Broadcom found a great niche to run their game - virtualization is one of the harder foundational tools to move out from under. It is like they found a way to tax data center floor space.

But that only lasts until people can move. Long enough to earn Tan a really nice chunk of change, and probably also long enough to make VMWare a tiny niche player.

Eliminating jobs that can be done automatically IS "real money on the table" to company shareholders. Will AI replace these jobs? You bet your ass they will. The West is not prepared for the impact AI is having on employment, and will continue to have for decades to come. Some people are burying their heads, but it won't save them. Entire fields that used to be good paying professional work are quickly becoming something a glorified script can handle with minimal input.

Gosh, maybe somebody should have thought about the poor public house before destroying the economy and telling the rest of the world to fuck off.

It turns out if everyone hates each other and is poor, they don't hang out in bars much.

Oh well. Maybe if they turn the island into an even poorer, meaner place, the good times will come back.

Some of us are kind of doing that already by running old OS's in VirtualBox, and then running old but useful abandonware for personal tasks on those OS's. It's pretty fun and there's an ocean of useful and interesting software out there.... especially from the 90's. You just have to be careful about where you get it from to avoid the malware aspect. But there are some reliable sites. And it's pretty fascinating using software that my dad used. We're definitely in a weird time.

I wonder how this is going to interact with publicity rights/privacy rights laws in various places.

Maybe I should start running my own pet robot Zuckerberg. He'd totally not mind at all, right?

Red states are welfare queens.

Start by making them pull their own weight.

The next step is encouraging bottom-up independence. Pro-feudal Republicans want dependency. This is one of the reasons they fight universal health care - keeping insurance tied to employment suppresses business formation by keeping a lot of people tied to their job because of risk.

Eventually opinions and expectations shift.

In the mean time, keep pointing how how Republicans are ruining their grandkids' lives, leaving them poorer, less educated, and sicker.

Giving in is interpreted as choosing to become a vassal. He thinks he owns you after that, and will keep coming back for more.

Respond to a fascist with a fist or you will be owned by them. Your choice.

Corporation? Our own government the last 5 years or so took the position that every kid should learn to code, because there was no future in things like, oh, honest manual work. AI has fucked the assumptions of everyone from the halls of Congress all the way to Silicon Valley.

I mean, you're right that they chronically produce insecure code.

I just think the cause is a bit different.

They have this habit of making everything as general as possible without thinking through the implications, while trying to "extend" anything they didn't make. So you end up with a generic URL parsing library that will happily launch installers from a text file in Notepad and similar nonsensical capabilities nobody in their right mind would intentionally use. Software for Martians, borne out of naive assumptions I doubt they even notice they've made most of the time.

And there's never been benevolent dictator with taste there, so it isn't like Apple's backsliding. Microsoft has always been like this and has no financial reason to try to do better, and even if they did, they don't know what "better" looks like. Except, perhaps, when coveting someone else's monopoly.

Keep trying. I'm sure you can convince fully 10s of trailer park Nazis to agree with you.

What the fuck are you even talking about regarding Biden?

As far as Clinton goes, I don't know who you think is defending him. Everyone I know says if you can prove he did something, lock the fucker up.

And that's the difference between normal, ethical people and fascist freaks. You defend these awful shitbags out of tribal allegiance - who cares if they rape kids, they're on your side. And you expect others to behave the same way, because you simply don't understand that non-weirdos want to see hurtful people punished no matter who they are.

And that's why you're failing.

What privacy do you have outside your walls? Let's assume you have a house for a second... if you do, then while your lawn is part of your property, and you can forbid others from trespassing, you can't forbid people from looking at it. Or at your doorway. Or your driveway. Unless you put up total privacy fencing, then everything outside your walls is legally accessible to eyes, both meat and electronic. And always has been. This is why city people have moved to the country for years. Because there your neighbors are raccoons and bobcats and snakes, and they don't care who comes to visit. City life has always been a surrender of privacy outside the walls of your domicile. That's the unavoidable consequence of packing people close together.

to buy a pardon.

Dude seems like a real shitbag.

What a shitty place we're becoming.

Don't wait for Dems to do the work. First, because they probably won't - the best analogy I've seen is Republicans are school shooters, Democrats are Uvalde cops. The bulk of them are useless, with a few traitors and a few clueful folks who can't do anything about the rest.

But you don't need permission to make your own choices about who you surround yourself with. Many of us are collecting names and sharing with like-minded souls as we research. Start your own! LinkedIn is a fucking gold mine of people telling on themselves.

These are people I will have nothing to do with because they've demonstrated that they are unfit to live in a modern free society. I will never hire them, I won't rent to them, if I owned a store I would ban them. ICE on a resume should be look at the same as "professional rapist".

Going fascist is a choice. I choose to have fascists nowhere near me.

(Do ensure you are familiar with local discrimination law. But you are also free to simply say nothing about your reasons. It was just a bad culture fit is all.)

There are other things happening in this space, like labelers on Bluesky. But I expect any big, centralized source of traitor listings would be attacked, both legally and by other means. Which is why I don't share with people I don't know, and why you should make your own. Let a thousand flowers, etc.

Having a long memory is how we will get another 100 years before people forget that fascists are evil, negative-sum shitbags again. Th ethnic cleansing-curious need to remember how Grannie Fascist died of lingering cirrhosis in a Florida trailer without air conditioning because everyone hated that nasty old bat so much she had to get her vodka money cleaning the local churches, and how Timmy the ICE 'Roid-rager killed himself in frustration because the local cops can't afford another lawsuit magnet and guarding backhoes overnight just doesn't cover child support.

I spent the better part of a year ripping my CD collection, circa 1998 or so. It just made sense at the time. It was like 800-ish CDs.

That has served as a sort of gravitational center of my music; everything I would seek out to listen to, I already own, so that only leaves "discovery". And I don't have mainstream tastes, so consent-manufacturers like Spotify are useless for that. I'm also older and less in to random new music, so I tend to be old-school there, too, and depend on friends for new music.

I still buy CDs sometimes, mainly at shows when I know the money goes directly to the artists. Then I rip it.

I have no reason to subscribe to a streaming service.