I'm not sure I completely understand you.

I would really like to see the catalog operators be held responsible for the new products that are sold through their publications, even if those are third-party sellers.

Yes, I am aware that this would cause a lot of headache for a whole lot of people. Frankly at this point I don't really care. These catalogs are not performing due diligence on what they're offering, and while it costs money to actually perform testing to ensure good products and it limits the number of function-alike competing products or badge-engineered products, what we're seeing now is an illusion of choice coupled to a race to the bottom quality-wise. If the catalogs for new products are held to account for what they sell then they may sell less crap and actually comparing between products would be easier for the consumer.

And that might be the crux of the problem. Bad enough to shill for Tesla given Musk, worse with the recent situation with ABC bowing to pressure on Jimmy Kimmel. Remember, that suspension was literally only three weeks ago. Those who canceled subscriptions are unlikely to go see it, it would come as no surprise if even those who weren't prepared to cancel subscriptions would simply shrug off purposely going to it, and given the extremely long time between movies it's not like they're particularly fresh in the minds of the audience anyway.

I have fond memories of the 1982 movie, even though as a child I was too young to have seen it in the theater and had to wait for it to be out on home video. I had low expectations for the 2010 sequel and frankly those low expectations were disappointingly met. I had no specific plans to ever see another sequel, and to top it off I'm not enamored with Disney at all right now as a final nail in the coffin.

Perhaps I am projecting here, but if the bulk of the potential audience doesn't care about the franchise and the company behind it has made itself undesirable then it's no surprise if it's not getting the sort of box office returns that they predicted.

grok? old enough to remember when grok was just a chess program.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.

That's what I said. You needed an extra board to keep the time between boots and most people didn't bother with one.

So every time you booted up your computer if you didn't enter the date and time (and a lot of people didn't bother) then your files were dated January 1, 1980.

If the Russians and North Koreans haven't started doing this yet I'm sure they'll be getting into it very shortly.

It's too effective as a weapon to leave it undeveloped.

As a Brit, I was surprised to see the UK as a destination of choice.

The current Labour government here often seems to be criticised for being ideological and not pragmatic. In particular, they seem to prefer policies that tax "the rich" and businesses in one way or another, yet not large, relatively wealthy groups like pensioners or the homeowners who have lucked out and now live in a million-plus property that most younger people will never be able to afford.

There's also quite a lot of red tape for businesses here, maybe not compared to some of our neighbours in Europe, but certainly compared to places like the US and probably parts of Asia too.

Obviously some of this is politics and maybe the policies are not so surprising coming from a party that in theory represents the working class. However, it is surprising that entrepreneurs would be attracted to a culture like this at a time when we expect to have this government for another four years still.

A lot of the older DOS systems (XT and the like) didn't have a clock built in. If you wanted one you had to buy a separate card and run a little program as part of your autoexec.bat to set the current date and time.

Otherwise, unless you specifically entered the date and time when you booted up the system, your current date and time was midnight of January 1, 1980.

So a great many DOS files are dated January 1, 1980 regardless of when they were actually written.

> Making Alexa is not THAAAAT hard

Last year, the WSJ reported that Amazon lost $25 billion on Alexa from 2017-2021, partially from selling devices below cost but mostly because of development costs. It seems like it's harder than you think.

Locally, yes, but the moisture that is accumulating previously evaporated and went somewhere else. What will the impact be there? Very hard to say.

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.