Interesting to note that commenters haven't matured since the mid-90s (or should that be mid-80s?)
How many of you have ever actually known a real journalist? Didn't think so.
I would say "Grow TF up", but it's been demonstrated that that's absolutely implausible.
Let's see...
Uber, WeWork, and now Wag; anyone seeing a pattern here?
It's almost as though the Vision Fund exists to collect big-loss-making "visionary" poop that no sane fund manager would put into a basket actually expected to make money. We see that sort of thing in SE Asia and the Third World frequently as what turn out to be "convenient" money-laundering-at-industrial-scale operations. Now, without casting any aspersions on SoftBank, Occam's Razor is a thing, and their recent string of high-profile dogs has been known to put discomforting thoughts into the minds of potential investors. They might well benefit from an aggressive PR campaign highlighting the Fund's successes compared to its failures, before politicians, investigative reporters, and scandal-hunting faux news orgs start sinking their teeth into SoftBank's haunches.
Food for thought, anyway.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro and the keyboard is very nearly as good as the Das Keyboard Model S Professional mechanical keyboard I'm typing this on now (connected to a 2018 iMac). I dread the day when it finally does die, because Apple haven't made a MBP that really interests me for at least 5-6 years now.
When the 2009 finally dies (the WiFi has been dead for a year), unless Apple have pulled out of their present controlled hypersonic flight into terrain, I'll probably look at the then-current ThinkPad X1 Carbon. As I said, I'm typing this on a 2018 iMac, and I can reach out and touch nearly a dozen Apple systems going back more than 20 years, but this formerly evangelistic customer, developer, and shareholder is done.
I guess that when you've been raised under an idiotic Communist system that creates weak minds and is intrinsically, inextricably linked to psychotic genocidal behavior, controversy can be pretty scary. And suicide probably looks pretty good, so there's that.
Actually, communism in China (at least as far as Marx or his students would recognise it) pretty much died by the time Mao did. What took its place under the new regime is certainly branded as communism, but owes much more to what Mussolini defined as corporatism, i.e., fascism. Everybody, especially in the leadership, is focused on two things: getting rich; and being seen as rich, powerful, and well-connected. Those aren't innovations of the PRC; anybody who's studied Chinese history of the last 3,500+ years would argue that the current variation may not even be the most ruthless, but are certainly the broadest-based. (If the Shang dynasty had ruled a billion and a half people, what we know of as "China" today would likely be a used-up, burnt-out husk.)
Few Westerners really understand how different Chinese history is from that of the rest of the world. China, in the space of half a century, went from a feudal, hierarchical, deeply xenophobic society that had devoted consistent, sustained, competent effort for thousands of years to not changing, to one forced to open itself to Western people, institutions, and industrialisation without ever having gone through the several-hundred-year transition period that Europe and its colonies had. One might as well pull a thousand classical-era Greeks up to the present and put them in charge of the world's largest sovereign-wealth funds; they might individually be very intelligent and capable, but they have nothing in their background that prepares them for what's been placed in front of them, and even less understanding why the rest of the (financial) world screams at them when they screw it up.
You can't, because open plan is dirt cheap and lower footprint.
Cheap, yes; inexpensive, not so much. A (software) company I worked for back in the mid-1990s opened up a new office building on their campus. They'd previously had nearly everybody in 1- or 2-person offices with doors that closed, and full-height partitions between desks of shared offices. The new building might as well have been a warehouse; it was 10 floors of absolutely open, unpartitioned space. They moved eight groups from the existing buildings into the top floors of the new one (and everybody in the old buildings had solo offices again) as guinea pigs for the new building and work environment. Now, the top managers in this company were sticklers for measurement and detail; some even (quietly) called it a fetish of theirs.
But that turned out to be a bit of a blessing for the workers, especially those of us whod been moved. The company had several years worth of data on productivity and error rates for each division and department, down to the work team level (4-10 people). They could, and did, compare the data they acquired from the teams in the new building to the data from those same teams in the old buildings, and they found something profoundly disturbing. The top-performing group after the move was 6% as productive and had over 18x the error rate in production as that same group had been when theyd all had solo (or a few duo) offices. No other team had higher productivity or lower error rates. Not one.
Four months after we'd moved into the new building, they called an all-hands meeting for the entire campus. The CEO and CFO got up, explained the problem, explained why they'd fallen into the trap (basically "we screwed up; everybody's doing it and so we thought it was probably a good thing"), and announced a schedule for the groups in the new building to temporarily move down to the bottom two floors while the top half of the building was remodelled with floor-to-ceiling partitions, noise-absorbing and -diffusing fabrics and materials, and so on. In the all-hands, they pointed out that doing the entire building this way was going to make it significantly more expensive than if they'd simply built offices as in the old buildings, but that they expected to make up that difference within less than two years from recovering lost productivity and reducing the preternaturally high error rates.
The CFO also mentioned something he said he'd found in his research. The open-office plan in tech basically originated with defence contractors during WW2. They were being paid on contracts by the staff-hour, and some "misguidedly bright spark" had had the idea to push for a study on how they could maximise billed hours while still (more or less) meeting agreed deadlines, and the study found that the more (skilled or knowledge) workers were sharing a common work area, especially when mixed with support- or admin-type workers, the lower the productivity. Many contractors quickly standardised on this; it was made more plausible by the claim that "hey, we have to put up these working spaces quickly, so no time for fancy details". Since Sili Valley started with semiconductor companies (e.g., Fairchild) staffed with engineers who'd previously worked for such contractors, they (largely unknowingly) carried the warehouse-as-office-space mentality forward because that's all they'd ever really known. Half a century later, you get us crunching the numbers (and, I later found out, several other companies at about the same time with similar experiences).
Open offices are, at best, cancer for productivity and for mental health. They should be abolished, if not explicitly banned under workplace-safety-and-health laws and treaties.
...and again in 2000 and again more recently. Americans too young to have lived through the Depression, World War II or the Korean War have consistently gone along with those who would sell them a smug sense of material comfort in exchange for their freedoms. Two quotes come to mind:
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" - Benjamin Franklin
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" - George Santayana
What goes around may well come around, but that will be scant comfort to the multitude of generations who will have to fight their forefathers' battles all over again, courtesy of our self-centered laziness.
With the new, RIAA-approved, liquid-sodium-cooled BFG 33-1/3, the EMI executives can, without rising from the comfort of their Aeron chairs or even wrinkling their Savile Row suits, lay waste to the entire anatomy of battalions of roaches^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompeting industry execs with ease. This is, of course, in addition to the legions of customers whose faith in the free market, not to mention their pocketbooks, have been permanently damaged by the BFG 33-1/3.
At this point, all we can do is fervently hope that The Best Government Money Can Buy will screw up catastrophically and actually take remedial action in the public interest. Vast amounts of RIAA/MAFIAA money have been invested in "campaign contributions" to avert just such a calamity,
That's not really too much to hope for in another 37 releases, is it? Seriously... I used to call WordPerfect 4.2 the Control-Alt-Shift-Left Elbow-Q software for its obscure key combinations. I take back everything I ever said about WP; after more than ten years of intermittent usage, I can't sit here and actually recall any keystroke combinations for Emacs. This tells me that, if there is a sweet spot for software usability, then Emacs inhabits the single point in the omniverse which is most distant from that spot. Geekiness was kind of fun 30 years ago when I was a teenager; I've better things to do with my time now - and so do you.
The road to hell is paved with NAND gates. -- J. Gooding
