It's a GNU-flavored version of those MS extensions, originally they added a subset of what MS does in order to let gcc use data structures in MS's headers and have somewhat source compatible builds (I think this was roughly around the time Cygwin popped up, but I'm not sure).

A fair number of professional teams enabled those extensions for non-Windows code because they like some of the tricks available with the extensions and use it in their proprietary or open source code. It's a trend that has finally spread to the Linux kernel. I think this was really only possible as some of the kernel grognards retired or were otherwise not around to put up a fight and generally maintain the inertia force on LKML. Torvalds himself isn't quite as grumpy as people think and is generally pretty pragmatic and can be influenced by consensus and reasonable arguments.

I never suggested a proportional pay system. But the upper limit is paying someone based on what they produce, anything less than that makes it possible to operate a business, paying anything more and it's not likely the role can be justified.

The labor market is not a free market. There is significant manipulation on three sides of it; from unions, from business, and from government regulation. For the most part, whatever mechanism you imagine creates a "market value" for your labor is just that, mostly just your imagination. There is practically no economic incentive to drive wages up or down by a $1 when labor itself is not a real commodity. Exchanging one worker for another is certainly the dream for some, but it's a dream that even the most aggressive capitalists don't practice. They will pay one person more than another for the same advertised role. For example, it happens to such a degree that government regulations were created to deal with fair employment practices and discrimination. Other discretion and prejudice that is not protected by law is fair game of course. And the only reason for this is that labor is not treated as a commodity by either labor or management.

Life as a service is kind of what some people have as a plan for you. But I get your point, and I would again point that you have the concept of a market value confused as a zero-sum system of exchanges. The very benefits that capitalism espouse is that production and consumption do not have to balance out and shouldn't for some very important macroeconomic reasons.

Holistically, the cab company produces a service of a value. The most important aspect of that service is the labor the cab driver performs, but the labor is not the entirety of a cab company. Setting that quibble aside, let's assume you mean paying the cab company a percentage of your salary.

You as a customer are willing to pay some amount for the cab service. Traditionally we'd have a fixed price that everyone pays for cab fare, typically regulated by cities but almost always a formulaic charge of an initial fare + distance charge. Everyone pays the same amount because it would normally have been too difficult to work out each patron's income at the point of service.

If you were using a "surge pricing" ride-share app, that is attempting to seek a real-time demand pricing, then individuals get to decide on a price and each person can be presented different prices at different times. Through relatively straight forward statistical analysis on the backend, the supply-demand curve can be optimized in the businesses favor. And you will be paying near the maximum you are willing to pay, which is somewhat correlated to your own personal financial situation.

Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams and Shane Dix (first book of the Orphans Trilogy) explains a similar scenario to the Bobiverse books, but it is darker and perhaps a little more cynical on the hard scifi parts.

Anyone that is willing to show up and be paid less than what they produce is a gold mine. Party of the grift requires businesses to treat everyone like shit, make everyone feel that their work is meaningless, that they are easily replaced, and that they won't survive without a job. HR departments have grown to fill that need of corporate propaganda and overall management of the greatest grift in history.

If they cared about fraud we'd have chips & pin everywhere. They only care about the fraud that they can't easily shift onto merchants and consumers.

They will have to accept lower revenue when I don't show up to buy anything.

Between Visa Inc and Mastercard Inc, there isn't much competition for payment processing regardless of who holds the debt. It's no coincidence that these companies have faced numerous antitrust lawsuits over the years (won some, lost some, settled many)

So at least someone enjoyed it

Generally its not too hard to hijack old hardware and add your own op-amps and whatever to the existing bias and drove circuits. Once you can get some signal in, even if you're just using your digital storage scope and some decently set up triggers you can crank though just about any old data set. Phase encoded, MFM, etc are all pretty easy to decode in software with a sufficiently fast microcontroller.

I used to get the two coupled like that until very recently. C didn't show up until around 1972. (UNIX was created in 1969). That factoid ended up being a minor plot point in a Chinese drama my wife is watching and I got it wrong, much to my embarrassment.

Training AI right now to make fake versions of old UNIX.

We need to encourage them to move to a Martian colony or Venusian balloon city. There's not room on this Earth for the mega wealthy and the rest of humanity.

Talk about fighting fire with gasoline

We're going out with a bang, not a whimper.

Ending DEI in federal agencies without a substitute policy is a violation of rulings related to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Preventing private businesses, universities, and individuals from applying DEI-like policies in their own hiring practices is a violation of the First Amendment.

Not that anyone is going to stand up to a court dead set on creating the first Unitarian Executive in US history.

America voted the way they did because they wanted the government ran like a business with a CEO holding absolute authority. GOP and MAGA won. They got their dream they've wished for since the Reagan era.