Next we could have employee owned companies, but that would be a much bigger shift away from this infinite growth strategy system where everyone seems to be ignoring the elephant in the room.

I don't mind the hybrid schedule so much. I'm not sure how I managed for 16 years to commute to the office every day AND go to the gym in the middle of the day for an hour.

I come here for the good news. Not disappointed.

Massively parallel vector multiplication. Currently big companies are eating the energy bills because they're stuck in the upward portion of a hype cycle, but soon they'll have to start charging people to talk to their chat bots. They don't get energy for free either.

You'd have to expend a significant amount of energy to create the conditions for a big thunderstorm. Like burning all the fossil fuels we piped out of the ground for a hundred years.. Oh wait. We did that. Now we have more intense storms.
The Middle East is very much more at war than usual, so the effects of all that air traffic and bombing could be creating their own seeding effect on the region.

I already had a garage fire, because I don't blow the leaves all over the street like most neighbors do. I should get one of them electric leaf blowers. It'd be easier to dust the house with one of them things too.

Because it'll be mandatory to have a mortgage, and neighbors if you want em. I want neither.

Are their greener pastures? Because the vesting dates have been passing for years and I'm never pleasantly surprised.

They don't buyback shares to hand them out to employees. Employees get limited stock as options.Those are non-voting shares with other restrictions. Generally they're options to buy a stock at a fixed price. If the current price of the stock is less than the fixed price (yeah usually), you'd have to pay more to buy them than they'd be worth. If they were going to be worth anything, they probably wouldn't have granted them in the first place.

Companies use cash to buy their own shares on the public market, reducing the amount of shares available/increasing value per share, which is good for people holding shares. It also consolidates control of the company, since they buy back shares from institutional investors who have significant voting power. It does absolutely f-k all for the employees, as none of that cash is being used to invest in things like employee compensation, lowering insurance costs, giving more people better yearly raises, hell cash bonuses are nice once in a while good job workers here's some cash, and things like paying for your gym membership because that's good for your health, improving facilities because a safe and healthy workplace is a good thing, or hiring more employees because people are the ones who do the actual work of you know, making, selling, distributing, supporting whatever a company does. They should tax stock buybacks and mergers at a rate that makes them unpalatable for most companies.

Windows used to be the fastest. At memory leaks. Maybe still is.

The Shield looks like the best thing out there. If I upgrade to a higher resolution projector that would be my first choice for streaming. I have any number of Macs running linux that can rip video to a NAS device.

The industry reserves the right to keep changing the format and selling you a new copy of the same stuff, in the new format. Streaming is the ultimate revenue optimizer for them. They can figure out what you want to watch, then figure out how to make you pay for it by moving it to a service you don't already subscribe to. Every 3 months you find you have 10+ subscriptions to cancel, and the 5th season of "Gunsmoke" is now only available through MGM++ which is like MGM+, but with the show you want to watch. Nobody knows how to make anything worth watching anymore, because it's expensive and takes a lot of time and effort.
I just watched a 4-part series that Amazon stitched into a single 285-minute monolith they put up for rental. The rental timed out at the 3/4 mark. If I want to see the last part, I'll have to rent it again. I tell ya, it's highway robbery.

I wondered why they bothered with the beach ball, but they were students, so who knows. If you've ever seen the "The Prisoner" series from 1967, a partly inflated latex weather balloon was used surprisingly well as a plot device to explain why escape from the island is impossible.

Elmo. Or large plucked chicken man.

They're just finding out that their products are junk when they get returned. After all they've never seen the junk they're selling, since its shipped from China directly to Amazon's warehouses.

Now I know where I'm sending all those AOL CDs I've been hoarding. I was going to sell them on Ebay but I think scamming Amazon is the ethically sound solution.