Mentioned two already, Aldi and Lidl.

They've been particularly successful in penetrating countries that have traditionally suffered from a lack of competition, like Australia.

To be fair, once you've a few years of experience in a profession, almost no-one gives a crap about your education. Being able to demonstrate you can do a good job becomes more important. Certs become more important and that's mainly because some licensing agreements give the company discounts if they can maintain X number of certified professionals. Obvious exceptions excluded, like being a pilot for example.

Not that I disagree with your point mind you, and to add to it the over-commercialisation of education has been detrimental to it's quality.

Nope, Microsoft is going to let it wither and die a slow, undignified death as they drain every penny they can out of it.

It's been the strategy with their gaming software for years now. Buy up a successful studio, kill anything that made it successful, release half arsed sequels that are DLC'd, P2W'd and generally geared to maximise profit over enjoyment and when that is no longer working, sack any remaining staff and shelve the studio. Case in point, Bethesda.

They've already said they have no interest in making hardware but they still want branded hardware out there. So what they want is someone else to have the expense of designing, building and supporting the hardware whilst they control the brand.

It would be a mercy if they Old Yeller'd the Xbox right now, but they won't as there's still blood to drain from it and lets face it, the fanboys will keep paying because they're too invested, financially and emotionally to stop now.

The Playstation has the same problem with a few notable exceptions, Sony still does some decent games, they are still willing to piss huge sums up the wall and the Japanese government will never let Sony fail no matter how much they piss up the wall.

Libre office is fine for personal use, it's improved in leaps and bounds in the last 10 odd years. I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of skill or experience to get them off the MSFT merry-go-round.

The problem isn't for the home users, they've always been on the "bend over and take it" track when it comes to MS, it's just that now they've got some real viable options which will end up hurting MS but I digress... the issue is business users. For business users the problem isn't the software for the end user (word, excel, et al) it's not even the issues with supporting FOSS, it's mostly the back end. The costs of running an on-site MS Exchange setup is stupendous and not to mention that it's a huge vector for cyber attacks let alone the costs of running an equivalent platform, not even Google really competes with Exch/Office and that's just the tip of the iceberg (OK, a large enough tip on its own), it's really on the back end where MS has businesses by the short and curlies. Whilst I agree businesses should be better protecting themselves against predatory vendors, it's not such a simple thing to do in practice.

I really think we need another serious probe into Microsoft, in fact the entire licensing industry. Shine a huge light onto it and we'll be horrified at what we find.

8 years ago, I may have agreed with you. Now you literally have a secret police force nabbing US citizens or whoever they don't like off the street and deporting them to a foreign prison without trial.

Your highest offices are openly ignoring the law... what makes you think they'll stop at shooting just one US citizen (and posthumously declaring them a traitor with no evidence after the fact). They're already sticking guns into the faces of preachers. Ironic as a German Preacher named Martin Niemoeller warned us of just this kind of thing 90 odd years ago.

That's really more akin to fascism rather than socialism, by which you of course mean Marxism.

A simple cow analogy,
Communism: you have two cows, the government takes both and gives you some milk.
Fascism: you have two cows, the government takes both and sells you some milk.

With the US, this really is a problem of it's own making. Not just with Trump, he's just the ultimate expression of a deep seeded problem in the US. The notion that someone who is poor or doesn't have enough money is in that situation entirely due to their own fault. That the poor deserve their lot. Makes people who benefit from it feel better however it's a negative feedback loop as costs rise (in no small part due to Trump) those who were previously comfortable start to suffer and struggle to reconcile this with the philosophy that it's OK to hate the poor because it's their fault they're poor.

Whilst I agree that it's not unique to India, it tends to be endemic across Asia with the notable exception of a few ex colonies like Singapore and the Philippines.

However as an Australian who's lived in Britain for the last 10 years, I think you misunderstand British politeness. A Brit will definitely say no to you, even directly. However the penchant tends to be for understatement. "I don't think that's a good idea" is a nicer way of saying "you're utterly daft for even thinking it" or "Things didn't quite go according to plan" means "it resulted in the death of a family of 4".

Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Yes, this stuff is moving digital as well. At different speeds in different countries.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Isn't the premise of a dollar store (or pound store) that everything is a single price...

Otherwise it's just a cut price store and frankly, the Germans have shown us with their cut price supermarkets that they key to running a successful one is hyper organisation. Everything runs like clockwork, no confusion, Everything goes into it's assigned slot. Money is saved by reducing overall work (I.E. the staff just put boxes on the shelves and let customer take the products out themselves), reducing costs and creating consistency (I.E. if national regs state the fridge must be x Degrees C, the fridges are exactly X degrees C) then passing the savings onto the customer. There's a reason Aldi and Lidl are growing so fast in so many countries.

Running a disorganised cut price shop seems counter-intuitive as you'll just drive customers away.

Awww didums... did I point out an unfortunate fact you can't refute... or even refuse (for the uninitiated, refuting requires proof, you can refuse without proof, also repudiate)

India, in my experience, is a society where the word "no" is the dirtiest word imaginable. It's unconscionable that anyone might say no to anything. Doubly so to their boss.

So every answer is a yes, doesn't matter if it's "yes I can" or "yes I cant" which leads to situations where anything deliverable is impossible to... well.. deliver. Any corner that can be cut gets cut, cut again and someone gets out an angle grinder to see how much can be shaved off after that. After things aren't delivered the finger pointing game begins with everyone shrugging and saying "it's not me". Meetings are convened with as many people as can be drawn into them as possible in order to dilute the chances that an individual can be held accountable and to reduce the chances that an individual might get an action item at the end of it. The meeting usually ends with the scheduling of another meeting with even more people in it. Of course, no-one can even consider saying "no" to any of this.

No is the "rudest" thing you can say to an Indian.

So is it any surprise that India's aviation sector is in shambles, thousands of flights cancelled because they can't meet schedules because ultimately, they just cant say "no, this is not possible, we can't meet that demand/schedule/deadline". So they're blaming safety regs, hey it's not so bad when you live in a society where life is cheap and almost everyone believes in reincarnation, plus all the airliners are foreign built so they can cop the blame for any problems.

India's aviation sector isn't the only one suffering from the yes problem.... it's just the most obvious because safe aviation is notoriously cautious and conservative, hence you have to say "no" a lot.

Fascism is far right... that's when government and corporate power merge.

But you know that. You just don't want to admit that your favourite corrupt government is fascist.

Unless you're honestly trying to say Trump is "left" because he keeps compelling companies to do things for him.

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.