Technically, they can't print bills like that. The talk was that they mint a $100T coin.

Call me when the job is done. Careful about which coin you put in the payphone.

Nobody else wants dollars. What are those holding the surplus going to do with them?

We run our own (huge) data center, so convincing our people that we should stay "at home" was easier, especially since we have our own cloud service (with blackjack. And hookers) so they can placate marketing with "yes, yes, we are doing this in the cloud" without even lying, but even here, some felt that urge to move stuff into AWS.

And yes, now we're having severe headaches.

The expense isn't in the infrastructure. That's peanuts. Quite frankly, the metal you need to haul your data back into the data center is pocket change. What really puts the money boot on your back is adaptation of your software, services, processes and of course the manpower you now suddenly need for maintenance.

The alternatives to the cloud are certainly not free. Actually, cloud services do have their niche. When I need sudden spikes of processing power, Lambda services beat on-prem server farms in pretty much any aspect. If I just need to try something out and need to spin up a machine quickly, a cloud container sure is easier to get with less overhead than even an on-prem VM.

But for anything where you have a constant base load, especially if you're large enough to warrant the staff for maintenance, the costs for cloud services quickly spin out of whack compared to on-prem systems.

Cloud systems are a tool. Not a silver bullet. They are not the hammer and your problems are not all nails.

And it even fails at this. Miserably. I can still install Linux on those systems. So what's the goal here?

Windows has really been "good enough" at least since WinXP. There are very, very few actual reasons why you would want to upgrade from there other than the OS losing manufacturer support.

Quite frankly, if XP still had patches going, I'd really have a hard time justifying upgrading from it.

True, true.

It's time to dig out the Linux distribution from back when Win7 had to be replaced and check whether now, finally, it is ready for business. I think that VMs are now far more capable than they used to be, so the few applications that can't run in Wine would probably by now work sensibly in that VM.

They already have altered it further.

Yes, MS is now officially worse than The Empire.

Not to mention that SystemD configuration actually uses the equivalent of the joke COMEFROM statement liberally.

"Fun to use"? Why in the world would I want a sudo that's fun to use? What's next, including delicious candy in the president's nuclear football? Perhaps instead of the annoying BONG BONG BONG when the kids take off their seat belts, the car should play Baby Shark. They might as well enjoy themselves before they go through the windshield.

Definitely 10 bladed razors with 3 lubricated shaving strips and a vibrate setting but no attempt whatsoever to make sure the blades are aligned.

Unlike SystemD and Freedesktop, OpenBSD doesn't have a history of trying to cram things down people's throats. Doas isn't a threat because OpenBSD is EXTREMELY unlikely to ever try to cram it in if it's not freely adopted.

For a few years now, I have seen Freedesktop's involvement in ANYTHING to be a big red flag. They've soiled themselves too many times to be trusted, complete with gaslighting and marketing tactics (but I repeat myself) when their technical arguments fail to carry the day.

OTOH, it looks like the SystemD developers do exactly that.

Kind of like in Alien.