Interestingly, I remember at one time, the whole "Fake it until you make it." slogan meant something much less devious. It used to be a slogan people said about a small business managing to present itself as much bigger than it really was, while delivering on promises and work that would usually only be expected from a much larger business.

To me, that was actually a positive/good thing. It was your classic case of an over-achieving startup, doing more with less and winning outsized contracts that helped it grow to be a formidable competitor with the established players.

I took the financial hit years ago, when I resold my high-end configured Intel Macbook Pro to move to the M1.

As soon as I saw the benefits of the M series processors on the platform, I knew it was the way forward. The Intel Core i9 version of my Macbook Pro had overheating issues where it would throttle its performance down every time it did anything demanding for more than a few seconds at a time. That's just wasted performance at that point.

The battery life on M series is insanely good without feeling like you gave up any processing power at all, which sealed the deal for me.

The idea of Apple using Intel CPUs was always, in my opinion, kind of a hack on Apple's part. They realized IBM wasn't going to live up to their initial promises to keep innovating the "Power" CPU to keep it competitive. There wasn't any real alternative for Steve Jobs and company at that point. They were left "high and dry" unless they just ported everything to run on the same processor all the Windows computers were using.

The M series gets the Mac back to being truly unique again. You're not just buying another Windows laptop on the inside, wrapped in an "Apple shell".

The Texas grid which is separate from the rest of the US has a size issue with balancing and peaking that ha shown up from time to time. Their grid collapse a few winters ago would (probably) not have happened if they were connected to the big grid like everyone else is.

There are two other US grids, the Eastern and Western Interconnects. They are not frequency synchronized, and there are minimal AC-DC-AC interties connecting them.

The big collapse in Texas involved about 30GW of generation going off line. Even if Texas were connected to the Eastern grid, it is unlikely that there would have been 30GW of spare capacity and 30GW of available transmission to draw on.

Perhaps relevant, ERCOT and the Texas PUC have approved the Southern Spirit 3GW HVDC transmission line that would connect ERCOT and the western edge of the TVA's transmission network. The other states that would be affected have refused to approve the project because they believe Texas will screw them over and drive their electricity prices up.

While it constitutes a weak argument that "it won't be worth making a new StarGate series because only the original fans would watch" ... I can't argue it may not have been the best series to do more with right now.

I used to love Stargate, as did some of my good friends. But this wasn't one of the sci-fi shows that only got a couple seasons and then got canned too early. This was a very successful show that arguably ran its course, with a LOT of material to watch.

I'd say there'd be more justification to bring back Firefly, or even just do one more good season of "The Expanse" that does justice to the last novel in the series of books.

I know quite a few people who refused to vote, in at least selected elections. Had zero to do with being cowardly or lazy. It's much about a realization that after studying the people on the ballot and what the candidates running are likely to do/support? None of them reflected anywhere near what they wanted to vote for.

If there's one thing I think that drug America down a slope to stupidity in politics, it was the huge push to "get out and vote, no matter what!" Swarms of totally uninformed people went to the polls and voted based on any number of ridiculous preferences -- more to get the little "I Voted!" sticker to wear around and feel good than anything else.

The "vote for the lesser of evils" thing isn't a great argument for voting either, ultimately. Sure, there are times when you dislike both candidates but feel like one is a "devil you know" and won't surprise you, while you may deem the other too risky of an unknown. But ... that's also a pretty strong reason Trump won re-election, if we're honest about it. Democrats didn't run a better opponent who people could "hold their nose and vote for" if they generally leaned more conservative in their political beliefs.

Our third party options are realistically non-starters, and that will continue unless one of them has their own huge financial resources to throw at running for office without needing their party's backing.

As soon as you start compromising with these people they've won.

I mean, come on... This one screams class action. I just got an email link to a list of current class action suits I could click on to see if I qualified, and none of them were over as clear cut a complaint as a company purposely crippling software initially promised to keep working.

Worth saying: In Texas, it's easy to find 3.75 square miles that's so desolate it's not useful for anything else. My local power authority here in Colorado has a power-purchase agreement with a solar farm about that size. The land it's on is so poor no one has ever trying either growing crops or running livestock on it. With the panels channeling rain water into narrow strips, it might now support enough grass for a small number of sheep, but probably not enough to justify the effort. Even more convenient, the land was adjacent to an existing transmission line, so the connection cost was a smallish substation. The authority's first battery farm is going in right next to the substation. There will probably be more.

This was back in the 2012-2015 time frame ... so "buy them bigger drives" wasn't always a reasonable solution. A lot of them were using Macbook Airs that were great for their needs EXCEPT for the SSDs not being as big as one might prefer.

I'm sure I'm just an outlier here. But I bought a cheap big screen LCD smart TV at Best Buy 3-4 years ago. It was a Westinghouse branded set running Roku TV.

At some point, they updated the firmware to consolidate the TV guide in it so it displayed all the streaming content and your over the air TV stations in the same guide. (Used to be, you had to pick a Live TV icon/button to look at your OTA content in its own place.)

Ever since that happened, the TV forgets all my OTA stations regularly so I have to go into setup and re-scan for all of them, to get them to reappear in the guide. REALLY annoying.

It would be awesome if a total UI makeover for it results in fixing this problem.

I used to work for a company that used the "Dropbox for Business" product. (I think they renamed it along the way, so that may be its former or current product name?) Anyway, my memory of it is that it generally did what you paid for it to do -- but was horribly costly when existing contracts ran out and went up for renewal.

They seemed to use the business model that once you invested in using the platform and they had your data captive in it, they could crank up the prices because it was cheaper to keep it than to go through the painful process of switching.

I also recall a really frustrating detail; We kept wanting DropBox to enforce a disk quota on client PCs. Instead, it would happily keep syncing more content until it ran someone's disk space down to around 0 bytes free, causing OS crashes and a big hassle cleaning it back up again. Their only answer was, "We added the ability to only sync the actual files and folders on-demand, the first time a user clicks to view/open/edit one of them." Great, but that's not the same thing as a disk quota. We had people working with huge video files and it only took one to wipe out remaining disk space on some machines.

This one's interesting on several levels. I mean, for starters? We already know most competitive sports involve people taking various drugs and supplements in an attempt to get an edge. So it's a lie and a farce when the Olympic committee or the Major League Baseball association or anyone else doing pro sports claims we're watching athletes who achieved everything they do 100% naturally.

Viewed that way, I can see how holding a "performance enhanced Olympics" challenges that and calls it out. Essentially, it's saying, "Hey... we don't just randomly catch and disqualify a few athletes, to keep up a facade that the rest of them aren't doing any of it. We let you see what people can do, period, in a world where these drugs and supplements exist and people take them."

Where it gets questionable for me is ethically, when you start asking if it's right to dangle large sums of money in front of people to encourage them to take dangerous amounts of drugs and push themselves into potential health crisis? I think most of us know that normally, athletes would limit drug usage to what they believe is relatively safe. (They're surrounded by others who have been doing the same and can make a judgement call based on what's actually worked and happened to that group.) Start changing things to huge cash prizes to win ONE event, and now people will get reckless. "I only need that $30 million this one year and I can quit the whole thing."

Historically, knowledge-workers had little interest in unionizing because they knew they possessed the ability to learn and adapt. Sure, they had useful skills and knowledge. But much of I.T. is about possessing the ability to learn new things quickly. Everything's in constant change or evolution. The software package you use today will get a new update in a matter of weeks and then it has new functions or features have been moved around to new locations in it. The programming language you use may even get deprecated, demanding you learn whatever replaces it. The hardware you troubleshoot and support changes on a regular schedule.

Unions primarily benefit people who want to retain fair compensation for doing the same specific tasks repeatedly. They want reassurance they won't be forced to do anything new that's outside the scope of what they were hired for. Such a thing requires a new job title/role and a contract specifying exactly what they agree to as part of it.

I.T. workers usually felt if they were getting a bad deal someplace, the best move was to quit and find a new job where pay/benefits and/or working conditions were better. There wasn't so much fear or concern if a place used different software or tools than what they used before. That didn't matter much as long as they could learn the differences between it and what they had previously.

I think that might be changing in recent years, though? Now, you probably have an edge if your resume shows you already worked at companies people are familiar with and impressed by. But otherwise, they mostly want newer/younger people who they can pay lower wages to and get the most out of. Most places are starting to treat anyone in I.T. as more of a necessary expense than an asset to the business, and fewer and fewer pay well for your decades of experience.

I know that's just me being a bit sarcastic or mean. I don't wish unemployment or a tough time on any of my "people" working in I.T. or with an interest in computers and technology. That's been my thing since I was a kid.

But ... I spent the majority of my career working for small businesses and even working for myself (on-site consulting and computer service). When I finally got hired on with "big tech", I lasted only a year before resigning, because I couldn't bear the constant changing demands, stress, foolishness and teams getting pushed around by middle managers in competition with each other.

I noticed a huge rift in "big tech" employment between the "chosen ones" and everyone else employed there. If you got into management in some capacity, or you were important enough in software development - you were compensated really well and made to feel like your job was fairly secure. The others doing such roles as deskside support or audio-visual support were in another world. They were just herded around by project managers who in turn would change direction on initiatives on a dime, when managers over them declared they had some new direction to go. For them, employment was a revolving door of hiring and firing (after tossing people on "performance improvement programs" to pretend they cared).

So when the big tech shakeup starts involving the middle managers and those all comfortable with lots of stock options and a high salary because they help code the site's web portals? It's hard to be THAT sympathetic. Time to learn how the rest of us in the career feel.

Umm, I never said I was offering a solution here. I'm just identifying a problem. And the problem is a lot bigger than "Trump". He's just the latest one in the line-up.

It's pretty clear we've had a long string of shady deals and the public being kept in the dark on what our government is really doing.

Only reason you can try to pretend the whole problem is the Republican Party is the fact they've been in a power a lot. I'm old enough, though, to remember how awful things were under the Carter administration with the "stagflation" and his turning our relations w/Iran from a close alliance to a geopolitical crisis. I also remember how, despite his ability to relate to the people and make people feel good, Ronald Reagan also pulled some corrupt B.S. Perhaps most insultingly? He did all of it while quoting very Libertarian key points and principles. Clearly a case of "do as I say, not as I do" when you look at the Iran Contra scandal or his non-working "trickle down economics" he's known for taking from his advisors and running with, despite it just being a failed experiment. President Clinton was fingered for shady campaign funding/financing methods, from the start, followed by firing all 7 members of the White House travel office and replacing them with friends and associates. Plenty of reasons to question Joe Biden's ability as President when he got a shot at it -- including millions of dollars from foreign countries funneled into his family's own bank accounts, and admission that he improperly removed a number of classified documents and tried to keep them at home. (No charges ever filed for "mishandling" those though, which probably tipped off Trump that he could get away with the same!)

I didn't even bother to mention Bush, Sr. or Jr. here but clearly, they had personal agendas too.

It's all a steaming pile in Washington DC ... and it just keeps getting worse, the more the leaders figure out they can get away with.