⦠tech contractors in the UK and Europe are paid more than permanent counterparts and in the US itâ(TM)s the opposite?

I think itâ(TM)s more accurate to say Intel felt power efficiency only applied to battery-powered scenarios like phones and laptops. Theyâ(TM)d given up on phones a while ago. I think they believed their dominance in servers could never be challenged while they held the crown for raw compute. They were wrong and theyâ(TM)ve only woken up to their complacency after losing double digit market share in that segment.

They added nagware (logging in to Zoom client had an annoying marketing banner that always returned no matter how many times I dismissed it, and another popup would appear whenever a meeting ended). I found more complaints on the Zoom forums about it. It seemed to apply only to some accounts but it was super annoying. Their support team confirmed its by design and there's no way to disable it. And so, I asked for a refund and cancelled my subscription. I don't get why they feel they had to nag paying customers? I also realise, this company will likely disappear into obscurity like so many hot tech startups in the past.

Does it really matter if it is like the 90s or not? No market crashes or recoveries are exactly the same. However one thing is certain, markets do operate in cycles and they have historically been about 10 years long. Now, with the Corona crash we've either had the fastest ever bear market and then recovery or we have had a taste of a longer term decline. There's no point in trying to guess or predict which one. I recall when the SPX hit the March lows everyone was talking 1987 style correction - look how that turned out. I have a very simple trading strategy which starts with: 2 closes above 10 day moving average on an index gets me long. 2 closes below 10 day moving average gets me out. Around this I look for other things (was 2nd close higher/lower than first; is there strength/weakness on internals, are we range bound) but really if people just followed this rule they'd probably out-perform most 'smart money'.

Wearing masks was obviously going to reduce spread. It made no sense why the public messaging was anti-mask (here in UK the media made you feel like a traitor to the country if you wore a mask because you’d be depriving medical workers of them - which was nonsense because there are still plenty of effective masks that are not approved or fit for use in a medical environment)

I don’t get one thing. Pottering is obviously is challenged when it comes to writing defensive code, listening to others, etc. How on earth did he get so major Linux distro maintainers convinced of systemd? One subpar human shouldn’t have been able to dupe so many. Anyone got an explanation for that?

Well they needed to do something to prevent a holiday quarter disaster... I imagine the i7s have had their thread count halved because steep discounting will be Intel’s only play against AMD at this moment.

Pension funds manage large sums of money - decent chunks go into indexes but they also have strong reasons to buy stocks.

For example, many funds are based on (i.e. need in order to meet their obligations) ~7% annualised returns. They should and would be in bonds (super 'low risk') if the returns there weren't so pathetic due to prolonged super-low interest rates - the 2008 recovery was made possible by screwing over savers (and in turn pension funds). They have been having to chase equities and indexes can't reliably return the 7%+ they need. Of course, they could lower their returns expectations but that would mean contributions need to increase or benefits need to be cut - neither of which goes down well and becomes a political problem with voters.

In short, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't

Same story with 2 of my former clients - Oracle's tactics worked before because they had a pretty solid monopoly and customers were willing to pay. Now customers are looking at cutting costs and attracted towards cloud competitors that charge fractions of what Oracle charges and aren't anywhere near as aggressive with audits and sales. Oracle can still succeed but it really needs to throw away its current playbook - otherwise it'll be repeating IBM's mistakes when the mainframe era was coming to an end.

They dropped the motto for this type of reason... Now it’s free to pursue money and power unemcumbered.

India definitely needs to invest more in cleaner energy. Population densities mean that the masses owning a combustion powered vehicle like in Europe & the US will have a greater impact. China realised this (better late than never) and are at least taking steps to clean up their cities. India needs to follow. I find it amusing that JLR (owned by an Indian company) are making their first electric car an SUV. If it were me, I'd also have been making an electric mini-car and electric motorcycle targeted at developing economies.

I remember this came up on Postgres mailing lists earlier this year: https://www.postgresql.org/mes... Perhaps someone can code some machine learning code-converter to do it :-p

What about users in those countries who without a patch might get their computers compromised and become unwitting victims in the next botnet attack in the land of the free and its allies?

If they had to run a company they'd run it into the ground instead of towards success. That's why they're politicians. Airbus, not the most efficient of global corporations, can remain a profitable concern only by making rational commercial decisions. If that means negotiating with a non-European supplier then the good French senator Alain Gournac ought to find out why Ariane 5 (or 6) were deficient and figure out how to make them competitive. But that would require the Monsieur Gournac to pull his thumb outta his ass and do some real work. Non, pas acceptable!

Caveat: I speak as a developer, just recently I've been told I should be doing more project management / team leading / mentoring. Everytime I ask a developer how long a piece of code will take I get an answer that I know is ridiculously unrealistic. Most non-techie Project Managers would take a developers 'I can do that in an afternoon' at face value. Instead I've had to have long discussions with my guys so that they begin to think in a way that gives accurate estimates (i.e. accounting for a bit of 'I don't know why this isn't working' and accounting for the fact they may have to refactor a bits of code here and there to make it tidier, etc.). So, now that I'm been on the 'other side' I do understand how estimates can go haywire.