was more appropriate in this case.

Maybe you should have a doctor make the sanity assessment. That's what my wife tells me!

Sure, people have reasons for choosing Apple. I don't begrudge them that decision. What I quibble with, is the characterization of this new laptop as a "Low Cost Laptop". It's not.

And Dell laptops last way more than 18 months. I've had half a dozen of them for home and work. They last, on average, 5-7 years.

Correction: Plenty of Trump-followers disapprove of Cheney. Trump, nor his followers, are conservative. They believe in one thing: whatever Trump says. Conservativism has nothing to do with it.

Liz Cheney had a deep believe in what she was doing, investigating the January 6 riots. She deeply believed that Trump was a scourge on the Republican party and on America. It was not something she did just to please Dad. She sacrificed everything for her beliefs. I respect that in a politician. It's rare indeed.

Yep, something I agree with you about. Screens provide a valuable outlet, and input, for people who have limited ability to get outside and do things.

My father-in-law is 85 and has lost most motor control. He can't drive or even walk more than a few steps. He can't put puzzles together because his fingers won't pick up the pieces. But he can do puzzles on an iPad. I'm very happy he has something to do, despite his physical limitations.

Less than $1,000 might be "low cost" for Apple, but it's not a "low cost" laptop. Amazon lists dozens of options for Windows 11 Home laptops, some from brand names like HP and Dell, for less than $200.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lap...

For such an approach to work, you first have to understand that there is a difference between cloud-hosted LLMs and local LLMs. Then you have to understand how to look for such a thing. And when it comes to apps, you're at the mercy of the app developer, you can't just open your calendar app of choice and say, "Use the inference engine that I have installed locally, instead of the cloud-hosted one you run by default". It doesn't work that way. Again, for you, maybe you can get this stuff done. But your elderly relatives cannot.

Are you saying that these distros are easier to install than Windows?

I'd suggest that in that oh-so-comfortable fairy-tale past, decisions were arbitrary and not based on factual or consistently applied rules. If the loan officer liked you, you got a loan, if he didn't, you didn't. That doesn't seem better to me. FICO might not be perfect, but it at least consistently applies the same set of rules to everyone.

There is a wide gap between borrowers with very high credit scores (the kind I described) and very low credit scores (the kind you described). In between, is a large group of people who borrow regularly, carry a balance, but also pay their bills. Banks indeed do make a lot of money from interest payments from these people, especially credit card balances, as the interest rates for credit cards is usually above 20%.

I don't think credit scores are Orwellian. They are just one tool a lender has to help them with their research. One way or another, a lender has to have information about a borrower, in order to decide whether to give that person a loan. Credit scoring agencies give them an important piece of information about whether that person is likely to repay.

Having worked for a mortgage company for 3 years, I know that loans are granted or denied at the discretion of the lender. They use the credit score as one input, but far from the only input. Under US regulations, they do have to use and disclose metrics that they use to grant or deny credit, but it's not all credit score. They use other pieces of information like debt-to-income ratio, income sufficient to make regular payments, among others.