Duh... I can't add. But the observation is still valid.

That would be interesting. Some of that is available in IRS filings for instance, in 2023:
Their expenses were $39,845,284, with

• 8.3% ($3,287,433) of that being Executive Compensation (not counting Baker's $6,223,660)
• 25.4% ($10,106,669) for Other Salaries and Wages

Of course a lot of the increasing expenses over the years related to Mitchell Baker's ever ballooning compensation. I guess we'll find out this year if the new CEO is sucking up as much of the budget. But that's over $10M just for executives and the questionable value that they provide... all of the rest of the employees add up to less total cost.

This sort of advertising, especially, is a cancer on our society and the entire human condition. It's trading down human experiences and interactions (like friendly smiles, etc) for profit until they no longer have value and positive meaning to people. The obvious long-term outcome of this is a worse world and the people pushing it must know that it is unambiguously evil.

I just freshly installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a piece of hardware only to find that systemd-resolved fails resolving after a hour of uptime due to some bizarre nonstandard way of handing server responses*. I've been using linux since before Slackware, so I guess I'm old, but I haven't seen this level of brokenness (that wasn't tied to lack of specific hardware support) in decades.

What's being pushed out to "stable" releases of mainsteam distributions under the banner of SystemD is some seriously amateur-level stuff.

* I can't be arsed to find the discussion of the error right now, but it has the obligatory Poettering reply that everybody else in the world is doing it wrong and that putting the resolver into a non-responsive state is the expected and correct thing to do.

That sounds like criminal conspiracy. Until people involved in actions like this aren't able to successfully hide behind the corporation anymore, this sort of thing will happen again and again.

It doesn’t sound like fun to me, but what do you think is responsible for these jankers having to go to such lengths to get what would amount to a few bucks worth of product if it wasn’t illegal. It sounds like a medical problem, honestly. Once you get the cops involved, now you have two problems.

This is what happens when law enforcement gets to interfere with our country's healthcare. The idea that an entire society has to suffer poorer healthcare because a minuscule fraction of the population will use a drug to have fun is something only authoritarian goons could dream up.

The same situation is currently playing out with several ADHD drugs as we speak (mass shortages based on arbitrary DEA-imposed restrictions). It has also held back research into various psychedelic drugs as effective treatments for PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, and others.

The DEA has got to go, but a good first start would be keeping them far away from our medicines and healthcare. The idea that we have to have an entire office of armed police with the sole aim of making sure that a small subset of the population can't get high or self-medicate is asinine.

You totally should (within reason). Intuition is a cool property of pattern-matching neural networks like our brain. 'Reason' comes about when we can back up the outputs with logic, but there's often value in outputs that we don't have a framework for reasoning them through.

Often intuition is wrong, but surprisingly often it's right. Of course, without the ability to reason it through you can't tell which it will be.

Yeah, anything coming from Google is automatically suspect. "Creepy advertising company finds a new intrusive way to collect more personal user data from deployed products. Shares some of it with users."

Working on cool science and tech for Google must be as frustrating as working for Microsoft Research must be. Do cool research to either have it completely ignored or twisted into some evil money grab.

Mine does that whenever I use my (company issued) thunderbolt docking station. Apparently when I switch between booting with that station plugged in or not, that changes the "hardware configuration" enough that it needs the recovery key. I've basically memorized the stupid recovery key at this point.

You joke, but when I had to use LabView for a while I just kept requesting bigger and more monitors to make it tolerable. You can push things into sub-VIs to a certain extent, but you always end up with the screen-too-small problem as the complexity increases. Ugh... nightmares...

Of course they'll bring themselves down in the process, but it won't be because of legal repercussions (they're mostly exempt from those). They are ultimately dependent on the society that they're strangling to death and when they choke the last breath out of it they'll find out that their wealth and power was derived from that society itself.

It's all so predictable and easily avoided. If they were able to be content with owning 90% of everything instead of demanding 100%, their little parasitic arrangement could go on indefinitely.

The traditional motivation of the Amish is to retain independence from the English (non-Amish society) and thus they are supposed to reject anything, like certain technology, that makes them dependent on non-Amish society. If they could build their own engines and produce their own fuel, they'd be free to use the technology. Of course, practicality and pragmatism lead to exceptions...

A demand-side solution isn't terribly feasible when we (as a society) are still fully committed to squeezing the working populace for every last cent while keeping wages stagnant and raising prices across the board. If the solution depends on the population replacing their cars and they can't afford to do so, are we just screwed?