"assigned to them"? What an absurd phrase. They bought it, they paid for it. They may have paid to have it built in the first place. Or they may have paid someone else who paid to have it built and only did so because they were confident that they'd be able to sell it when they wanted to. Maybe they inherited it from somebody who bought or built it, confident that they'd be able to leave it to their children after their death.

Landlords don't have property "assigned to them". Where did you ever get that notion? Nobody would ever buy or build anything as expensive as a house or an apartment building if they thought it could be taken from them without compensation. Buildings exist ONLY because the people building them and the people contracting for them to be built are confident in the existence of property rights that guarantee that the building can be exchanged for money, whether rent or sale, at the owner's discretion.

If you take away the confidence that the owner of a building can exchange it for money, whether in the form of rent or sale, then you destroy the construction industry. The residential construction industry simply cannot exist if people who would pay for residential construction believe the legal system won't support their plan to exchange a building for money.

Also, the statement "a landlord doesn't do any labor" shows a profound ignorance of landlords. A really staggering level of ignorance that really really raises the question of how can a person be so fantastically ignorant.

But you can choose not to become a doctor, or a construction worker or a water treatment plant worker.

If it becomes possible to demand certain goods and services with no obligation to pay for them just by saying "it's a human right to receive that good or service" and no recourse for the provider of the goods and services when people flagrantly take what they "need" with no intention of paying, than it'll become obvious that those are the sort of goods and services that nobody should go into a career of providing.

Confiscating the work and property of people who currently have it is pretty much a one time thing. After you've made it clear that anyone providing those things is subject to having them confiscated without compensation, you pretty much kill any future hope of new people going into those lines of business, and anybody who can get out of those lines of business will be looking for alternatives.

If you're satisfied with never another apartment building being built, and with never a house being built without the future resident paying in full in advance, then go ahead and try to make it legal to for any current occupant to stop paying and claim that their current occupancies justifies their forever future occupancy.

But if you think it might be nice for new buildings to get built, don't try to justify why the moment somebody moves into it, the people who paid for it to be built have no recourse to compel payment from the people who will live in it.

I have read documentation that was clearly written by somebody who thought nobody was ever going to read or use it. It was worthless, but it sure would have been nice to have some actual useful documentation. This was pre-LLM by at least a decade or two, so I'm pretty sure it was written by a human who generated "slop". And now I'm not sure how to differentiate "AI slop" from human "slop".

No, they can just sit idly by and let the Republicans do what they want. If that's your preference, enjoy, because it's what we've got. Depends if you want to solve problems or just enjoy being able to assign blame. I think a lot of people enjoy being able to assign blame.

In many states it didn't really matter, Trump wasn't going to win the electoral votes. But if you live in a state where a republican win was a sure thing, you had better options than just handing over your state's electoral votes to Trump and saying "not my fault, I'm a democrat"

But what if it doesn't require a meeting?

What if I intend to send you an email after the meeting, but might decide to use a group text chat instead and will only resort to scheduling a meeting if it turns out that it's taking too long to reach an understanding via written communications.

"Touch base offline" means "We need to resolve this, but not right now, and we don't need the participation of everyone on this particular call in order to work out the details. The answer or decision is important, but it's a better use of everyone's time to continue on to the next topic right now without agreeing on that answer/decision." but it doesn't imply a specific form of communication or a specific time. "Touch base offline" is a lot more concise than trying to precisely express exactly how that not-right-now decision/discussion will take place.

Oh, and what makes you think that "workflow" and "task" are interchangeable? The workflow might be a diagram I plan to draw and send to you after the meeting which may or may not require a phone call to fine tune the exact steps in the diagram. "Meet to discuss this task" might be entirely incorrect. A workflow might include a series of manual tasks by different teams or it may require some automation to be developed or it may just be how you and I plan to organize and distribute the work between the two of us. It might be that somebody mistakenly thinks "workflow" and "task" are synonyms, but it might also be somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.

Not just your house. In my neighborhood somebody had an ICE car parked in their garage. It caught fire and not only destroyed their home entirely but did enough damage to the neighbors on both sides that their homes were also condemned.

That was probably over ten years ago and it's all been rebuilt now, but it took over a year. It would suck to lose your home for a year because your neighbor parked an ICE vehicle in their garage.

Still, everybody around me does park their cars in their garages and a lot of them are EVs, although fewer than the ICEs, and there was only one fire in the 25 years I've lived in the same neighborhood.

So the score is:
1 ICE fire destroyed three homes
0 EV fires destroyed zero homes

Of course they can, it's one of the only two things they do.

Non-rechargeable batteries do one thing: generate electricity from chemical reactions.

Rechargeable batteries do two things: generate electricity from chemical reactions and consume electricity to drive chemical reactions from a lower energy energy state to higher energy state.

Are you maybe confusing batteries with capacitors? You might be correct in saying that capacitors cannot generate electricity since they simply allow electrons to move around in a way that transfers energy into and out of an electric field. But batteries definitely do not contain all the electricity that flows out of them, they generate it on demand from chemical reactions that generate an electric potential.

I suspect that most people neither under nor over estimate the size of Africa because most people just don't care enough to estimate the size of Africa.

But I'm at a complete loss as to why you think estimating the size of Africa has anything to do with estimating the potential of Africa. Centuries of history provide strong evidence that size of countries/continents/islands has very little correlation to what they have the potential to accomplish.

And estimates by foreigners of the size of countries/continents/islands has even less to do with the potential of those countries than their actual size does.

Do you think Taiwan or Japan or the UK have been negatively impacted by people looking at maps and thinking that they're smaller than Africa? I don't think people looking at maps and saying "that region isn't very big" affects the region's potential negatively at all, and making it look bigger on the map isn't going to undo the non-existent negative impact at all.

Snowflakes as a form of frozen water are very beautiful, so using the word as an insult is weird.

With a very specific interpretation it is a valid insult, but neither SirSlud nor the Anonymous Coward I'm replying to seem to know what that interpretation is, so they both are failing pretty hard in their attempt to be insulting.

Kind of like trying to insult someone by calling them a star or brilliant or genius or gorgeous. Any of those words could be an insult under certain circumstances with the right context, but just throwing the word around in the wrong context isn't a successful insult.

Close to true. There are two main types of companies, non-profits (often referred to as 501c.3 in the US after the relevant section of the tax code) and for-profits (including a variety of structures such as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs as well as as publicly traded)

It's pretty much a tautology that if you create a for profit company your primary goal is to make a profit. Lots of non-profit companies are simply trying to not lose so much money that they can no longer do whatever it is their primary goal is.

If you weren't trying to make a profit by doing any given activity, you'd probably just do it and not bother with the paperwork and legal fees of creating a company.

Same goes for anyone with a job, BTW. You can generally work without getting paid, it's called volunteering and lots of people do it. If you've got a job it's because your primary goal is to get paid.

Companies aren't sentient, they're just organized groups of people working together. Groups of people are just like individual people, some are working for the money and some are working because they want the outcome of the work even if they lose money in the process.

You provided a link to another comment you posted speculating that Microsoft overspent on Nvidia hardware. I'm not saying you're wrong, but referencing your own previous speculation doesn't count as evidence.

I agree it's quite possible that Nvidia (and Nvidia shareholders, including anybody who has any S&P index fund in their 401k, IRA or pension fund) has benefited from overhyped AI spending. If you have invested in an S&P 500 index fund it's possible that you had or will have profits from Nvidia balanced by losses from companies that overspent on Nvidia hardware that they don't really need.

But, your speculation doesn't give any evidence that Microsoft would have been more profitable if they had bought less Nvidia hardware and instead spent that money on employee salaries to keep these people working on whatever they were doing.

Actual evidence would need two things, 1) evidence that the Nvidia hardware is sitting unused right now and will continue to be unused or underutilized and not helping generate revenue, and 2) evidence that the people who have been laid off would have been generating increased revenue relative to what Microsoft will see after the layoffs.

For #2 to be believable we'd need to know what products/services the laid off people were working on and whether those products/services are being discontinued or cancelled. Right now Microsoft still seems to be full steam ahead on their AI bets, so it's too soon to say whether betting on AI is going to lose money for Microsoft relative to continuing to employ these people on something non-AI-related

It doesn't have to cover their salary, it just needs to cover their expenses. I've been employed full time for less than 30 years and have invested a fraction of every single paycheck I've ever received. If I were laid off today, my investments won't cover my salary but they certainly will cover my annual expenses for the rest of my life. The extra money that my job provides is nice, but I never budgeted my life around spending my entire salary even when I was making less than $30k/year.

Obviously people who are earlier in their career or who haven't prioritized investing over spending every dollar of every paycheck will need to find another job.

Well, I've done zero research into exactly which employees were laid off, but Azure seems to be a huge financial success and Microsoft got into that business LONG after Amazon. I imagine it must have taken a huge number of people to overcome that head start and become a major player in the public cloud market.

But how much is left to build in Azure? All the stuff the customers really want is already there. Sure they need people to keep supporting it and enhancing bits around the edges, but do they really need as many people as it took to build it from nothing when AWS was already raking in huge amounts of revenue from their public cloud customers?

Seems to me perfectly reasonable that when Microsoft decided to build a competitor to AWS that they decided they needed a lot of people to do it RIGHT NOW, not just a small number of people delivering a feature-poor prototype twenty years later.

Perhaps, but my father was laid off and subsequently died when I was twelve years old. I found the experience extremely motivating because I felt I had no choice but to work hard, spend frugally and become financially self sufficient. And as a result I could have retired by the time I was 50, but continue to work because the work is interesting and pays well. Your alleged "lower achievement rates of single parent raised children" is heavily dependent on the personality traits of the children and of the single parent. Lower achievement is not a given. Some people respond to adversity by giving up, others respond by trying harder than they might have if there had been no adversity.

It does seem like there is a fair amount of narrative telling people that they can't win so they might as well not try. I suppose it can be hard to overcome that and choose not to give up.

Could be a good thing. Way too much of the value of the S&P 500 is tied up in such a tiny fraction of the total number of companies, and MSFT is one of the giants.

If you're right and this kind of management destroys the company it'll open up opportunities for other companies.

Seems like we've got some doomsayers claiming that a few large companies control everything and everybody else is screwed, and we've got other doomsayers claiming that the few large companies are being fatally mismanaged and will be pillaged for a few quarters worth of profits.

Certainly there were companies that seemed unstoppable 50-100 years ago that have collapsed in value to nothing or near nothing, so it could happen to Microsoft. But looking at their stock chart from the 80s through today, it looks like aside from a small bump in the late 90s it was very flat from the 80s through around 2016 or 2018 followed by massive growth. Only time will tell whether current management decisions will cause it to come crashing back down and open the door for other companies to benefit from Microsoft's short sighted leadership.