Studies also show that people who have alcoholic drinks ~1/day also live the longest. Drinking anything to excess - whether tea, coffee, or alcohol - is a sign there's something off with a person's lifestyle. Similarly, think about the types of people who don't drink *any* alcohol: like you said, those too poor to afford it, and also those people who abstain (coffee, alcohol) because of "air quote" health reasons "/air quote" ... again, a group with something wrong with their lifestyle choices.

(Disclaimer: I do know one individual who abstains from coffee because any amount of caffeine !@#$s up her heart. But that's the *one* exception)

One thing most people should be grateful for is that the discipline (and intelligence) required to make serious weapons (bombs, bioweapons) is basically absent from (most of) the people who want to use them.

If you have those qualities, you are most likely successful enough to not want to go on a mass killing spree.

At a former company, I discovered two instances where the programs allocating commissions were buggy as heck. Some people being overpaid, others underpaid. In one case, it was pretty small bananas. The other ... not so much. As in tens of thousands (USD), and in a couple of cases, over a hundred thousand.

On a completely unrelated note, the top sellers who were short-changed had all left the company.

And HR decided to 'fix' the mis-payments only for people who were still with the company.

And on another completely unrelated note, the people who were hit for previous over-payments also left the company.

Wow, you are *so* far off the mark!
"...that ensuing legal fallout will help some lawyers put their kids through college..." ...given the way Trump has NOT been paying his lawyers ...

Alternatively, they could actually enforce the existing laws, and fine the companies that break them.
Perhaps increase the fine an order of magnitude each time.
Wouldn't be long before companies either stop using robocalls, or go out of business.

Obligatory PA link: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...

Same news, different person ...

Got another problem - corporate setting, Edge has been made the default browser ... and I have to use IE when using other Microsoft products, i.e SharePoint, Powerbuilder, MDS. Because a large part of their functionality doesn't work with Edge.

Seems Microsoft spent so long making sure that no-one could use any other browser with those products, that when they finally threw in the towel, admitted that IE was fundamentally insecure, and made the switch to a Chromium browser ... they couldn't make Edge bypass all the 'Fu$ck You!' code they'd built in for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Yandex (those are some of the specifically targeted ones that have been reported).

"Our economy is not designed to let our species thrive, it's designed to centralise power."

Perhaps the biggest mistake people make is failing to understand evolution doesn't select for what is best *long term*, it selects for what is best *right now*.
And very, very often what is most efficient in the moment is achieved by dumping mechanisms for long-term survival.

The 'economy' has evolved to its present state: the average life of companies has plummeted from ~75 years, a century ago, to ~17 years right now. Expect that particular trend to continue.

Unless intelligence is applied to the situation, companies are going to go the way of dinosaurs: unquestioned masters of the world one day, extinct the next due to a situation they were no longer flexible enough to handle.

Dang, I almost wish covid were a little more fatal, the way it seems to be targeting Trump supporters right now. Evolution in action, and all that stuff.

"I don't know what your country's IQ scales are like, but the ones I've had dealings with are meant (important word) to have a mean of 100 points and an SD of 15"

Yeah, hyperbole.

OTOH, there have been numerous studies showing that (as of 2019) the average IQ of Law Enforcement 'officers' in the US is currently ~93. And has been steadily declining for a few decades.

See Jordan v City of New London. Where the court held it was perfectly reasonable for the police to *not* hire someone for scoring too high on their test.
Yup yup yup, they didn't discriminate against him on the basis of him bein' too smart, 'cause the test wus applied to everyone equally!

You raise a good point - if your data is not encrypted as appropriate, then you are vulnerable to blackmail.

So not only do we have idiot management not allocating enough resources to do decent backups, we now also have idiot management failing to allocate for encryption.
Yet - somehow - they continually manage to give themselves huge bonuses.

Perhaps there is a disconnect between what management claims, and what they are actually doing?

The BIOS hacking is a whole other level. Then again, it can be fixed by physically visiting each affected machine and flashed. Most places tend to have only a few models of machines, so this is not much an issue - just time consuming.

Competition between them is heating up :)
https://nypost.com/2021/04/27/...

I do have a concern. M$ worked very, very hard to ensure that some of their other products - e.g. SharePoint, ReportBuilder, PowerBI - did not work, or worked with greatly reduced functionality, if someone *dared* to use any browser except IE.

It has been rumored the massive push to M$ Teams and M$ Clowd (OneDrive, Azure) was because they did such a !@#$ing good job that they can't get Chromium-based Edge to work - fully - with those products.

Microsoft isn't a monolithic organization. And while I loathed SharePoint (and there are a few good features to it), this means a huge problem for anyone/any organization that has files in it ... not to mention all the reports being kicked out by ReportBuilder and PowerBI.

M$ has invested a lot to try and fix the Edge/PowerBI incompatibility. Not so much with anything else. 'Planned obsolescence' is ancient history to Nadella

Yeah ... I have to LG X Power 2 ... and have had zero issues with it. The jack has worked like a charm ... even use my gaming headset with it.

That said, I've seen the statistics. I'm lucky - looks like quality issues have plagued LG for years, and they really haven't addressed them.

When I buy something like a phone, I'd like the company to have a decent rep for quality, rather than gambling a few (to several) hundred bucks on a crap shoot.

More like (un)Lucky Goldstar

Bought my LG a few years back based on one single item - longest battery life. The rest of the features were comparable to others, including the price. (OK, one of the larger screens, which I preferred, being somewhat on the larger size myself).

Currently have a Samsung for work, and regularly use iPhones.
Given the minimal differences in UI, I'm strongly reminded of the line about all electronics eventually becoming mere commodities, and the user data being the main selling feature ... of the manufacturer.

Purity test. Once extremism takes hold, there is no limit to how far it will go, until the entire community implodes.