I know quite a few people who refused to vote, in at least selected elections. Had zero to do with being cowardly or lazy. It's much about a realization that after studying the people on the ballot and what the candidates running are likely to do/support? None of them reflected anywhere near what they wanted to vote for.

If there's one thing I think that drug America down a slope to stupidity in politics, it was the huge push to "get out and vote, no matter what!" Swarms of totally uninformed people went to the polls and voted based on any number of ridiculous preferences -- more to get the little "I Voted!" sticker to wear around and feel good than anything else.

The "vote for the lesser of evils" thing isn't a great argument for voting either, ultimately. Sure, there are times when you dislike both candidates but feel like one is a "devil you know" and won't surprise you, while you may deem the other too risky of an unknown. But ... that's also a pretty strong reason Trump won re-election, if we're honest about it. Democrats didn't run a better opponent who people could "hold their nose and vote for" if they generally leaned more conservative in their political beliefs.

Our third party options are realistically non-starters, and that will continue unless one of them has their own huge financial resources to throw at running for office without needing their party's backing.

That's a matter of what you are used to and know. I can navigate LibreOffice much more readily than in Microsoft Office, as LibreOffice has been my standard for a long time.

What on Earth gives you that idea? Did you read what I wrote?

I mean, come on... This one screams class action. I just got an email link to a list of current class action suits I could click on to see if I qualified, and none of them were over as clear cut a complaint as a company purposely crippling software initially promised to keep working.

Why is that a surprise? We all predicted it from the very beginning. It's like being surprised when Christmas arrives every year.

Yep. The Fed report is total nonsense. It's yet another opportunity for the business real estate owners to try sabotaging remote work. I remember when my boss converted us from fully remote during the pandemic (which worked wonderfully!) to a hybrid schedule after the pandemic. His justification was that our office space was going to be reclaimed for the executives if we're not using it. A few months after we went hybrid, the executives reclaimed our office space for themselves anyway. They moved us to a dungeon at that point.

When we brought up that being present in the office didn't save our office space, and that going back fully remote would benefit us all, we got shot down. The new excuse was that the customer-facing employees were angry that they didn't get to work remotely, and we needed to appease them so they didn't quit. When we brought up that they were completely unskilled labor, and we were highly skilled professionals, the boss just shrugged it off. He never liked the idea of remote work, but is at least somewhat afraid of a revolt. However, many of us are close enough to retirement that he's betting we're not willing to rebel. However, he's not completely certain of that, so we "get" to compromise.

But yeah, the Fed report is complete and utter bullshit.

This was back in the 2012-2015 time frame ... so "buy them bigger drives" wasn't always a reasonable solution. A lot of them were using Macbook Airs that were great for their needs EXCEPT for the SSDs not being as big as one might prefer.

I'm sure I'm just an outlier here. But I bought a cheap big screen LCD smart TV at Best Buy 3-4 years ago. It was a Westinghouse branded set running Roku TV.

At some point, they updated the firmware to consolidate the TV guide in it so it displayed all the streaming content and your over the air TV stations in the same guide. (Used to be, you had to pick a Live TV icon/button to look at your OTA content in its own place.)

Ever since that happened, the TV forgets all my OTA stations regularly so I have to go into setup and re-scan for all of them, to get them to reappear in the guide. REALLY annoying.

It would be awesome if a total UI makeover for it results in fixing this problem.

I used to work for a company that used the "Dropbox for Business" product. (I think they renamed it along the way, so that may be its former or current product name?) Anyway, my memory of it is that it generally did what you paid for it to do -- but was horribly costly when existing contracts ran out and went up for renewal.

They seemed to use the business model that once you invested in using the platform and they had your data captive in it, they could crank up the prices because it was cheaper to keep it than to go through the painful process of switching.

I also recall a really frustrating detail; We kept wanting DropBox to enforce a disk quota on client PCs. Instead, it would happily keep syncing more content until it ran someone's disk space down to around 0 bytes free, causing OS crashes and a big hassle cleaning it back up again. Their only answer was, "We added the ability to only sync the actual files and folders on-demand, the first time a user clicks to view/open/edit one of them." Great, but that's not the same thing as a disk quota. We had people working with huge video files and it only took one to wipe out remaining disk space on some machines.

This one's interesting on several levels. I mean, for starters? We already know most competitive sports involve people taking various drugs and supplements in an attempt to get an edge. So it's a lie and a farce when the Olympic committee or the Major League Baseball association or anyone else doing pro sports claims we're watching athletes who achieved everything they do 100% naturally.

Viewed that way, I can see how holding a "performance enhanced Olympics" challenges that and calls it out. Essentially, it's saying, "Hey... we don't just randomly catch and disqualify a few athletes, to keep up a facade that the rest of them aren't doing any of it. We let you see what people can do, period, in a world where these drugs and supplements exist and people take them."

Where it gets questionable for me is ethically, when you start asking if it's right to dangle large sums of money in front of people to encourage them to take dangerous amounts of drugs and push themselves into potential health crisis? I think most of us know that normally, athletes would limit drug usage to what they believe is relatively safe. (They're surrounded by others who have been doing the same and can make a judgement call based on what's actually worked and happened to that group.) Start changing things to huge cash prizes to win ONE event, and now people will get reckless. "I only need that $30 million this one year and I can quit the whole thing."

Historically, knowledge-workers had little interest in unionizing because they knew they possessed the ability to learn and adapt. Sure, they had useful skills and knowledge. But much of I.T. is about possessing the ability to learn new things quickly. Everything's in constant change or evolution. The software package you use today will get a new update in a matter of weeks and then it has new functions or features have been moved around to new locations in it. The programming language you use may even get deprecated, demanding you learn whatever replaces it. The hardware you troubleshoot and support changes on a regular schedule.

Unions primarily benefit people who want to retain fair compensation for doing the same specific tasks repeatedly. They want reassurance they won't be forced to do anything new that's outside the scope of what they were hired for. Such a thing requires a new job title/role and a contract specifying exactly what they agree to as part of it.

I.T. workers usually felt if they were getting a bad deal someplace, the best move was to quit and find a new job where pay/benefits and/or working conditions were better. There wasn't so much fear or concern if a place used different software or tools than what they used before. That didn't matter much as long as they could learn the differences between it and what they had previously.

I think that might be changing in recent years, though? Now, you probably have an edge if your resume shows you already worked at companies people are familiar with and impressed by. But otherwise, they mostly want newer/younger people who they can pay lower wages to and get the most out of. Most places are starting to treat anyone in I.T. as more of a necessary expense than an asset to the business, and fewer and fewer pay well for your decades of experience.

I know that's just me being a bit sarcastic or mean. I don't wish unemployment or a tough time on any of my "people" working in I.T. or with an interest in computers and technology. That's been my thing since I was a kid.

But ... I spent the majority of my career working for small businesses and even working for myself (on-site consulting and computer service). When I finally got hired on with "big tech", I lasted only a year before resigning, because I couldn't bear the constant changing demands, stress, foolishness and teams getting pushed around by middle managers in competition with each other.

I noticed a huge rift in "big tech" employment between the "chosen ones" and everyone else employed there. If you got into management in some capacity, or you were important enough in software development - you were compensated really well and made to feel like your job was fairly secure. The others doing such roles as deskside support or audio-visual support were in another world. They were just herded around by project managers who in turn would change direction on initiatives on a dime, when managers over them declared they had some new direction to go. For them, employment was a revolving door of hiring and firing (after tossing people on "performance improvement programs" to pretend they cared).

So when the big tech shakeup starts involving the middle managers and those all comfortable with lots of stock options and a high salary because they help code the site's web portals? It's hard to be THAT sympathetic. Time to learn how the rest of us in the career feel.