The realisation that Microsoft will provide personal/company data on MS hosted systems to the US government when asked - regardless of where the data is held or who owns it - has been an eyeopener for some companies.

Moving off Microsoft to alternative platforms has been floated for consideration for what looks like the first time ever in my org, and that's from our EA team in conjunction with security. Some things are already underway that will reduce transition friction down the road.

No one is stopping anyone from doing this. Freedom of choice is the desired outcome, and choosing to be a stay-at-home mom is a perfectly valid decision.

Now you need to look at why this isn't chosen as much - have you looked at the cost of living lately? Many locations require both parents to work to afford to live there, so that choice is no longer valid.

If you want to revert back to when mom stayed at home while dad worked, the father needs a job that pays well enough to sustain a family on the one wage. That means directed policy changes that reduce the cost of living (lower inflation) AND increase wages (increase inflation). Good luck finding someone that is working that for the common man...

Search for Trumps approval ratings, apparently Ohio and Iowa now have net negative scores, and Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point of term. You could look at the result of other elections for more objectivity, even in Miami the Trump backed mayor lost to the Dems.

They'll just have to work out how 2M kids, 2M workers, and 6M retirees (guessed #s) can support the country and be supported in turn. Maybe that requires an abundance of AI and robots performing much of the work in the country and hoping that remote work can bring in enough income to do the rest.

If you're in government and not thinking about 25+ years in the future, you're doing your country a disservice.

So share buybacks of ~50% more than gross debt? Uber could pull themselves completely out of debt over the next few years but instead are dedicating that profit towards buyback of shares.

Do share buybacks typically increase the value of existing shares more than simply paying down debt would?

We're jumping off VMware. I know of many others also.

I guess they really want to get rid of their customers?

I didn't see this campaign, but I have installed Bazzite on my 2 kids gaming computers. I'll be investigating the remaining devices over the Christmas holiday. Should be able to do another 2 or so.

They might actually play with all the toys we've bought them over the years!

Mind you, I was days away from getting my kids their own Steam accounts so they can start building their own library, and using family mode to access mine. Guess we're back to only having my Steam profile working on one PC at a time...

I had a PC similar to this that same year. As a gamer, I upgraded at least 3 times by 2001, as each upgrade showed noticeable gains over the previous config in some way.

Now we're stuck with CPUs increasing in speed by 25% over the last decade, with core counts the main change. That means my old 4770k and even Celeron 6100k PCs with Bazzite OS and a newer gen GPU work extremely well for everything my kids throw at them.

In Australia, firmed renewables are coming in as the lowest LCOE of all technologies - yes that's including battery backup (which IIRC seems to be around 1-2 hours of 100% capacity generation). We have federal rebates for residential batteries to soak up all our excess solar that is sending wholesale prices negative during daylight hours. There's also a temporary initiative around free power for 3 hours during peak solar periods, so that non-renewable inflexible generators aren't slugged too much for the generation during these hours...

The obvious answer is...with AI.

Sure, there's plenty of sarcasm in there, but repetitive analytical action like reviewing millions of chat prompt and answer duos and de-identifying it sure sounds like it should be done by some sort of smart-ish algorithm.

Downloaded Bazzite a couple weeks ago. Gathering a few more spare parts to try making a gaming PC for the kids this weekend using this OS. If it's good enough, I'll convert my current main rig across. Then there's the little NAS box which came with Win11, and the wife's PC which is Win10.

Looking at all that, I feel MS really dropped the ball when it came to managing the personal / home installs...

I don't want to subsidise my gaming hardware by giving away even more of my personal data, and I see enough ads already too.

The only moving parts in this thing is the single cooling fan.

All legal age citizens would receive the UBI. For those earning above some arbitrary amount (median annual salary perhaps before UBI) your taxes should increase such that you receive no extra benefit from the UBI.

All the other welfare programs are meant to disappear.

One of the fundamental issues though is that currently the vast majority of federal revenue is derived from people earning a wage (~1/2 through income tax, and another 1/3 are payroll taxes). What will the federal government do if near 5/6ths of their revenue is lost through automation?