In the worst case, they'll add interior walls (and maybe add some windows to the exterior walls), and resell it as office space, residential space, factory space, retail distribution space, or even a community library. After all, floors built to support racks of equipment should handle the weight and distribution of stacks of books without breaking a sweat.

So the construction might be overkill for what they eventually get used for, but it's not like a newly built, solid building isn't going to find a use. Maybe a quarter of the effort is wasted? Just guessing.

Come on, I'm not in any way a fan of Musk, but he appears to have (at least until recently) let the adults run things at SpaceX while he just takes the credit for it, and when Falcon 9 was first flying, his entire net worth was "hundreds of millions" rather than having "hundreds of billions in disposable income."

Oher rich people have played with rockets, too. He's, shockingly, mostly succeeded, and while his actual personal achievements here are far closer to Al Gore's infamous claim about the internet (his real efforts in funding and commercialization while in the senate, not the sound bite we love to mock) than what Musk wants everyone to believe, the whole "other rich people playing with rockets" bit suggests that no, you probably couldn't have done as well or better with his resources.

What this country needs is a good two-dollar red-team AI, that will try to create an exploit based on a submitted bug report and use the exploit to compromise a Mac in the QA lab. If it succeeds, the bug report is definitely genuine and should be prioritized.

I agree that has historically been the case, but OTOH Trump is deteriorating so rapidly (both psychologically and in terms of his level of popular support) that after November's bloodbath (and whatever Trump's unhinged response to that will be), the remaining Republicans may well decide it's in their own interest to get him out of office sooner rather than later.

We've reached the "Pope is selling indulgences" phase of the American government's decent into blatant corruption.

The main impact of prop 19 is making it possible for the elderly to not be forced to move to another state if they decide to downgrade to a smaller home. It likely has minimal impact on people's ability to move closer to their jobs, because it is limited to people 55 and older, so less than a quarter of California's workforce qualifies for transferring the cost basis to a new property.

More to the point, the people most likely to change jobs are younger workers, and none of them qualify.

As for Modoc to Beverly Hills, the difference in market value is added to your assessment. So if you bought a $50,000 home in the middle of nowhere that has appreciated to $300,000, and you trade up to a $3 million home, your new tax basis value is $2.75 million ($3 million minus $300k plus $50k). So it really doesn't make much difference in that case, practically speaking.

And that's when the corporate systems are configured to warn if you try to share something with or from the wrong account, and you shame the user into doing it right. Besides, this is usually only a problem for brand new users. Once you have a bunch of files uploaded to both accounts, you're not going to suddenly see the files from your personal account, and think, "Oh, this is where my work stuff goes".

It's only confusing if you have access to the same files from both accounts. And then, yeah, you'll get confused about which account is editing the file, but it's not as if it really matters in that situation.

And now, by suing a bunch of former employees, they're giving employees who might be thinking about jumping ship a reason to pause. Whether Apple wins or loses the lawsuit, Apple wins.

They know what they are doing. The UK government has never believed in privacy rights. They know they're doing a disservice to everyone. They don't care.

And the only rational answer is to cut them off. No more iCloud storage for anyone residing in the UK. And for anyone else, immediate denial of access from the minute you set foot in that country to the minute you leave. This is the only reasonable option.

And ultimately, this is the reason why Cloud storage shouldn't even exist. The minute you depend on someone else for storage, you can't completely 100% guarantee that your data is not in someone else's hands. If you store it on hardware you own, not built by the company that sold the backup software, then people will be able to verify that data is getting pushed to only a single destination, and if they started cheating and sending it to two different services, folks would likely notice. It's not perfect, but it makes back doors a lot harder to pull off without detection.

We need Time Machine for iOS, backing up over encrypted SMB to servers on our home network that we control. Fix that gap, and none of this matters anymore.

Not sure anyone is having to provide an incentive. While in small quantities, old models of Chromebook might cost as little as $200 on sale, chances are good that schools are spending more like $400 to $500 on average for their devices.

At just $600 for the Neo (the current educational price), the cost difference is minimal now. And if your teachers are already using Macs, that's one fewer platform to support. And if the hardware lasts longer (to be determined), then that could easily make up the remaining cost difference.

It really isn't complex. Google does it just fine. You have an account picker in the upper right corner, and you choose which account you're using to interact with that app. No big deal.

Having a mechanism to use one account for music and a different one for app stores? Now that's complex. That's adding special-casing for each app that needs to handle a separate account, instead of designing the auth system correctly to support multiple accounts to begin with. It's almost always easier to do it right than to add a bunch of special-case workarounds everywhere.

I also disagree with the claim that 99.9% of users only have one iCloud account — not because it isn't currently true, but because it is true only tautologically. If the system is designed so that no person can meaningfully use more than one account, then no one is ever going to create or attempt to use more than one account. What this means is that no businesses will ever use iCloud accounts for their internal messaging system, etc. Apple is basically shutting themselves out of the business ecosystem altogether by design.

They've designed the system in a way that makes what you're saying true, so of course it is true. But that doesn't mean that 99.9% of users would not *benefit* from it not being true. In an ideal world, iCloud would compete head-to-head with things like Office 365. They have the tech, but limiting it in ways that make it useless for business purposes means they aren't actually competing.

The root cause comes from these twelve words:

Authentication systems that allow only a single signed-in account are defective by design. Approximately 100% of all people have more than one account that they need to be signed in with.

I have half a dozen Google accounts for specific purposes — one for work, one for personal, one for electronic music tablets to which multiple people share physical access, a couple of old domain-specific accounts that got converted from free work profiles, and I'm probably forgetting some. Not all of these are useful, but if I could not have continuous access to work and personal, it would be a tremendous pain in the backside.

And encouraging people to merge profiles like that is nuts. It all but guarantees leaks. A confidentiality agreement typically protects things you learned in the scope of your employment, but after you are employed, if they continue to send you confidential information, there's a decent chance that you aren't under any legal obligation to keep that secret.

This is just a really bad way to do things, driven by a fundamental flaw in their architecture. And it doesn't just cause problems for Apple. It causes problems for their customers as well. I can't have a separate iCloud account for my work. I have to use a Google account. And more than that, when I hit the maximum number of AirTag devices (which I'm about to reach), I can't add additional iCloud accounts. I'm hard-capped at a single account.

While we're at it, the limitation of a single user per iPad stems from the same defective design process. All of those sorts of 1:1 mapping decisions between accounts, users, and devices need to be fundamentally rethought, because they were always a mistake. Maybe now that Apple is being bitten by it, they'll finally do the things that users have been asking them to do for the last decade. Bonus points if they lose their lawsuit because of a lack of a modicum of care on their part, because that just might be enough to wake the sleeping giant and get them to fix this mess.

That's not what I meant about taxes. What I meant is that in California, your property tax assessment is set at purchase time. If you move to a new house, your new property is assessed at the new purchase price. That tax situation can easily create a five-figures-per-year disincentive towards moving closer to your job when you change jobs. It may not be your employer's problem, but it absolutely affects where people choose to work.

The corollary of that statement is that if employers truly want the best people, they're fundamentally doing themselves a disservice by demanding too much in-person time, because not everyone is that easily mobile. It also tends to discriminate against older workers, who are more likely to own a home, have kids in school, have a working spouse, and have various other things that tie them to their current residence and make commuting harder.

Yes, it's a trade-off, but there's no evidence that it is in employers' best interests to force employees to make that trade-off, and that's the point I was trying to make.

No, you could always either change jobs or sell your house and take a huge property tax hit every year for the rest of your life.

For the overwhelming majority of roles in tech, the pandemic proved not only that those workers could be WFH, but that the company's efficiency on average went up when doing so. Yes, some workers' efficiency went down, usually because of having kids who were also at home, and struggling to manage that, but once that condition went away, there was even less reason why those workers needed to be in the office. This leaves only the people for whom physically commuting to the office was necessary to avoid distractions, which is nonzero, but is again specific to the person, not the role.

I mean, if you include things like custodians, maintenance, security, food service workers, and IT, then I suppose those roles have to be partially or completely on-site, but that's only because the roles are focused on physically maintaining the site. And most of those are outsourced to contractors in any large company anyway.

The employees who truly have to go onsite are mostly support staff, and even in a pre-pandemic, pre-WFH world, were likely to be paid far less than the ones who didn't.

Work travel is a convenience for the employer. It was never actually a requirement for working with people in other states or countries, but rather a sign that they don't know how to properly manage the time zone interactions. But yeah, if they're making you travel overseas to meet with other teams or partner companies or stuff like that, they should pay you more for having to be able to drop everything and be mobile like that. Flip side is that doing so tends to be discriminatory against people with kids, etc., so it is potentially problematic to do so. A better solution is to make work travel optional, and make it "bring your family" so that you spend a week doing work and then your family joins you for a week of paid vacation as compensation.

But the fact that your employer requires you to wear suits puts your employer in the "What decade is this?" category. That's 1980s territory right there, and makes me wonder if the reason you have to be there in person is simply because your company is so far behind the rest of the industry that they can't figure out how to enable remote work properly.

Defense contractor?

I can't speak for the GP, but making 4x my salary wouldn't be a motivator for me. The industry already pays stupid amounts of money. I have enough money to comfortably retire pretty much anywhere in the world, and I'm two decades from retirement age. So if I were in a situation where working from home 5 days a week were extremely important to me, rather than merely a case of me being annoyed at how much less work I get done post-pandemic, then yeah, I'd give that job up. But that's me, and everyone's situation is different.

Because they have decade-long commitments to leasing buildings, and that money isn't going to stop being spent just because people can't use them. Because they want to reduce headcount, and pissing off their workers is a great way to reduce attrition. Because their C-suite has large investments in companies that own buildings, which their companies lease, and if companies lease fewer buildings, it directly affects their personal bottom line. There are lots of reasons, most of which have jack s**t to do with efficiency.

It is well established that most tech companies got suddenly more efficient when everyone started working from home, at least on average, and that return-to-office mandates caused productivity to crater. Most of this is because not knowing whether your employees will be there turns out to be extremely useful, because it causes people to be judicious about scheduling meetings. As soon as we returned to the office, meeting culture came back, and we waste a quarter of our time doing nothing but status reports and listening to status reports.