.. is creating boilerplate replies for unimportant messages. AI does management-speak well. (Probably because no-one can tell if it doesn't.)

What's sad is that you're saying "see, China does it" like it's a good thing.

And that's the catch - you're right, I wouldn't travel to China, because I could end up SOL with no recourse and subject to political whims. And now that's also true of the US. Sure, it's probably going to be fine. But there are plenty of countries in the world where it will almost certainly be fine, so why wouldn't I spend my tourism dollars there instead?

It can be, depending on the timing and who is involved. To posit a simple example: if I'm invested in your company and your poor accounting says "oh crap we're broke", and I use that information to sell my stake? When you find the money and go "whoopsie doodle we're actually SUPER profitable!", there's going to be some very hard questions about who was buying the company and what they knew when.

Clearly the solution is to make all the jumpers wear the mascot suit for the year's event. Consistent and a marketing opportunity!

On the good days they do it to add some nice-to-have features (one dialect I'm aware of added a keyword that says "yeah, just assume I put all those fields in the GROUP by clause", which IMO should just be in the main spec). But it definitely is also a play for vendor lock-in. (Oh, you used our nice extensions? Welp, guess you're stuck with us unless you want to rewrite all your queries sucker!)

The problem is that in tech, there's always young cheap labor. So they've learned from gaming that you can offer a "full time" job and then when it's time to juice your quarterly numbers you jettison them. Who cares if you've pissed them off? They'll either suck it up and come back for the next "full time job", or there'll be a whole bunch of eager STEM grads discovering they shouldn't have skipped history or economics classes and now get to learn about supply and demand in real time.

I agree, up to where the company runs into tax implications (because now you're employing someone working in another country, and they'd really like their share of payroll taxes and such.)

But within those boundaries? I don't see why I should fuss that my staffer got to house-sit for a couple weeks, so long as they're getting the work done and getting their hours in.

And that's 100% cool. I have staffers who go in a couple times a week just to get out of the house. Others come in because their spouse also is remote, and it's just easier to split up. Some just don't have the space at home for dedicated office areas. It's a personal choice.

My (again, personal) logic goes thusly - if I'm spending the hour on the commute, what am I and the company getting out of it? In my case, our team is spread out across the country - there's no-one else in my province. So all my meetings are going to be on screens anyway. If there was someone local I needed to meet, I'd happily arrange my day to go in to do that meeting in person. Guess what - most of *them* don't want to come in either! So, if I'm going to do exactly what I do at home, just in a less comfortable chair and on a smaller screen and fewer snacks on hand... what's the gain for anyone?

Even if my team was local - and they'd been hired non-remote and thus lived reasonably close to the office - having everyone in person for meetings sounds awesome. But the rest of the day we're all on our computers doing our work with our headphones on to concentrate, which loops back to - what's the advantage?

Wait - so the company said "if you work out of the office you get to take the day off", not "you can remote in"? The former is just good practice. The latter is playing favorites.

It's an attempt at framing. "Piracy" was coined intentionally, because it frames as evil theft, not copying. "Forbidden sharing" brings to mind those years where kids weren't allowed to trade lunches at school because a principal decided it was an allergy risk.

Could just be Stallman has less luck than Doctorow - "enshittification" seems to have caught on rather nicely.

Hell, back in the mid-90s software companies were poaching first-year students ("to get them before education ruins them"). And the O&G companies had to be bullied to stop taking kids at 16 who figured "hey, why finish high school when I can go straight to a six-figure oil rig job!" What they didn't tell the kids was "yeah, in a few years we'll punt you for the new up-and-comers, so hope you like being 25 with no education!"

Wasn't the whole problem that this *wasn't* a Google project (or any business support at all)?

Well, there was that whole global pandemic, and turns out keeping the economy from imploding costs a few bucks. Unless you wanted mass unemployment, followed by homelessness, followed by deaths?

There's a few restaurants in town that have those little robot waiters. And they *all* have a human following them around.

And every decade or two there's a new scare-story of the new thing being bad for kids. Before YT was video games. Before that was TV. Before that was radio. Before that was newspapers. And so on...