What does that actually achieve though?

Ok, they know that you called them an idiot.
Does that make them less of an idiot?

Does that actually help the world in any way?

Correcting them, without insulting them, may....possibly, result in them learning something. Possibly, maybe.

Insulting definitely won't, it'll just make them write off all of your opinions.
Insulting people because you believe they're "idiots" and need to be called out as "idiots" only satisfies your ego, it doesn't provide any other benefit.

It's also about not operating with all the guardrails and governance and red tape and arse-covering that a giant corporate entity can't survive without.

The reason Startups succeed (and the reason they fail), is because they do a whole bunch of very sketchy stuff that they would never get away with in a big corporate.

You really can't get startup success without startup risk, and I just don't think a company the size of Amazon is actually willing to accept startup risk, no matter what a C-level says.

Unless they fire their entire legal, cyber security and HR departments, plus 90% of all the managers and just tell the senior engineers to go for it.

I live in the UK. I have heatpumps. I live in an all-electric house.

My electric bill is GBP 30 this month, rising to GBP 40-50 in the winter.

Previously it was GBP 120-150 per month in the winter.

Heatpumps save a LOT of money and are so low power - I can run them off battery, no problem at all (200W to sustain 20C in an 0C external temperature).

Being in an all-electric house has actually MADE solar and heatpumps profitable for me. My solar runs through the blackouts (I live rurally, so I've been "off" for 1% of this year already... I know, because I collect stats on everything in my house). My heatpumps can run off my solar. And I don't have big expensive heatpumps, nor big expensive solar.

The utilities in the UK have proven to me that they can't be trusted to deliver a product, and the government has proven to me that they have no intention to regulate the utilities or help out in any significant way. Thus, I am trying for a utility-independent future. I'm literally looking at atmospheric water generators (basically a heatpump that collects the condensation) to generate water from air which, with a greywater system, should fulfill my water needs. Purely so I can tell Thames Water where to go, no other reason.

But I cannot self-generate gas. I can, however, make my own electricity. And do so in a dozen different ways. And store it. And even drive to work on it (hopefully, in the future).

P.S. my electricity bill this summer is anticipated to bring my average monthly bill down to £25 a month.... summer is *great* and very cheap in a well-insulated house with a aircon/heatpump.

Read my post above.

You have to pay certified engineers to install any air-con system that they advertise unless you understand and seek out a specific alternative.

Your choices are:
  - a niche self-installable system using propane that you have to install and maintain yourself because trades won't use them.
- a large, expensive system installed and maintained by a certified engineer with only a partial grant and other restrictions.
- paying a certified engineer to do the whole thing at your own expense.

The grant system is a way to preserve the dying trade of Gas Safe engineers.

Gas boilers in the UK are soon to be banned.

An unqualified person working a gas boiler or gas piping is illegal in the UK and has been for decades. It's called Gas Safe, formerly Corgi, and it's a very regulated qualification in a very regulated industry for a reason. I get that. You could kill people.

Heatpumps have only one problem - they have a specific requirement to be installed / maintained by an F-Gas certified engineer (not quite the same as the above, far less stringent). Which is really nonsense, because the only part which is actually regulated is the refrigerant (and I get that happening in the days of CFC's etc. but we didn't have that certification back then!).

Nowadays the refrigerants are vastly different and thus the F-Gas requirement is really nothing more than "You must pay a tradesperson, how dare you try to install this fridge yourself" rather than some "you'll blow your house up if you do this wrong", like a Gas Safe certification.

Which is why I went out of my way - and I imagine a lot of other people have - to find heatpumps that don't require that certification. Which leads me to an ultimate irony. You can get them, they are commonly available, legal for sale, and they just use a different refrigerant to the regulated ones.

One of which is R290.... propane without any additives so you can't smell it. So I can legally install a heatpump which uses odourless propane in my house myself, but I cannot legally install one that uses the same refrigerant as my own fridge. Now, it's not a lot of propane, only 200g or so, but still... I find that ridiculous.

So before the law catches up with that, I self-installed two heatpumps, each with the capacity to heat or cool my entire house (which is only small) while I still can.

And why did I want to go the self-install route? Is it because I'm poor? No. I could afford an engineer. But get this - the only UK government subsidies for heatpumps require you to use the certified engineers, AND they need you to have a bunch of requirements for your house. Houses are bought or sold with Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs). These tell you how energy efficient the house is based on.... some random guy having a quick look and guessing. It's literally that bad.

My EPC says that I'd need to fit cavity wall insulation, party wall insulation, another 150mm of loft insulation (in a loft you can barely crawl already), change all my doors etc. in order to get it to the grade where I'm eligible for a heatpump grant, which is also pretty much only available if you're out-of-work or disabled, and your house passes the grade, and you buy a HUGE whole-house system, and you spend thousands yourself. Which is weird because this house is the warmest and best insulated house I've ever lived in in my life and I have no intention of ever adding any more insulation ever, anywhere on it.

And then they go "Why aren't people buying heatpumps?! We even have grants!".

Because the GBP800 heatpump I bought is using an unregulated refrigerant and I can just slap it in myself (two holes in the wall, and a plug nearby, that was the only requirement) but your GBP5000 towards about GBP10,000 of heatpump system is only available if I already can't afford a heatpump anyway and I spend another GBP10,000 insulating my house unnecessarily to get it. Also, you don't advertise the fact that non-F-Gas heatpumps exist and work perfectly well, just the same.

So I bought the GBP800 heatpumps. They are amazing. 200W of actual draw over the course of an entire day (i.e. 1KWh for every 5 hours it's on) and it keeps my "poorly insulated" house at 20C when it's below 0C outside.

If you want people to use heatpumps - offer an unregulated install route. Preferably a safer one actually! And then advertise it like mad.

Pretty much, heatpump grants only exist in the UK to drum up a new trade, a bit like solar installs where - again - it's a regulated industry and they only provide grants to those systems which entail regulated professions doing the work at enormous markup and on a large scale.

"We're getting rid of all the gas boilers / cookers, which means Gas Safe engineers will be basically out of work, which means we retrain them as F-Gas engineers with similar skills and then MAKE PEOPLE USE THEM."

Sorry, I get the concept, but that's not the way to meet your energy and climate obligations.

P.S. Slashdot classic still can't handle simple symbols that aren't even Unicode, hence GBP instead of.... let me try... £ ... nope... still doesn't work. But SoylentNews (also based on Slash) works fine in the same mode!

How much money do you think is wasted on a SINGLE scam employee when it comes to light, or someone with no ability to do the job who cheated their way into the position, or is just no good at the job but talked their way in because they were briefly on the same golf course but now you can't sack them?

I'm not a fan of AI, but maybe it'll do a better job at identifying people with actual weapons instead of journalists with cameras, or which buildings are clearly marked hospitals, or which troops are actually on their own side.

Pretty sure I'd prefer it if I had an AI rather than an American coming to my aid, in fact.

Okay, I shall say this again.

If you want to hire without fear of discrimination, then you should do this:

People submit their application, they are edited by HR to remove age, gender, etc. and you select for interview by a blind panel who just go from the edited applications.

When it comes time to interview, you SEND YOUR HR PERSON to the other person. If that means flying them out or driving out to them... do so. They can then do their usual paperwork, identification checks, etc. and also account for anything to do with disabilities, etc. (especially for remote work, who cares?). Then only HR ever meet them face-to-face and can verify them.

While there, they set up the interview (saves all the hassle of people's shitty mics, etc. interviewing people for non-techy roles, and stops the person being prompted by others or cheating). And they do so by either: a chat interface where they type in the candidate's answers, or an audio-only response. Depending on how much you want to protect yourself against accusations of discrimination for disabled, mute, slow, dyslexic, etc. people.

The interview panel ask questions, the remote HR person relays them in an appropriate manner and feeds back the answers, and they also assess whether the person is who they say they are, whether will be able to fulfill only the necessary requirements (e.g. for a remote role, they don't need to be able to lift or walk, for a purely online role, they don't need to be able to talk, etc.).

And then once selected, you can introduce that person fully to whatever they need to do.

It also means that THE COMPANY PAYS for the travel for the interview, not the unemployed, job-seeking, potentially disabled, candidate.

We need fair interviewing. It'll never happen in the US, but even in the EU and elsewhere, we need fair interviewing. And, as a natural consequence, it eliminates fake candidates, those being prompted, those slyly using ChatGPT to answer the interview questions, etc.

And try claiming discrimination when the interviewing panel had no idea if you were male, female, other, young, old, black, white, disfigured, slurring, disabled, bedridden or whatever unless that trait is CRITICAL to the role.

Slashdot used to be a place where people could post expert knowledge and insight into a topic, and voice different opinions on controversial subjects.

I'm going to take a chance and try to add some insight from "the other side" and maybe we can have some intellectual discussion. Or if not, if everything Trump does is bad in the worst possible way it is to be bad, then I'll get modded down.

There's a thing in economics called the Marshal Lerner condition, and much of what Trump is doing economically appears to be aimed at manipulating this condition to the benefit of the US. It's an interesting read, from the game theory point of view.

The economy is a wildly complex system with multiple "elasticities" holding all the pieces together, so that if you put stress on one aspect, other aspects will strain or relax to compensate.

Just about nothing in the news media takes this into effect, all the descriptions I've seen have been justifications after the fact, and not actual economic analysis.

If you raise tariffs then importers will have to pay more, so they will charge more, and prices will go up. This is only true when everything else is held constant. In the current situation everything else isn't held constant, the system has numerous elasticities, and things will compensate.

For example, as of last night 50 countries had contacted the US to negotiate trade deals (EU being one of them, representing 27 countries for one contact). This is an elasticity that got pulled taught when the tariffs went into effect. This was the expected outcome, Trump said as much in the weeks leading up to the tariffs.

Furthermore, everyone and their dog has said that the unfair tariff structure was a problem for many decades. For example, Nancy Pelosi in 1996 gave a lecture to congress about the problem, and we've let the problem get progressively worse over the past 30 years.

Given that there is some economic analysis that unfair trade is hurting the country, and given that high-level democrats used to believe that it was a problem as well, I'm of the opinion that the machinations of the current administration are a good thing.

It appears that all of the resistance to fixing this problem is because it's Trump that's doing it, and that fixing the problem in this same manner would be OK if it were the Democrats doing it.

I'm in favor these actions for this one specific issue, and for right now. In three months time I'll reevaluate my opinion, but additionally I don't think it'll take even that long - I expect the whole thing will be over in a month and then the US will be in a much better position.

No insults, no innuendo, just some objective analysis derived from searching the issue and listening to both sides.

(There are other actions taken by this administration that I'm wildly against, just not this one.)

Thin clients are terrible ideas but surface every 10-15 years or so because people think they're a genius for thinking of it again.

There is a product out there called nComputing. It's - quite literally - a RaspberryPi, in a box, with rdesktop. It boots connects to a session and lets you use whatever it's connected to (e.g. a cloud-based Windows desktop if that's what you want).

They are something like 20 years old or more, and migrated to RPi when they became more viable than their own custom kit. But that's all it is.

And as someone who's managed these kinds of things will tell you - RPi or Citrix - they have a whole host of problems especially when people have higher expectations than running Word (which they could do in any browser).

10 years ago I inherited a set of them that had been sold to a school as a "perfect" solution. To make them work, they had to buy two stupendously powerful servers for the time. Because running, say, 100 copies of Google Chrome, Office, SketchUp, etc. 1 for each user, with any kind of performance means you need some serious power and RAM on the backend.

And then they realised - it just doesn't work well. The web went 3D and video acceleration, and the servers just couldn't keep up with that unless you upgraded them every year. And then if you're spending money enough to run 100 desktops from one machine and having to constantly upgrade... why not just buy 100 desktops and have done with it? Which is exactly what they ended up doing.

I inherited this box of junk from a predecessor. I threw the servers, they were knackered and underpowered. I put the nComputing boxes to work because I was FORCED to use them to do something. So I made them digital signage displays (and they struggled like hell with anything like HD video, and my network bandwidth went ridiculous). And I just bought computers... for less than the cost of replacing the servers.

This stuff gets reinvented each "generation" and it doesn't improve. Thin-client, fat-client, distributed, consolidated, even - I would say - in-house, cloud (it won't be long before something happens and people bring things back in-house).

For $349... plus the cloud services costs to operate it... I could just buy a Windows PC. And people will demand a laptop anyway, which you won't get for $349.

Aircon generates a significant amount of heat that you could usefully use in any large scale. The problem - again - is that if everyone has a small aircon system, it all adds up and you can't gain from those smaller losses.

I live in a country where aircon isn't required at all.

But I do have it. Because heatpumps are far more effective than any other heating.

I have an all-electric house, and my heatpumps keep it warm for 200W (consistent average throughout the winter). In the summer they switch to aircon if I want.

But I also have a solar setup. Because even in my cold, dark country, I can make enough electricity to make that heatpump operate. But - again - to do that I have to do everything myself on a small scale. Next door is an empty field that the owners are trying to develop or sell, and it would be an ideal solar farm. But they can't get approval. Meanwhile, myself and others are importing consumer panels from China, batteries from somewhere else, kit from Taiwan, etc. and putting it together inefficiently on a small scale. Then coupling it with an imported heatpump from god-knows-where.

To me: It's brilliant. I can literally become independent of utilities, on my own terms, at a decent rate.

In global terms... that's a huge loss. We could do that en-masse FAR, FAR cheaper, with better kit, with far less stuff flying around the world, but we don't.

What's killing the world is not datacentres or aircon. It's that we're all doing it individually rather than having large-scale projects. How many datacentres are there? How many share resources? How many individual rooftop solar projects are self-funded, unmanaged, inefficient and aging compared to utility-scale solar and cheaper energy prices?

I've arrived at this situation myself - I intend to be utility-independent by retirement, because I simply cannot rely on utilities to do their job or government to monitor and regulate them. Water companies have polluted EVERY river in the entire country. Electricity companies ramped up prices as soon as Ukraine sniffed because all their money is in gas. BP announced they've basically given up all green efforts and are going back to sucking up oil out of the ground. I've been failed as a consumer, and the only way to not support that is to do things myself (electric house, electric car, solar install, heatpumps, atmospheric water generators, etc. hell, even satellite Internet, etc.).

Which is the single least efficient way for me to be connected to utilities. All those large scale places are losing money, demanding subsidies, avoiding regulation, failing to modernise, never investing in infrastructure, not scaling up, and just passing on all costs + stupendous profit costs to consumers.

As someone with a pretty socialist outlook (there's no reason we couldn't nationalise electricity, water, etc. networks and pretty much give it away), it's damning that I've reached the point mid-life where I have no trust in the industries or regulators and so have branched off to do things myself... and done a better job.

I've had 1% power cut since the start of this year. 1% of the time my grid electricity has been off. And I could be in London in 20 minutes. My prices have risen stupendously over the years. And yet my solar... rides out those power cuts seamlessly. And will pay back in 5 years 8 months at current rates. More if energy prices continue to rise, while solar prices continue to fall (every time I buy a panel or battery, it's cheaper and more powerful!).

We've hit a point where everyone has to cater for themselves, so we've lost all scale. In the old days we would even share heat and steam across cities. Maybe we should look at sharing "aircon" across cities. But it can't work while even the basic and oldest industries are still not doing what they need to and aren't regulated and everyone just decides to go it alone.

In fact, I think it's going to get a lot worse... people will install their own solar, heatpumps, electric car charger, etc. and then the industry will lose a huge amount of money and they will claim poverty and demand more tax dollars to invest in their facilities because they can't break even. So instead they'll pollute, neglect and not care that their utility is no longer a utility but an expensive private service for the few.

Why the hell is that a broken link to a ChatGPT conversation?

How did this pass moderation?

What would you like me to do?

Buy only organic, gluten-free, locally-source satellite Internet?

Billionaires are - universally - arseholes. You have to be to become one and a normally-adjusted person literally cannot become one. Because if you gave me a billion dollars, I'd set myself up for life, multiple times over, and my family and spend the rest (i.e. the vast majority of the money) on other people. No ordinary person would ever become a billionaire because they'd not get to that point in the first place through basic humanity.

However... almost every large company in the world is run by a millionaire or billionaire. Samsung. Microsoft. Canon. Epson. Yahama. McDonald's. All of them. I can't avoid every company simply because the guy at the top is rich.

However, I can avoid companies that are literally allowing themselves to be ripped apart by a rogue CEO who has so intensely broken all illusions of them being a sane human being, and yet still allow him to continue purely because he bankrolls them. This started LONG before the cave divers. The guy is an absolute arse is so many ways, with dangerous and damaging rhetoric.

I can't avoid dealing with companies that, at some point, are owned by billionaires. I can avoid the ones who think it appropriate to accuse people of being paedophiles, performing Nazi salutes, and spending their life trying to hurt others.

Musk can't keep his mouth shut. He doesn't even have the brains for that. His ego is too big and connected directly to his tongue. Maybe Bezos is racist. I have no idea. But at least he's got the sense not to end up front-page news about it. Whereas Elon actively courts such controversy and attention, and I am not required to ever support him in that.

In case you haven't noticed - I'm not alone. Tesla is tanking in Europe purely because of the things that come out of Elon's mouth. If he'd done everything he's done, but just not bothered to ever talk to the press, people would still be up-his-arse with their cult of him. But he's too thick for even that.

He's a dumbass.

Technically, socially, economically.

I wouldn't leave him alone in charge of a rabbit hutch, let alone a billion dollar company.

Dear Microsoft,

My next PC will be Linux again (Slackware desktop for 10 years many years ago). This is because you managed to take 7 and break it, give us 8 which was malleable into a working 7 again, take that and give us 10 which was better, then break that with 11 - despite telling us there would be no more versions - and now you have worked incessantly to make my life more difficult and my productivity significantly less and shove me towards subscription and cloud services which I do not want and have precisely zero interest in.

I haven't installed Word for myself since my Word 2000 CD (yes, just Word on its own, on an official CD, with an individual official Microsoft Word licence key). I would even contest that that software hasn't improved significantly since that time. And you're going the cloud thing to those too, so I've been running Star/Open/LibreOffice for as long as I can remember.

My laptop of five years now has so little proprietary software on it that I stopped ever caring about the underlying OS. The only thing that was "major" was VMWare, but don't worry! Broadcom have happily destroyed that for you too!

Even something as simple as gaming (open game, play it for hours) has been tainted with your nonsense, prompting me to stick with one software provider, and even using my Steam Deck because - get this - it actually has better compatibility for old Windows games than Windows does.

So when I'm looking at replacement machines... I'm sorry but your offerings don't even register any more. And I have the knowledge to run a Linux desktop, I just didn't want to have to because it can be a little bit of a maintenance burden, but hey... have you SEEN Windows lately? At least I can choose what my desktop looks like and not lose usage of my machine for hours whenever it wants to update.

And I'm a tiny, non-business cog, I'm sure. You don't care about me and I don't expect you to. But the fact is that I don't care about your opinion either. And I also happen to manage thousands of machines with your OS. So when people ask about things... like cloud migrations of servers, Office subscriptions, etc. guess what my answer is biased towards?