I am sure, that being a high-wit allows you to tell me in detail, why South Dakota has a severe staffing problem, when California doesn't. I am sure, that your explanation will be entirely free of classism or anything which could possibly offend some snow flake. Please refrain from anecdotes of some trad wife who loves it there.

If you look for signs of collapse: Based on the stats discussed here I see these in South Dakota much stronger than in California.

All places have some shitty societies somewhere, but in some places these people run the show, and these are not the places a well educated and civilized person wants to be in the long run. God help you, if your significant other looks or sounds foreign, or just doesn't want to blend into the "inject 'em with the Wuhan flu" maga crowd.

Lots of people left the sunny south of Europe and moved to the tundra in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. Weather only stops people so much, and in times of well observable climate change and temperature rise a place like Southern California sounds less pleasant than it should.

Compare this statement of fact against all this right wing drivel of "liberal hell holes" that everybody wants to leave ASAP. It looks like some regions may have to change their attitude towards educated people, if they want to attract a decent work force.

Banking industry is sometimes really stupid and oblivious, I received dozens of scam emails asking me to urgently install the "Security App" to unlock my bank accounts. It took a few months, before my bank decided to create an app to securely access my bank account. You'll never guess, what they called that app.

Paypal change of ToS would also be an example of frequent emails, that I had to research before actually deeming them legit.

Tariffs are a tax, if you apply them across the board. If you apply them highly targeted, they are an easily avoidable tax for all Americans, yet an economic hit on the country trying to benefit from scams.

If Bulgaria hosts these scammers, the USA are well within their right to lean on EU to clean up their back yard. Also, Bulgaria wouldn't last long in a direct economic confrontation with the USA, so these tariffs wouldn't have to last long.

To make a long story short: if you apply tariffs and sanctions smartly, they are very impactful and effective. If you do it like DT47, then they're like a tax.

There are European countries with a lager tradition, and those who prefer ales. The lager drinkers vastly outdrink the ale drinkers, and all recent beer converts in Southern Europe also drink lager. There's a hipster circle trying to make IPA palatable, but that's 1. new and 2. not that big in volume.

And yes, I did experience lager beer with flavored hops e.g. at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto, which was a cool place to be while it lasted. They were very proud of their flavored hops and happily presented them to us "look how good" during a guided tour through their brewery. And yes, I do agree with you, that a flavored lager is a shame.

While the Americans in our group insisted, that Oregon Pale Ale was very good, in fact at least as good as any decent lager beer, the profound quantity difference of beer consumed at happy hours (compared between a keg Pale Ale vs. a keg of Spaten beer from Munich) told a vastly different story.

The main premise, why "American beer is bad" comes from two sides:

• 1. Central Europeans, who are the most avid beer drinkers and therefore most likely going to complain about "bad beer", typically prefer lager beer. So you have the choice between cheep American lager beer and expensive craft beer.

• 2. For some reason Americans like flavored hops, which is a big nono in Central Europe. So even the few craft lager beers will not match their expectations.

What you said doesn't check out, I'm guessing you're leaving something important out. People forget passwords all the time, which means they have a process to "reset" the password (a HUGE percentage of people have no idea what the 'password' to their account is when they call places like this in general.) You probably just didn't want to go to a physical office or go through whatever hoops they had or have to wait for them to mail a letter. However, that wouldn't have made an interesting a story, so I get it. Still an issue since I assume you wanted to turn off autopay and would expect to do it 'quickly', but, details matter.

Any high roller pharmaceutical company would quickly found a small startup with enough separation to provide plausible denial, then fund it with the cash required to get that data. Whatever trade secrets are in these 1+TB, knowing them is worth way more that these 25M.

And I am sure you never asked yourself: how did Nightmare Eclipse find all these bugs so quickly? And why now? Right?

When people blame Microsoft, they typically mean their Microsoft loving corporate IT. The same folks, who bought Crowdstrike products, also think that Windows is the only viable operating system in a corporate outfit. Since I am sure, that Microsoft's sales reps do anything in their power to support this view, they do share some of the blame.

Anyone remember the Witty worm? This was over 20 years ago, and so called "security" vendors still haven't learned a thing. Given the underlying security of Microsoft products, any software trying to defend this quagmire is bound to be so complex, that it will be more risk than benefit at some point.

Take a look at Nightmare-Eclipse (6 Windows zero days, 3 of them still unpatched), the Oracle Peoplesoft zero day, the Cisco zero day, and on top of that a remote DoS against OpenBSD, hundreds of CVEs against linux and Firefox. This is a lot of crap raining down on corporate America, possibly more than they can handle. They can especially not handle this, if zero days keep hailing in as they did. They are not geared for this.

One can all blame this on poor coding practices, maybe the bugs were found by some other means, but we do know, how the OpenBSD remote DoS was found. I would have shut down the new Anthropic stuff just as well, bribes or not. We can't allow most of corporate America to implode, just to show, that software wants to be free.

These are incredibly complex pieces of software, which simply shouldn't be made accessible to the big bad internet. We saw the same situation last year with Sharepoint, and are bound to see more of the same. I believe, that "attack surface" is the right term. There are many ways to provide these services to people working from home, which do not expose such high value targets to random hackers.

According to the article (I know, I know), of these 100+ affected entities more than two thirds were "institutions of high learning" aka universities. These are the entities brimming with experts, many with big well funded CS departments, they sure have experts of IT security and risk management, and seemingly nobody sounds an alarm, when such services are accessible from everywhere. Just wondering ...

If you don't like paying through nose and ears, then why use Oracle anyway? SMH.