You are hinting at the nothing to hide position which states that law enforcement should be an all knowing panopticon because the honest have nothing to hide. But given the rise of authoritarianism worldwide, you need to be more vigilant than ever to prevent government from surveilling you.

https://youtu.be/3e62270w7LI

Pulling repeated hardware platform switches underneath without bothering customers too much is a thing that only a very competent company could do, and Apple is a very competent company.

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

Apple nowadays is bound to avoid any huge missteps, because it has become a very conservative company.

Granted they blew some on the Vision Pro, but not much, for them. They folded on the electric car project, which now seems like a shame as Tesla is vulnerable.

What revolutionary product has Apple launched since Steve Jobs died? It has been 14 years, and I'm still waiting.

Consoles have a 7 year life, the Xbox One came out in 2013; it should have seen a fully new hardware design in 2020. So they're 5 years overdue ("series" are hardware refreshes, not a true "next gen" redesign) Microsoft has never been able to turn around the story of the failed launch the product is likely dead at this point. Microsoft wanted to own the media landscape and at this point they've given up on that vision for 5+ years.

As to VisiCalk being the real OG that started from nothing, there's an interesting comment on a VisiCalc youtube:

In 1969, we had to develop the world's true first electronic spreadsheet (LANPAR) within the limitation of 32k of memory - and we included forward referencing which didn't appear in Visicalc, TKSolver, Supercalc or even Multiplan I. Only in Lotus 13 years later. We even included the ability for sophisticated logic calculations, access to external data base data, and input of data in real time. Timesharing in those days was very similar to "cloud" computing now, except that you knew exactly which remote computer was doing the processing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also at that scale who knows how much they are paying for each seat, I'm sure it's a bespoke deal. No doubt MS is making money, but I wouldn't just take the retail price and multiply it by 2 million.

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

How do you know that?

Being from Google, I rather assume the opposite - and that they probably focused their engineering effort to make sure the reduced battery life didn't give their corporate surveillance activities away.

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

thanks

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

So, what is your prediction? It sounds like you think Amazon is going to fire thousands of people in hopes that AI will eventually replace their roles, and then say, "whoops, it doesn't work, we're screwed," and the packages will stop flowing. Is that your prediction?

Anybody have a way to read the blomberg article?

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.