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.

At this point, I've stopped giving politicians the benefit of the doubt. If they support regulations that look like they have the potential to drag the United States into becoming an authoritarian hellhole, I assume that they're actually trying to do just that. It makes it a lot easier to convince myself to vote for another candidate in every election afterwards, even if that candidate isn't as good in other areas, because at least the other candidate isn't trying to destroy our basic freedoms.

Look up the sponsors of the bill, and vote against them from now on, whether it's a primary or a general election. Repeat until ousted.

Wait, what do you mean that's wrong?

Sorry you feel that way, but it's a reasonable take on reality. There are two types of situations: Situations where you want to learn about X and situations where you need to know the answer to some very specific, but narrow question about X. For the second question, giant, ad-laden websites where the answer is buried in a pile of unrelated information are basically a disservice. You're paying for the information not just by watching their ads, but by wading through all the other crap.

In an ideal universe, there would be some sort of micropayment system, where websites earned money just from people visiting, and it came out of a fund paid into by ISPs, and the amount paid would be proportional to how many sites the Internet users of the world hit that day, and it would have some way of avoiding payment to link farms and other similar garbage content. And this would be an international system, and it would be designed in a way that somehow perfectly preserved privacy while maintaining auditability. I have no idea what that would look like, of course.

In the absence of such a scheme, though, there will always be a tug of war for power between content creators and browser/search companies, because the latter are trying to do what is best for the user in the short term, and the former are trying to get paid to protect what is best for the user in the long term. And I'm really not sure how to solve that problematic power dynamic, except by suggesting that perhaps that tug of war might actually be the solution, because it means neither side has too much power and control.

Apparently not, or at least the web version refused when I asked.

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

Wait, uneducated people can't get high now? Things sure have changed since I was young. Back then, it was mostly the uneducated kids getting high. :-)

These are the same lazy dolts that call them selves "Software Engineer" yet don't know shit on how software actual works beyond an ID, don't understand software developer ethics, and think the can be sloppy because "computers have a lot of RAM" completely blind to the idea there janky ass software isn't the only thing running on a computer.

Modern IDEs have lead to this industry being full undisciplined half wits.

I literally do. Stop being bad at your job.

"I know it is counter to modern coding practices"
it is not. It's literally best practice. Coders not doing this are bad at their job, and should be fired.