If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.

Google "Dark pools". Currently they account for slightly over half of all US transaction volume. Yes, they're still regulated; no, we do not have visibility inside them.

China, India and AI data centers are the cause of all of this. But the little people of the world will be told to not use their air con or drive personal autos.

I can already, completely above-board, sell someone a block of DRS'd IBM shares for crypto if I want to. Let's all be clear this isn't about denominating stocks in Bitcoin.

Rather, this is effectively about recording stock transactions on a blockchain. Nothing more and nothing less than swapping a distributed transaction log for a traditional ledger.

The implication is clear, the SEC is at least considering the idea of creating shares as a token cryptocurrency. In this case, the tokens are backed by real shares. That's not a technical requirement, though, and a future company might someday skip the major exchanges entirely to list only as a token. To be clear, there's nothing sacred about the exchanges and their "house rules"; there's nothing inherently wrong with using a blockchain vs a ledger; and to reiterate, this has nothing to do with "buying stocks with Bitcoin".

On that last point, I consider OKXICE's decision to accept payment in some nondescript "stablecoins" as extremely unfortunate. Not because I'm a cryptophobe, but because it muddies the waters as to the viability of the core concept of tokenized equity itself - Though that's a bit of a tautology, given stocks are already "tokenized equity". Whether we denominate them in USD or BTC or cowrie shells is an entirely separate issue.

Modern companies don't care about top talent at the moment. It doesn't take top talent to enshittify your products. Nobody is doing real innovation anymore.

This reminds me of a segment I saw about 15 or 20 years ago on a show called "How It's Made" that played on a channel like the Discovery Channel (before all cable became reality TV).

The segment was "How CRTs are Made". I was kind of surprised that CRTs were still being made, but I was especially surprised by the fact that they appeared to be American workers in the factory. They were doing everything pretty much by hand with no automation, and they were making some rather skinny looking CRTs. The show never elaborated on what the CRTs were for, but they sure didn't look like TVs.

I dug into it a bit after that using some clues I noticed in the show, and found out that these were cockpit displays for F15s or similar military aircraft. It's probably an item that you just don't go changing the specs on, and they understandably aren't going to farm out to TCL. I can't imagine how much each one cost, though. And I certainly wouldn't try to rack it up as a "win" for any of GWB's or Obama's trade policies.

How dare the people who create your revenue streams demand reasonable working conditions?

Of course employers are welcome to set the terms under which they'll give us money. And similarly, we're free to set the terms under which we'll accept their money. That's how it works.

Personally, I love companies announcing draconian new RTO policies - There aren't many better indicators their stock price is going to spike short-term then tank a few quarters later. But that has nothing to do with working for those companies. On that front, it's just a hard "no", to the point I'm seriously considering becoming a professional "interview troll" once I retire!

I hate ads more than the average bear, but I have to admit, I have no idea where people are seeing these either. Are "ads" someone intentionally loads and watches really ads, or are they merely short-form content?

That said, if these are everywhere and the very fact I'm using FF with uBlock Origin is the exact reason I haven't seen these... That is the sort of viral advertising most companies dream of.

There's a fuckton of cigarettes manufactured every year. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge"... Good riddance!

LPT: You can also turn your phone to watch the content. I know, mind blown, right? Pass it along!

I'm not saying I would or wouldn't take this particular buyout, but as you point out, it's not a safe assumption the default severance would be the same absent this artificially sweetened offer. At a quick glance, New Jersey is the only US state that requires any severance at all, beyond making employees whole for time worked and paying out accrued PTO. Many do have additional requirements around mass layoffs, but nothing comes anywhere near two weeks per year of service. Even NJ, as the best-of-the-best (honestly surprised it's not CA or MA, but not in this case), only requires one week per year of employment.

That said, I see the GP's argument come up quite often in any online discussion of layoffs, and it took me years to finally figure out, this topic basically comes down to a simple class issue: If someone is a moderately well-paid salaried employee, a severance offer is almost always going to beat UI by miles (and as you also pointed out, that's not a mutually exclusive choice, UI just picks up after severance ends). If someone is a low-paid nonexempt worker, by contrast, severance is usually nonexistent and employers playing games around UI claim appeals are a lot more common.

There's also other benefits to consider, most importantly health insurance. Severance offers usually allow employees to keep their group health insurance during the severance period, while COBRA is eye-wateringly expensive even for someone formerly paid well.

The highest UI check in the country is in Washington state, and only comes out to $1208/week, for a maximum of 26 weeks (barring certain exceptional circumstances). A Principal Engineer (level 65) at Microsoft averages just shy of $246k/year and this buyout is offering up to 39 weeks total.

Weekly, that's $4.7k vs $1.2k. Total, that's $184k vs 31k.

I can guarantee nobody smart enough to be an engineer at Microsoft (as much as we might make fun of their culture and products) is dumb enough to fail that one-question math exam.

Who's going to be able to scrounge up an extra 12KB of RAM in today's market?

It looks like if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Here's the problem, and why everyone resents this crap (your fellow IT folks most of all)...

Yeah, great, you're an Exchange admin and can send email "from" any random VP you want. And you have access to their recent document history so can "spice it up" by referencing actual projects we might really be assigned to. When your phishing tests are literally indistinguishable from legitimate emails, you're not "testing" anything, you're daring people to ignore legitimate work at risk of their continued employment.

If "my boss" sends me an email, which the headers show really came from his account, and asks me to take a look at a spreadsheet we worked on three days ago - You're not being clever, you're an asshole.

1) Comcast could have started moving to fiber a decade before the upstarts and qualified for the same subisidies.
2) Comcast has received 2.6B in subsidies since 1987.
3) Remind us again, how long as Biden been out of office now?