I've seen hints of this sort of belief before, and I want to understand it, but it seems so incredibly sheltered and naive that I have trouble believing a large number of people actually hold it.

For starters, your implicit assumption seems to be that "MAGA" == downwardly mobile white folks. That's part of the coalition, yes - but the dominant caste is wealthy suburbanites - we used to call them "white flight" voters. Think car dealership owners and dentists. The kind of people who can afford to fuck up boats at "Trump Yacht Rallies".

The second is that somehow condescension and ridicule somehow uniquely attaches to this segment. Hate to break it to you, but that is most people's normal. It is privileged white folks who are learning what it is like to be treated like everyone else, and are reacting to that.

The third weird thing is an utter failure to notice that these condescending "captains of industry" are all MAGA supporters. Trumpistas who think this way are literally cheering their own subjugation. MAGAts are being led around by the fucking nose. It would be hilarious if they weren't taking the rest of us with them.

I think it's more horses for courses, and can also vary considerably between what different demographics, both contemporary and historical, think of as "perfection". Hollywood is largely driven by white western males, so they naturally favour your "20% silicone", although that does seem to be undergoing a gradual change of late, but that's not the case for world cinema as a whole; you'll find far fewer wannabe Barbie Dolls in African cinema, for instance.

From a people portraiture perspective, especially candids, there is also a night and day difference between what a photographer would most typically want to shoot in a studio vs. on the street. The former is very much about some ideal of perfection, with hours spent on makeup and clothing the model(s) and setting up the lighting rigs, before the camera even gets turned on, whereas in the streets and fields, you are totally going to home in the people with the most interesting features, and those often tend to be very much the definition of imperfection. You are actively looking for the aged faces with more lines than a metro map, more piercings/tats than Vogue would likely ever consider acceptable, and anything else that really tells a story about the kind of life the viewer of the resultant image might imagine them to live. For the right images, there is absolutely value that can be measured in both clicks and dollars there too.

Also, why limit it to women implanting silicone to comply with some visual aspirational idea of perfection being forced on them by men (mostly), media, and entirely unrealistically proportioned dolls? Have you seen the lengths some men are going to as part of the "looksmaxxxing" fad? There's going to be a Darwin Award winner there real soon now, I'm sure.

It's $10 for one person, but take 1 million people, and it's $10 million

Right, that's why this makes sense for Gmail. The spreadsheet says make the free tier extraction percentage number go up, and they value noncomplying users' time at zero. The math should is different for company-internal email.

The operative question should be, how much do you want to spend on employees sorting email instead of writing code or whatever you hired them to do? Because that's how you're buying your disk storage savings.

Different places have different considerations - as I mentioned above, my employer now clearly values reducing litigation risk over my productivity. In the past at startups, my decision was to give folks huge quotas and treat it like any other capacity management problem for scaling/budgeting.

There has to be some limit, and if someone somehow bounces off of it nobody thinks it unreasonable to tell them to fix it. And anyway there's usually a reason like a misconfigured something that infinitely-spams about whatever it is upset about. Otherwise they can worry about work instead of email management make-work.

Should be a knock-off for $500 soon enough.

Of course it'll be a little rough around the edges, and the solar panel won't work, and instead of growls it makes Bart Simpson jokes, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

When I was directly admining systems, I didn't have time to argue with people over a couple dollars worth of storage.

I also didn't want people wasting time worrying about quotas or other artificial limits unless they were abusive. (The dude who wrote something that was authing against LDAP 10s of millions of times a day got a talking-to.)

A lot of people confuse "I can't imagine doing or needing X" with "there is a good reason to deny the ability to do X." Honestly, I think most people are Doing It Wrong, most of the time. So? If they're getting shit done, none of my business until they are making unreasonable demands that impact operations. And 100G of mail is peanuts.

My current complaint is the opposite - I can't keep mail longer than a year now, lest it be discoverable in some potential future lawsuit. I've gotten better at predicting what I'll need to know later, but still miss things I should have saved somewhere, and that absolutely damages my productivity.

Actually, I think it was Fred Schwed Jr. 86 years ago, but still just as relevant. In case it's not obvious from the fee, this is totally not about making YOU financially better off.

I'm guessing the tank has enough positive pressure left internally that it can withstand the pressure exerted upon it by the upper stage's engine exhaust without collapsing until the upper stage is clear. If it deforms, then presumably it would not be able to be reused, but if it can withstand the pressure long enough just fine then that removes the need for some additional shielding, and the mass that entails.

What I'm hearing is "But, I'm a highly-compensated professional! Not like all the plebes we spy on constantly to compensate me."

I do agree that they should stand up for themselves, and they have my support, once I'm done supporting causes I consider more important, like toe lint eradication.

Facebook headhunters used to bug me constantly. I put up an autoresponder telling them what I thought of their business model, leadership and general behavior, and that I would wash dishes for a living before working for a degrading, anti-human shithole like FB. Eventually they got the message.

I ended up in a fairly heated argument with some FB employees several years back when I mentioned that. It was obvious they felt stung by someone rejecting the choices they made and kept leaning in to, "but I make more money than you". Which was I was happy to concede, it was true. Suggesting that my self-esteem costs more than theirs didn't seem to be what they wanted to hear..

I wonder if those folks are still there, protesting about their workplace privacy.

The headline may as well be "Rose maintains transactional relationships with tech media after all these years".

At this point I think if a good idea walked up and smacked him on the head, the name alone might doom it. It has been an also-ran in a confusing number of categories, so depending on your age you may remember it as a very different kind of failure than I do. Sort of the converse of trademark dilution - it is clear what the name is and who owns it, what's muddy is what the service is supposed to be.

You're assuming the companies with these fleets of (currently largely non-existant) robots are still going to solvent if the bubble pops. That seems highly unlikely in many cases given the business model for AI is apparently "borrow massive amounts of money to fund it using the promise future orders as collateral". Asset strippers have no interest in salvaging a business; their business model is to buy the physical assets cheap, dump the debt on to bagholders (the shareholders), and sell the assets off to whoever wants it, hopefully for more than the cents on the dollar paid they probably for it. I buy stuff from these auctions from time to time; it's a great way to get nearly new, and often still on the market, kit at a fraction of the retail price.

Also, Facebook might not be the best counter example there. Remember what happened to many of the hires, business units, servers, and services, Meta setup when Zuck went all-in on the Metaverse? What do you think he'll do if going all-in on AI doesn't pan out for him?

Yeah, but these are Humanities students. That, by its very definition, is an area where AI should have very limited use, where it is applied should be done really, really, carefully, and job losses are far less likely than in many other fields. Sure, there's analysis of datasets, especially of geographical and historical data, but that is one of the areas where a specifically trained model can really be of use, but an AI is never going to painstakingly brush away dirt from some ancient historical site, and I shudder to think what would happen if AI hallucinations get let loose on philosophy or religion. That said, it would probably be very amusing watching those who buy into the output; and doubly so if the model was trained on the Butlerian.Jihad from Dune, less so for actual crusades, jihads, and "holy" wars.

Still, if these presumably tech savvy Gen Z students are not fans of the tech, regardless of whether that's because the recognise how its being used by corporates or some other reasons, then I think the people that need to be more worried about this are those that have built the massive pyramid trillions of dollars of debt to build something that few seem to want or trust. Like the .com boom, the bubble must pop sooner or later and sort out who is a "pets.com" and who is a "google.com", and there are growing indication that, unlike .com, the demand that will be required to pay for it all just isn't there, and we're already way beyond the scale of any previous government bailouts. That kind of crash only has one outcome; a lot of shareholders (which includes pension funds) are going to lose their shirts.

According to TFS, the layoffs are due on 20th May. No one is going to voluntarily quit if they can just phone it in for another 8 working days and get at least some additional severence pay to tide them over while they look for a new job. If they don't get cut and are still hacked off enough on the 21st, that's probably when people are going to start to quit.

Of course, one thing Meta is very good at is profiling people. And another, as TFS points out, is being callous sociopaths. Chances are they've factored all that in and I wouldn't be at all surprised if their actual target is a 15% RIF and they've worked out that if they fire *this* 10% on the 20th, then *this* further 5% that have definitely had enough and were hoping to be laid off will be so fed up with the loss of their former colleagues and even more hostile workplace will quit of their own accord over the next few weeks. If Meta was aware you were looking for another job before they announced the 10% RIF, it's pretty good bet you're in the additional 5% they are hoping for.

It's not a lake under the city, it's an aquifer, so it takes quite a bit of time for the water to disperse, rather than flow, through it. Replenishing a little bit of the water in one area through a leak might stave off some of the sinking in that area, but the areas where water is being extracted from will continue to sink much faster, with the additional complication that the density of the aquifter likely varies as well. The net result is the same though; different parts of the city sink at different rates, with those near leaks or denser parts of the aquifer slower than those near extraction points or the more porous areas, hence all the tilting buildings.

My home storage setup is currently is two 8 20TB drive arrays - one live, one a remote backup.

I was buying drives to add another stripe when the pricing started to ramp up - I try to buy them over time to get different drives from different lots. Now I wish I'd just bought a bunch.

This time last year they were $369, sometimes cheaper. The most recent one I bought was $500. The cheapest I see them right now is $769.

I think I'll be waiting on that new stripe, but at least I have four spares to keep the existing system running.

Can anyone name under what authority this would operate?

I'll wait.

(Executive orders are orders to the executive branch. If you aren't an executive branch employee, they have as much authority over you as a postcard from me does.)

Also a good time to remember that a big part of the anti-Biden case from the techbro money types was how stifling and onerous the "please don't make dangerous robots" guidance was. Bill Ackman upside down in clownshoes on a unicycle, with a kazoo up his ass.