Imagine if instead of the left spending the last ten years campaigning to ban Christmas and force women to allow men into their bathrooms, they'd been campaigning against the power of billionaires.

If the Woke left didn't exist, billionaires would have had to invent it.

Oh, hang on, in many cases they did.

If it was reasonable I presume companies wouldn't be complaining because it would be as cheap as or cheaper than setting up their own payment system.

Not necessarily even that. Some friends tried to break into the movie business in London but pretty much everywhere required them to work for months as unpaid interns to have a chance of a paid job. Middle-class kids living with their parents could afford to do that, but poor kids couldn't afford to live in London that long without an income, and probably not even on the income they'd get from their first paid job if they held out that long.

It's another way that poor kids are kept out of certain lines of work.

China is a serious country. The West is (mostly) not.

The economics is largely irrelevant. China could be in just as bad a state as the West if they put people in universities based on sex or skin colour rather than merit, taught them that people can change sex just by saying so, and continually told them that China was evil and Chinese people should just disappear and be replaced by Indians and Africans.

> in many parts of the country schools are literally falling apart while good teachers leave the profession because they cannot afford to live on a teaching salary

Meanwhile, if you look at education outcomes against spending over the last few decades, outcomes in the US have become worse and worse as spending has risen.

People get their AI to listen to the podcast and summarize it for them.

Canada didn't kick the crazy people out of the party. Carney put them in his cabinet.

If the recent change to Twitter which put location on user profiles is anything to go by, most of the troll farms seem to be in India and Pakistan.

This is bizarre, not to mention terribly Boomerish.

They could say no. No-one is stopping them.

They won't because they care more about money than their long-term customers.

This is why such people shouldn't be in positions of power. And won't be in the society that arises from the collapse of this one because we'll be damn sure to drum into the survivors that the merchant caste can never, ever be put in control again.

You Can Just Say No.

The only people who believe they have no choice are the ones who chase money at any cost. This is why such people should never be in positions of power.

I'm just glad we upgraded all our PCs over the last few years before the "AI" scam wrecked the computer business.

Well, this is it.

Yeah, with my old gaming PC I stuck to Windows 7 for years since it was pretty much only used for gaming and not browsing pron sites. But then Steam decided they wouldn't run on Windows 7 any more so I had to buy a new one.

Which wasn't such a bad deal as it would probably cost 50% more to build today. But with the downside that it has Windows 11.

Having set up two Windows 11 PCs in the last couple of months it's amazing how much work it takes to get a usable OS after installing it.

And who decided that moving the start menu to the middle by default was a good idea?

MBAs only care about the value of their stock options, not whether their ideas are nonsense.

And AI is The New Hotness right now.

A bunch of reasons, but the most obvious is that they want to tie your soon to be mandatory usage of their "AI" cloud to an account so they can store all your stuff on their servers and cut you off if you use those bazillions of GPUs more than they expect.

Also, Bitlocker seems to be tied to a Microsoft account because it appears they store the password there. I set up a new Windows PC recently and it decided to turn Bitlocker on without asking me, but ultimately it didn't seem to encrypt the disk because I'd set up a local account... it just flagged it as an encrypted disk but didn't run the encryption process.

I'm sure it must have happened sometime this year, but I don't remember the last time a Falcon 9 booster returned to the launch site. Everything I've seen recently landed on the barge.

New Glenn does have a better launch envelope by being able to hover to land in bad sea conditions, but the extra fuel cuts into the payload more. So there are benefits and costs.