I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

if you don't have an offline installer you didn't "buy" a game you leased it for an indeterminate period. I've been on steam for a long time, but I don't support a platform with money if I can't play my game at my cabin with no net. Granted Steam has some offline ability but it is flaky and doesn't work for all titles.

By your logic Gaming owes itself to MicroSloth and we should all support that crap. The only thing Valve gives back is that which is required by the various licenses, and they have made a good living off OSS.
All this aside I still love and play HL often.

other countries such as ? easy to quote nothing...

Lord no. The system needs reworking. The LEO's (law enforcement officers) should submit the request and justification to a third party, just like search warrants, who should then provide the data. This kind of tool needs centralized authority and security. But humans are crap, so even with watchers some will abuse the system.

I'd mod you up if I hadn't posted already. A simple check and balance system would make Flock a great resource and stop the abuses. I don't like the idea of being tracked everywhere but if you had just cause, the ability to do a city or state wide search for a vehicle by plate number is amazing and could save lives.

That's not what I meant about taxes. What I meant is that in California, your property tax assessment is set at purchase time. If you move to a new house, your new property is assessed at the new purchase price. That tax situation can easily create a five-figures-per-year disincentive towards moving closer to your job when you change jobs. It may not be your employer's problem, but it absolutely affects where people choose to work.

The corollary of that statement is that if employers truly want the best people, they're fundamentally doing themselves a disservice by demanding too much in-person time, because not everyone is that easily mobile. It also tends to discriminate against older workers, who are more likely to own a home, have kids in school, have a working spouse, and have various other things that tie them to their current residence and make commuting harder.

Yes, it's a trade-off, but there's no evidence that it is in employers' best interests to force employees to make that trade-off, and that's the point I was trying to make.

There are in excess of 800k Police/Sheriff/Highway Patrol officers in the US. 50 doing bad things or even 500 is a very tiny percentage. Look at other professions and plot the sizable percentage that go rogue. I wonder what the % of CEO/CIO that commit fraud and embezzle is. Cops that go bad SHOULD be nailed to the wall, but quit painting everyone the same color as the crooks.
On another note Flock is a great tool provided it is strongly regulated. What they are doing today is crap. You need a writ or a warrant to get info on anyone...

FT or Field Training is 12 months AFTER a 14-18 week boot camp academy. You can be let go for any reason during your FT. That seems like a fairly robust training and guidance period. What other countries are you referring to ? All police in the world operate with "qualified immunity" not would not be possible to do the job without i.t

No, you could always either change jobs or sell your house and take a huge property tax hit every year for the rest of your life.

For the overwhelming majority of roles in tech, the pandemic proved not only that those workers could be WFH, but that the company's efficiency on average went up when doing so. Yes, some workers' efficiency went down, usually because of having kids who were also at home, and struggling to manage that, but once that condition went away, there was even less reason why those workers needed to be in the office. This leaves only the people for whom physically commuting to the office was necessary to avoid distractions, which is nonzero, but is again specific to the person, not the role.

I mean, if you include things like custodians, maintenance, security, food service workers, and IT, then I suppose those roles have to be partially or completely on-site, but that's only because the roles are focused on physically maintaining the site. And most of those are outsourced to contractors in any large company anyway.

The employees who truly have to go onsite are mostly support staff, and even in a pre-pandemic, pre-WFH world, were likely to be paid far less than the ones who didn't.

Work travel is a convenience for the employer. It was never actually a requirement for working with people in other states or countries, but rather a sign that they don't know how to properly manage the time zone interactions. But yeah, if they're making you travel overseas to meet with other teams or partner companies or stuff like that, they should pay you more for having to be able to drop everything and be mobile like that. Flip side is that doing so tends to be discriminatory against people with kids, etc., so it is potentially problematic to do so. A better solution is to make work travel optional, and make it "bring your family" so that you spend a week doing work and then your family joins you for a week of paid vacation as compensation.

But the fact that your employer requires you to wear suits puts your employer in the "What decade is this?" category. That's 1980s territory right there, and makes me wonder if the reason you have to be there in person is simply because your company is so far behind the rest of the industry that they can't figure out how to enable remote work properly.

Defense contractor?

I can't speak for the GP, but making 4x my salary wouldn't be a motivator for me. The industry already pays stupid amounts of money. I have enough money to comfortably retire pretty much anywhere in the world, and I'm two decades from retirement age. So if I were in a situation where working from home 5 days a week were extremely important to me, rather than merely a case of me being annoyed at how much less work I get done post-pandemic, then yeah, I'd give that job up. But that's me, and everyone's situation is different.

Because they have decade-long commitments to leasing buildings, and that money isn't going to stop being spent just because people can't use them. Because they want to reduce headcount, and pissing off their workers is a great way to reduce attrition. Because their C-suite has large investments in companies that own buildings, which their companies lease, and if companies lease fewer buildings, it directly affects their personal bottom line. There are lots of reasons, most of which have jack s**t to do with efficiency.

It is well established that most tech companies got suddenly more efficient when everyone started working from home, at least on average, and that return-to-office mandates caused productivity to crater. Most of this is because not knowing whether your employees will be there turns out to be extremely useful, because it causes people to be judicious about scheduling meetings. As soon as we returned to the office, meeting culture came back, and we waste a quarter of our time doing nothing but status reports and listening to status reports.

At this point, I've stopped giving politicians the benefit of the doubt. If they support regulations that look like they have the potential to drag the United States into becoming an authoritarian hellhole, I assume that they're actually trying to do just that. It makes it a lot easier to convince myself to vote for another candidate in every election afterwards, even if that candidate isn't as good in other areas, because at least the other candidate isn't trying to destroy our basic freedoms.

Look up the sponsors of the bill, and vote against them from now on, whether it's a primary or a general election. Repeat until ousted.

There is an old technique - the guaranteed winner by random chance:

You get 32 stock brokers. On Monday the boss picks 2 stocks. 16 say that stock is going up, 16 say down, and they each call 100 people and give their prediction. That evening the 16 that were 'right' call their 100 back and brag. Tuesday they repeat only with 8 on each side. Repeat on Wednesday with 4 winners. Thursday they have 2 winners. Friday they have 1 winner that brags to his 100 prospects:

"Look, I happened to predict the winner every day this week. I can not guarantee that will happen every day, but if you want to hear my predictions next Monday, I need you to move your account to my firm."

And the gullible fool does it, not knowing that mathematically the predictions were guaranteed to work on 1 of the 32 brokers. Just math, not competence.

Betting on AI was not some super genius move - especially using margin. All it involved was taking the popular opinion and going all in. While it worked you look like a genius. When it fails, you lose everything.

He just played the odds and won for a while. But the math was never going to have him win forever.

10% drop is large but not horrific. This is basically normal variation, not something real.

Apple is one of the "FANG" stocks - Facebook, Apple Netflix, Google. They are huge companies that have had major gains as compared to most other stocks. Over time some people just bought those stocks.

This drove the prices of their stock up a lot from greedy people The current drop is just undoing some excess greed, not really that big a deal.

On 7/31/2026, it hit a low of 300. Before 7/31/2026,. the last time Apple was at 300 was 7/2/2026

In other words, it gave up less than a month of gains.

This is not that big a deal - yet. I would be shocked if it dropped to 272. Why? Because that is just below the previous 'low point' on 6/25/26. Going below that number not only indicates a significant drop, but it established a trend of new lows being less than the last lows.