This is great fodder for lawsuits around competition / anticompetitive business practices, and consumer protection lawsuits.

On their face, individual agreements that lock in prices as a voluntary agreement are enforceable. However, an awful lot of laws kick in when they are more than an individual contract and from the story they're hitting 16 of the biggest ones, and therefore a lot of the market.

Depending on the market such as the country or the state, there are potentially enormous penalties that can be applied. For some laws, the fines can be 2x the gains. If these account for 40% of the company's revenue, the massive fines would mean 80% of their revenue for as long as the profiteering was on the books. In the short term while they grind through the courts they'll look like a windfall, in the long term when court rulings come down they'll look like bankruptcy, as potentially years of revenue get charged to massive fines.

And that's the core of the issue.

If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.

If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.

As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.

A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.

I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.

These days people use bullets, the 4th box of liberty.

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, all shot and killed while in office. Seven more presidents had shots that landed but didn't kill them. Most presidents in the 1900's and all of them in the 2000's have had assassination attempts that were intercepted and stopped before they could get their shots fired at the president.

The story is that even during the constitutional convention, when discussing why a president would leave power after a successful impeachment and conviction, or after an election, one of the delegates reminded them "if they don't go peacefully, they can always be removed the traditional way", which ended the discussion.

A positive thing I note is that after all modern authoritarian regimes collapse, many of their followers become unemployable. The SS after Nazi Germany, the Stasi after the cold war, many KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union ended up turning to organized crime instead if they weren't picked up by the new government's security/intelligence services. People just don't want to hire them. I suspect in a couple years, anybody who decided to remain at ICE will struggle to find jobs as long as that's on their resume, and government prosecutors moved from being a prestigious mark for a lawyer into quickly becoming a limiting factor instead. From the first administration, quite a few struggled to get work after it ended, I'm assuming it's going to be worse for them after round two, however this current presidency ends.

Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.

In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, and those approaching retirement finish out their careers training everybody, mostly just supervising and commenting, and that's a good thing for knowledge transfer, both for institutional knowledge and collective wisdom across the industry.

In corporate environments people want to hire already-trained, drop-in experts. Phrases like "hit the ground running", rather than "six month training period", unless the worker themselves are expected to pay for that training period. Companies see training, mentorship, and learning as something people do on their own time, not something the company does. And there's no retirement phase where the declining workers spend their days passing along their institutional knowledge, they're fired the moment after passing their peak, and the institutional knowledge vanishes.

It's what passes for journalism these days. Give it a few rewrites, it will be on the various news aggregation sites that you're an insider with first-hand knowledge, or that you're a spokesperson for the company.

Same, I had that for a while.

The wifi names were "Surveillance Van 5" and "Surveillance Van 24" for 5Ghz and 2.4GHz channel. I set the family's cell phones network device names "Surveillance Operator 1", "Surveillance Operator 2", "Surveillance Operator 3", and "Surveillance Operator 4". For house guests sometimes it got a chuckle, "connect to surveillance van 24". I know when I went to friends who took their networks seriously, I had someone ask about it.

Are consumers really clamoring for this?

I've worked with both the state of CA and AT&T.

You're goddamn right I'm full of hate.

Hmm, I hate CA, and I hate AT&T ( may both rot in hell ). I literally can't lose no matter who "wins".

I hope they both destroy each other somehow.

The blame for this falls squarely on the politics surrounding education fads. We abandon the boring things that work in favor for the new exciting crap that doesn't. And it's not because anyone really thinks it works, but because there are billions behind the new crap.

Parental apathy factors into this as well, no doubts.

We know what works, so ask yourself why we aren't using it.

Seems like this all boils down down definitions. What does a grade mean?

If a grade means understanding the material, there's no reason every student couldn't get an A. Sure, many won't, but when we're talking about Harvard students, especially at lower-level courses, the barriers to get into the school are so high that it makes sense most students would be able to master the material.

If grades are relative to other students, even if every student understands the material perfectly there's still going to be the curve, some A's, B's, C's, and some must fail.

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

Based on my analysis of their needs and what AI can deliver. I agree that it's management's job to increase efficiency and output, but change for change's sake is never good. For instance, in the examples above I *knew* what AI would deliver. I told them, in no uncertain terms, what product they'd receive. They still made the decision to push ahead ( and I'm more than willing to cash that check ). I can see, objectively and by any metric, that what was delivered is a worse customer experience than what they had before.

However, because it's "AI", that makes it acceptable. The buzzword has effectively disabled the rational and critical thinking parts of this management's teams brains. Of course I have seen this before ( First rule of IT: Vendors lie, Second rule of IT: Managers believe them ), but to this extent? Especially in smaller businesses, where margins are tighter. For what they're paying for this AI solution ( ha, "solution" ), they could afford to hire another staff member; another person on the phones, and far more capable than AI in delivering the ultimate product ( caring for the patient ).

Mind you; I pointed all this out to them. They know the math, but they are so...enamored with AI that it doesn't mean anything to them. Meanwhile, patients and staff hate it.

I'm sure there's AI use cases out there which deliver a decent ROI. What I'm seeing in the field, however, is management hysteria for the latest thing at a scale I've never before experienced.

I shouldn't complain, it's paying extremely well, but I know this will all come crashing down at some point.

I've been through more than a few technology cycles, so while I don't necessary disagree with you, the scale of the disconnect between the worker bees and management is more significant than I ever remember.

It's becoming exceedingly difficult to dissuade management from AI courses of action, even when they make no sense or will end up delivering a substandard product for significantly higher cost.

For instance, I just had a client implement an AI auto-attendant for a medical office. Were they having difficulties answer the phone in a timely manner? No. Do they anticipate a staffing shortage that would cause such an issue? No. Will the auto-attendant be able to accomplish what a regular worker can? No. In fact, it can pretty much only answer the phone and find someone for the caller to talk to.

But by god, management had to have it. So, for an extra 2000 a month they get a middle man that delays delivering service to patients. Management loves it. Folks answering the calls hate it because the patients hate it.

Different office asked about AI curated music. Another client asked about replacing our network monitoring software with AI so their IT staff can stop working after hours. They both will end up getting their wish, and at least in the case of the network monitoring solution it's going to cause so many issues I'm having them sign a waiver before I implement; I won't be held responsible when the AI agent is rebooting servers randomly because it thinks they're offline.

More than any other IT fad over the past 2 decades, I've noticed AI has really divided "decision makers" and "makers/workers". Those of us in the trenches making things work are highly skeptical of AI and treat it much as we have any other "flash in the pan" technology; weary, willing to test/play with it, but disbelieving of the hype.

The decision makers though...whoooboy, they've bought into the tech hook, line and sinker. They want AI everything, even in places it makes no sense. They can't define what they want AI to do, or how it's supposed to do it, but by god they will sign away millions of dollars in pursuit of their golden cow.

The only time I really saw anything like this was with "Teh Cloudz!", but even then it was tempered by practicality. AI? It's magic beans, all the way down.