Maybe a major title like GTA V Online suddenly being unsupported has something to do with it?

Although the cheating was so rampant it was unplayable on steam.

I suppose people still use PGP these days, tho' I haven't seen much of it (minus one bank that used their commercial product). GPG?

And "all gone"? How about some details? How does ones PGP key "get compromised"? Weak key? Weak passphrase? Keylogger?

Isn't this blockchain thingy supposed to show transfers?

We need some deets.

Moving at even pedestrian speeds in Las Vegas is quite an unpleasant task, having done so myself on a few occasions.

https://lynx.browser.org/

Used with Julian Assange's "Surfraw" is an amazing combination.

I went to go buy one and it says "out of stock".

https://store.pine64.org/?prod...

If I, as a consumer, wanted ads from a competitor, or was willing to pass my shopping behavior to multiple vendors by choice, it might give me more information to make a better deal.

Maybe I can leverage multiple vendors of the same or similar product who all know that I'm looking for a beer, and one nearby might say "Hey! Our happy hour has your favorite beer at a good price".

The "nightmare" is the involuntary tracking part - not the competitive behavior of consumers who want the information.

Who controls our data?

Like I said in the comment: if management is so poor that they cannot do their job to motivate people and then cannot do their job to fire those people they fail to motivate then how can we blame those who are (mis)managed as "dead wood"? Clearly the layoffs are not coming from the middle managers who didn't do their job in the first place but from some "executive level" efficiency expert.

At Juniper (following Microsoft) they opted for a "bottom 20%" policy of requiring that 20% of every group be identified as a low performer. A group could have the best (or the worst) team but one in five had to be given a warning-you-must-improve-or-be-terminated rating. Guess who got these ratings? People management didn't like. The best managers assigned the failing ratings to themselves as an act of protest and quit. The demoralizing effects of such a system were clear. People started to churn to keep their jobs but churn isn't adding value, it's appearing valuable.

Have you never worked at a job with morale destroying management? Have you never read Dilbert?

In my experience unproductive people are poorly managed, poorly motivated, poorly trained - and are rarely simply unproductive but demoralized and badly lead.

It is blaming the victim to call people who are laid off "dead wood". Bad management is all too common in IT.

Layoffs are the product of bad management, not poor work forces.

I think it's been noted that Godwin's law cannot be disproven.

Also: "Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card"." (wikisomething or other) To make facile analogies to Nazi's isn't then really the point, unless I call you a Nazi. There is no one advocating lay offs so there is no opponent to implicate.

Management uses brute force techniques to terrorize their employees - to motivate them with fear. Mass firings clearly take out many people who were seen as good hires at some time and before this sudden need to "reduce head count" were seen as part of the employee base - not worth removing.

That a lay off is a good time to expand ones power base - layoff anyone who has ever opposed you or simply didn't kiss your ass good enough. If management decides that anyone with a spine and an opinion they don't like (i.e. isn't simply sheepishly following theirs) is "dead wood". And even if you are working hard it's "not important". A loyal base of sheepish yes-men who may be the less qualified, less hard working but seen as desirable workers. I've seen this at multiple companies: kissing ass saves your job, working hard rarely does. If they don't like you they'll find a reason to get rid of you. If they like you, whatever you are doing is seen as worthwhile (or you'll be steered toward "worthwhile" projects).

If that's not a Nazi way of doing things, I don't know what is. Godwin was a Nazi.

If management is so brilliant it can identify dead wood when it is forced to, why couldn't it identify dead wood before hiring them or remove them before intense negative financial pressure requires them to do so?

Might not the /appearance/ of "removing dead wood" be the actual intent with management essentially guessing who can be replaced or not and those who hang around being forced to do more work for the same pay but "morale improves" because they are happy they have a job? And since people temporarily work harder out of fear or relief the appearance of having gotten rid of the dead wood is made more real as the new dead wood gradually and slowly relaxes.

Because if the management demotivated the employees enough to turn them into dead wood before they'll do it again with the new crop.

When management has no idea how to motivate people they lay people off. I suspect it's similar to the Nazi motivational technique of random executions: it keeps people on their toes.

Wouldn't it be clever for the pro-H1B visa lobbyists at Google to plant news stories about how gifted foreign workers are?

If the argument is "US ed bad, Foreign ed good" and therefore "US workers bad, Foreign workers good" necessitates liberalizing H1B visas, well it just writes itself.

Not saying that /. is just a plant for Google PR hacks or nothing. Ok, maybe I am.

Aren't you essentially arguing that they are backed by the transactional value of the drug exchange? Which is to say it's backed not by a commodity but by a service.

Thank you Mr. Stallman for your fine suggestion.

if their pricing and quality (or lack thereof) weren't enough.

Clearly the US has a problem with overpaying it's executive staff and numerous studies have shown that US based executives are radically overpaid.

We need immigration reform to allow immigration for reasonably paid executives from abroad who don't run amok and seek to undercut immigration for their staff so they can pay themselves 200x the global average for executives.

Belgium, France and Norway appear to be good countries to relax restrictions for:

http://www.verisi.com/resources/us-ceo-compensation.htm

the purpose of unions is similar to that of lawyers: to advance the interests of their clients.

If automation is resolving the problems of employer-employee relations then automation is making unions irrelevant, much in the same way that if robot counseling were to make marriages more successful they would be making divorce lawyers irrelevant.

The purpose of unions is not to "protect jobs" but to advance the interests of their clients: one such interest is the preservation of the jobs, but also the handling of grievances (I was a party to a unionization effort that revolved almost exclusively to providing some system of handling grievances as part of a contract).

Automation is making unions irrelevant indirectly by eliminating both the injured and under-represented workers but also by eliminating incompetent and arbitrary managers.

It is bad management that makes unions useful, in the same way that bad faith parties to contracts make lawyers useful. If management was reasonable, fair and respectful then unions would find themselves without clients.

Aggressive anti-union efforts mostly revolving around fear, intimidation, illegal firing for unionizing, forced company meetings in which employers "hint" about what will happen if they opt to unionize are the some of the barriers to unionizing. Laws favor anti-union efforts and there is only weak enforcement of the existing laws in any event.

IT suffers from bad management just like all industries. The value of IT employees and the relative ease of workers to change companies perhaps makes it hard to unionize from a strict wages perspective, but from a grievances perspective it is just as useful.