They kept harping about climate change and all they did was shut off ways to make energy. They mainly shut down, did hardly any building. This "crisis" was inevitable and of their own making. Now Europeans have to sleep in the same bed they shit in.

When I started they'd just finished digesting Sun. They were already turning into a pretty shitty place to work. They were starting to do the H1B offshoring thing like my other old employer: IBM. However, Oracle really got it going in the mid 2000's. They ginned up tons of white-guy layoffs so brown-guys could be subbed in. It was super obvious they were literally "sending all the jobs overseas" (well, to India, not some vague destination in the EU or something). They certainly were not hiding the fact internally. They started making everyone's job just a little harder and just a little more shitty in some ways. For example, people working the weekends were forced to come in during the week just to fuck them a bit and get them mad so they'd quit and make room for more Indians.

I'm amazed anyone but Indians and fucking MBA frat boys are left at Oracle. They SUCK now. They laid off just about everyone from Sun. They laid off all the American engineers that knew anything. It's just a strip mall corporation now that tries to buy low in India and overcharge Americans for their shitty RDBMS that's gone down the toilet. Oracle ASM and RAC are GARBAGEWARE that run like shit and have fucked up the operating environment to the point it's almost un-runnable. Oracle 8 was really the last/best version of Oracle RDBMS. That's why they have to bundle up Exadata systems as "custom racks" because nobody could make that pile of horse shit run without it being pre-built by Oracle and nobody would be dumb enough to use raw storage / ASM (dumbasses at Oracle forgot DirectIO was around by 2003 pretty much in every filesystem, so cache control is not a valid excuse). Well, okay DBAs that were never sysadmins might be dumb enough and I've heard a few tout ASM && RAC back when they first came out. Now, the DBAs I know all are miserable and wish like hell for the days before those shitty Oracle components were pushed as the default.

Context engineering for modern agents. The distinction is what you can imagine. In context engineering, you're dynamically altering the entire context window instead of just prompts added to them.

As for "of value", perhaps the system and agent prompts. That's a pretty fast-moving target. But since Claude has locked down Opus access to just API keys for external tools, those are really just for trying to glean ideas from.

Literally all of what I described are exactly the sorts of tricks corporations pay to work around taxes. And in general, they're better at finding loopholes than governments are at closing loopholes. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's likely to be way, way, WAY harder to pull off than you think, at least when it comes to subscription-based streaming services.

Plus there's not a sale when you're doing subscription-based streaming. It is no different than going to another country and watching it and coming back with the memory of having watched it in a theater, minus the actual travel, plus the pixels having briefly appeared on a screen somewhere else. Most people will balk at paying tariffs without actually having something in the end for their troubles.

That's why it automatically sets up the old address as an alias to the new. Permanently, if I don't miss my guess (there's no reason it shouldn't).

Lets you take your time updating everything dependent on it, or not bother at all.

It's not about smoking. It's about what the government is allowed to tell you what and what not to do.

Nothing new about this at all. Pay for the business version with your own domain, and it's been possible for as long as I've run things. This is *exactly* the same thing, including using the old address as an alias. They just expanded it to free accounts.

It's not exactly rocket surgery, after all.

While I'm sure most folks like Meta's Instagram and Facebook, Google's YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, I personally wouldn't mind seeing it all disappear or otherwise under go radical changes. Of the ones mentioned, YouTube could just cut out the forums on the video section and it would just be a video streaming platform and not social media.

The only way to keep teens off the platform is to demand government ID to create an account or otherwise get a third party to do the same thing. I think the majority of adults are so addicted they'll turn their information over to keep their accounts. The ones that don't, well, they probably were not the target audience anyway.

At the end of the day, governments don't want people to be online with knowing who everyone is. That's the direction this is all going and will probably end up. Sad Sad Sad.

Well, that's great then. I pay for a subscription. I pay nothing extra for the imported content. So no tariff.

But wait, the subscription is from a foreign company. Why isn't anyone paying taxes on this? We should tax it all because the company is foreign.

Ah, now the company has an in-country subsidiary, and you're paying that company. And suddenly the fees are no longer taxed. Instead, the content that comes from overseas is taxed. But the in-country company pays a licensing fee that is an infinitesimal fraction of the subscription fee that you pay. Then, they pay a huge "trademark licensing fee" for the use of the Netflix/Hulu/Paramount Plus/* name, so that nearly all of the money you pay for your subscription goes to the parent company untaxed.

Good luck sorting it all out and proving that they're violating the law.

So no, for entirely virtual goods and intellectual property, it's almost never that simple. In fact, it is ridiculously hard, and enforcement is downright nightmarish. The term "Hollywood accounting" didn't become a household term for no reason.

The tax will be paid by the business and of course passed on to the consumer. That's precisely how sales taxes work in the USA. Isn't that how VAT works in Europe? Collected by the business and passed along to government?

Besides, ALL taxes are paid by consumers. Businesses don't pay taxes, their customers do.

Hmm, sales tax isn't charged twice. Europe, it's rolled into the sticker price and paid by the business. USA, it's a line item on the end of the transaction, collected by the business and paid to the government.

A tax on a streaming service would essentially be a sales tax.

I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner, but then there was a moratorium on this that did just expire, so now is the time to tax the people more. It's the fever dream of every government everywhere.

Don't worry, soon everyone that doesn't produce anything for themselves will be doing their best to tax US streaming corporations. All it will do is drive up costs for everyone, as our government will probably see the Europeans do it and say, hey, why leave money on the table, and start taxing us state side as well.

Just another reason to not bother with streaming any more then I have to.

... the America's Cup challenge team remains intact.

All true. But office work is essential to maintain "the corporate culture". Whatever that is. Something akin to military culture with its command hierarchy, as far as I can tell. (Probably why there's so many ex-military people climbing the corporate ladder.) An order gets barked down the line and absolute unquestioning loyalty is required. Maybe if we are all taking the next hill, charging into machine gun fire. But not in most enterprise decision making. There's usually time to stop and think of better solutions.

The competition is easily keeping up with Claude Code. It's their LLM that's impressive, not their terminal application.
Even OpenCode is keeping up well with Claude Code, and it works with any LLM.