Buying groceries with a check?! Look at this rich guy. The rest of us have to fill out a credit application and take out a mortgage when we want to buy a Christmas roast.

Yea. your friend's line of reasoning is pretty common but it is a bit of a head scratcher to me. There's less transparency in private business, so there's corruption and unethical dealings that most of us never find out about. The point of having services under government control is that it's the people's money and the organization should ideally be answerable to the people.

The anti-union shift has been a bad strategy for the Dems. Unions can get their members showing up to the polls or even for political action far better than Act BLUE can by just sending upper middle class donors a panicked email begging for donations.

  Some people don't like unions because it's an extra layer of politics. It seems inefficient to have dues and voting and people getting paid just to be reps. But taking a step back: if you want to walk into a room with your boss to negotiate something, like a job or raise or working conditions. You, as the worker, are standing alone and your boss has an entire organization (and legal team) behind him/her. Without unions every person is negotiating under a serious imbalance against some of the richest and most politically connected organizations in the world.

Not sure. Just when you think you've found it the line slants up again. But humans have limits and Donald Trump is old. His hey day seems to have been in the 80s and 90s. Now he's slowed down and is taking more naps, plus a bunch of his old friends have died or gone to live in group housing. I suppose you could argue that he's taking dirty old man to new heights in his mind.

You contradict yourself. A product that isn't easy to use or setup in one or two clicks fails in the market. Hence cloud.

Ah, you have a personal definition of "necessity." I'm sure what follows is going to be good.

Enshitification and dumbing down of everything is done because quite frankly most people are frigging useless when it comes to technology.

the more rope you gave idiots

Most products are unfortunately designed for the commoner, not the techie in mind.

Etc.

I always find it quite ironic when "the techies" on here complain about how it's impossible to change the battery in a phone and bitch about problems that can be solved with an ESP32 and a bit of solder (like the one in this story). Guess there are multiple levels of "frigging useless when it comes to technology."

VPNs are pretty hard when you don't know the name or address to connect to.

This time seems to be post-Discovery acquisition pain, and they're going to be selling off a bunch of stuff before they let Netflix acquire the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens to a few more media companies too. They've all been spending money like mad to try and buy streaming customers and also make something they want to watch.

Bullshit. Selling property is selling property. You seem to be distracted by the idea that a corporation is anything other than a group of co-owners. I'm not saying sometimes rights need to be restricted for the common good. They always do. But come out and say it, don't weasel around it with but but corp....

For all their "losses" they were also able to pay down their debt in 2024 with $4.4B in cash flow

WB lost more than $11 billion in 2024, although their debt did go down from $70 billion to a mere $46 billion.

That would never fly. You just know that some dufus at the gym would bring a 10kg steel dumbbell into the MRI room and ruin things for everyone.

I bought an HDTV too early and it quickly became obsolete because it didn't support 720p only 480p and 1080i. That's what happens when you buy technology, someone doesn't bother supporting it because it's too much of a pain, there is too little money to make, and ultimately they know that people are just going to buy new hardware when their old hardware stops working.

They tried, but quarreling parent groups couldn't agree on whether to teach the kids that they were coding with 3 registers or 259 registers.

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

I get it when an organization outsources something when they don't have enough work to sustain a team. Like a small town government isn't going to operate their own roof repair division just to repair government roofs (rooves?), you instead would hire a local contractor that has plenty of private work to keep their crew busy.

But some things the government does all the time and it doesn't make sense to outsource, like most office work. Of course outsourcing some temp staff can be practical if one can anticipate things like seasonable demand, but hiring local students if the job and time frame fit (summer job) is better still.

At the end of the day an organization can pay an employee, work out benefits, etc. Or it can pay a for-profit business to take a cut for management, owners, etc and try to cut corners on quality or benefits for the employees. I know how the neoliberal "third way" think, and they'd rather reduce the number of government employees, even if that amounts to giving taxpayer dollars to a private owner and gutting good paying union jobs in the community. It's no wonder the working class is struggling under skyrocketing housing prices, high tuition, and low wages. It's all symptoms of an unhealthy economic system that is the direct result of our political shift in both parties in the US. (and a general trend in much of the West with neoliberalism, especially the anglosphere)

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

I think I will cancel a few streaming service and Amazon prime to compensate.