This got me interested. What exactly is he saying there? Does it mean what I think it means - that they immediately shift that money around, possibly through some mixers, to muddle the origin? And, of course, make it better suited to pay their proxies now that Qatar isn't sending suitcases of cash to them anymore?

Thank you for writing that. I was starting to think I'm going crazy and I can't possibly be the only one who sees through that.

And if you realize that Trump is just the clown at the helm. There's literally an entire bureaucracy underneath him doing most of the planning, deciding and executing.

Douglas Adams was right. The role of the president is not to excert power, but to distract from it. President of the Galaxy, president of the USA, no difference.

This.

You don't need billions to be care-free. Even double-digit millions in some nice safe assets already give you enough fuck-you-money to be good. And while everyone looks at the super-super-rich and they're in various public lists and tracked by not just the tax authorities, barely anyone knows the multi-millionaires. I know three or so that I'm sure nobody on here has ever heard anything about. They stay quiet, comfortable, private.

Don't you think you have the absolute best reason to not be revealed right there?

Can you imagine what criminals the world over would do for a few percent of that money?

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

twosat confessed:

Perhaps nobody posted that link because it's not funny. Oh it wants to be funny, and it tries to be funny - but it fails to be even mildly humorous for three long, boring minutes.

You're welcome ...

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

That's what campaign donations get you, if they are large enough.

This is why congress occasionally bullies the big tech companies. We all think they might want to have some regulation or to punish them. Oh sweetie... they're saying "nice company you have there... would be a shame if something happened to it..."

The best time to leave github was when the evil empire bought it. The second best time is now.

Seriously. Anyone who thought MS wouldn't fuck it up in the same way they fuck up everything they touch can't be helped. It's Microsoft for crying out loud.

MBAs are sheep. Blindly following the flock is what MBA schools teach them to do - and questioning conventional wisdom is strictly verboten.

Why else would they worship at the altar of stockholder supremacy, when transferring all their company's liquid assets to high-volume stock trading algorithms forces them to borrow money at commercial interest rates to fund their "investment" in AI, instead of using cash on hand for the purpose, and saving the interest payments for other investment purposes ... ?

Don't care. If your shit shows me ads, it's not getting into my kitchen. Note to self: Don't buy appliances from Samsung anymore.

Yes, I am vocal in how much I hate ads. I believe the CEOs of advertising companies should get one hit with a stick for every time their ad bothered someone even in the slightest.

Exactly what I'm saying.

The fact that users and enterprise customers are not demanding better software from Microsoft with the same fervor their ancestors demanded that the witch be burnt speaks volumes.

And I'm specifically talking about operating systems here. Software can crash for all I care. I'm fine software quality being all over the place, the market can sort that out. But operating systems are natural monopolies and the foundation for everything else. We should not accept shoddy quality there.