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Comment Re:Chop Chop Chop (Score 1) 40

Corporations don’t exist to hand out jobs — completely agree. They hire people because human creativity, judgment, and problem-solving generate more value than they cost. That’s the foundational engine of economic growth.

But saying “companies don’t create work to hire people” assumes the amount of work is fixed, like slices of a pie. History tells a different story. Every major leap in technology — electricity, assembly lines, computers, the internet — didn’t eliminate work overall. It created whole new industries, new products, new forms of demand, and millions of jobs that never existed before someone imagined them.

The real question today is: will companies use automation to expand opportunity, or will they let fear and short-term profit pressures shrink their vision to whatever fits after payroll cuts? Treating workers as a cost to minimize is the fastest way to shrink your own future. Redeploying them to innovate, build, support customers, and explore new markets is how productivity becomes prosperity.

Humans haven’t become too expensive. What’s become too expensive — at least in the corporate mindset — is patience. Investment. Shared success. The belief that people are not just an expense line, but the actual source of value creation.

If we want a thriving economy, the answer isn’t fewer workers. It’s smarter, more meaningful roles that turn technological progress into shared wealth rather than shared precarity.

Comment Re:Chop Chop Chop (Score 1) 40

It’s definitely true that a lot of companies are cutting workers right now — and that creates real anxiety about where things are headed. But I think the narrative that “humans have become too expensive” flips the real issue upside-down.

Labor isn’t what’s skyrocketed in cost. CEO pay, shareholder expectations, and relentless targets for profit growth are. Companies keep raising prices even while laying off thousands, not because they can’t afford workers, but because they prioritize margins over stability for the people who actually create value.

The biggest missed opportunity here is that automation doesn’t have to be a replacement strategy — it can be a redeployment strategy. When new technology lets humans spend less time on low-value labor, companies can empower them to drive innovation, serve customers better, develop new products, and ultimately create more wealth. That’s how productivity gains should work.

But too many businesses think like accountants, not builders. They treat labor as a line item to subtract, instead of a force multiplier. They cut payroll and congratulate themselves for “efficiency,” even as they shrink their own future potential.

AI and automation could give us shorter weeks, better jobs, and broader prosperity — but only if we stop treating human well-being as an inconvenient expense and start seeing workers as the engines that turn technological progress into shared abundance.

The future isn’t precarious because humans are too expensive — it’s precarious because profit has become priceless, and imagination too cheap.

Comment Re:fucked up (Score 0) 44

Why is anyone trusting MickeySoft with their business secrets?

It's inertia, largely from government, but also institutionally. When businesses originally adopted Windows (3.x) there was a massive cost difference between Windows and anything else capable of doing the job of allowing users to run business applications, and in many cases the software simply wasn't there. Putting everyone on a Unix workstation would have cost 3x as much or more, even if the software existed. Putting them on X terminals and using centralized systems to support those would not have saved any money vs. Windows, at least not up front, and required a strong network.

Today they could switch, but now would have to face the cost of switching itself, and they would also find themselves incompatible with government in a number of cases.

Comment Re:My last corvette (Score 1) 202

Corvette is no longer a sports car. Some would argue it never was, it was just a muscle car with better handling. But now it's a supercar, and it needs to be bigger. A smaller car doing the speeds it will do will be unstable. You need both some wheelbase and track, and you also need the wheelbase to be significantly greater than the track, or you will have a twitchy deathtrap.

If you live in the USA and want a sports car, the answer has been Miata since it was introduced. It used to be 240SX, but nobody knew, because Nissan is shitty at marketing. (You needed more power, but the stock "truck motor" used in the USA would do 300hp with a turbo on stock internals reliably, and there is a shitload of room for engine swaps in that vehicle.) The 240SX used to absolutely dominate autocross when it was in the E/SP class. Then because they won too much the SCCA moved it to D/SP where it had to compete with M3s and other shit with twice the power, which was some absolute clown shit. Nissan never brought us the S15 Silvia which would have been the post-1998 240SX, so the Miata has been the answer ever since unless you want AWD, then it's been Impreza. They still have a model or two with a stick.

Comment Microsoft disables explorer in explorer in win11 (Score 5, Interesting) 44

When you load an Explorer window in Windows 10, the window loads and then it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it. In Windows 11, in an apparent attempt to hide how the sausages are made from the user, it loads the stuff that's supposed to be in it before it draws the window. That way it's usable shortly after it appears. But what happens if you have a network failure? Now the explorer window no longer appears until after the network timeout passes, even if you open e.g. "explorer c:\". This means that you cannot use Explorer to load local resources during a period of network failure without waiting for at least a few minutes. If I want to open a local document I therefore either have to load it from within the application (which itself may have a variation of the same problem related to file dialogs not becoming usable until the network timeout passes) or go find and "start" it with the CLI.

While I'm complaining about stupid by-design fuckups in Windows 11, I used to use Notepad as part of my workflow in Windows 10. Not only does all text appear the same with no formatting, but it strips formatting, so if you paste something into classic notepad and then C&P it out later it goes without any of the text formatting. Sometimes this is exactly what I want. Windows 11's notepad breaks both of these things by supporting RTF, and by having a shitty autosave feature which you cannot disable. You can stop Notepad from loading its prior state on launch, but you CANNOT disable autosave. If a network share goes away while a document is open, NOTEPAD HANGS. If it doesn't come back before the timeout is exceeded, THE DOCUMENT IS UNLOADED. It literally just closes the tab, ALONG WITH YOUR CHANGES.

Microsoft has always been incompetent but this is well beyond the pale. This is beyond amateur hour level bullshit, this is a new low of incompetence even for Microsoft. And since their servers are pathetically fragile and need to be rebooted once a week or more for something simple like file services to even work reliably, this is causing me real life problems which result in less work being done.

Comment Do people seek out OSS intentionally? (Score 3, Interesting) 45

I know I do, but I mean more specifically, do enough people seek out OSS to keep it around? I go looking for OSS solutions both to save money of course but also to be able to have the code so that I can update it if it breaks later. I have successfully done this several times despite not being much of a programmer, getting hints by googling compiler errors.

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