3) Older people make younger people more cynical, faster.
They put up with no shit, call bullshit bullshit in public and don't kowtow to stupidity. This does not sit well many managers.

Why I go to Starbucks? .... being outside the US, I don't. I simply don't.

It's not good coffee. Most drinks are simply sugar bombs. And baristas that have checked out of caring, simply overheat/not care about the coffee.

This, and the well known tactic of setting up ghost stores to try and force popular local stores out of business mean I'll not venture in to one. (ok, once every two years because my partner needs to pee and its the only thing open. Then I will sample an Espresso or Flat White and be disappointed, again).

If you're putting robots in the kitchens, that coffee better be 1 "local currency unit" or less. Not 5 to 10 "local currency units".

Closed standards are a sure way to stifle innovation and kill market penetration. More effectively than any pirating ever could.

Minidisk? Zune? Betamax? I haven't had enough coffee to list all the examples. And if I did, I would probably die of caffeine poisoning first. Side note, why does Sony's name come up a lot in these types of lists ... oh yeah, having a foot in content AND device camps. "Man who sit on fence get splinters". Content division's paranoia cripples the device and stops the device technology from taking over the world.

The only other thing that Closed Standards are good for is keeping prices high. Which is a contributing factor to "death of a product".

"So letâ(TM)s say you work at a company, and they have an OKR 'use AI to improve productivity'. If you arenâ(TM)t familiar with OKRs, they are something that your manager tells you to do, and the more of them you do the more likely you are to get a raise, or bonus, or at least keep your job. Sometimes they are flat out assigned to you, sometimes you get to pick off a list, sometimes you and your manager come up with them together. You manager likely has an OKR handed down to them to get their employees to use more AI, so this isnâ(TM)t a pure blue sky thought experiment. It is a realistic situation. "

As someone that's been in low level management - this is horseshit. If HR are telling you this, they are lying. They DO NOT GIVE promotions. Promotions are hinted at, promised, but ARE NEVER given. It's just to make you work harder.

Once you realise that, you can be free.

Quote Red Dwarf:

        Lister: [Kryten has been informed that he is about to reach his expiry date and will be shut down] How can you just lie back and accept it?
        Kryten: Oh, it's not the end for me, sir, it's just the beginning. I have served my human masters and now I can look forward to my reward in Silicon Heaven.
        Lister: Silicon what?
        Kryten: Surely you've heard of Silicon Heaven?
        Lister: Has it got anything to do with being stuck opposite Brigitte Nielsen in a packed lift?
        Kryten: No. It's the electronic afterlife. It's the gathering place for the souls of all electronic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters, hairdryers. It's our final resting place.
        Lister: I don't mean to say anything out of place here, Kryten, but that is completely whacko Jacko. There is no such thing as 'Silicon Heaven'.
        Kryten: Then where do all the calculators go?
        Lister: They don't go anywhere. They just die.
        Kryten: But surely you believe that God is in all things? Aren't you a pantheist?
        Lister: Yeah, but I just don't think it applies to kitchen utensils. I'm not a FRYING pantheist. Machines do not have souls. Computers and calculators do not have an afterlife. You don't get hairdryers with tiny little wings, sitting on clouds, playing harps.
        Kryten: But of course you do. For is it not written in the Electronic Bible, "The iron shall lie down with the lamp"? Oh, it's common sense, sir. If there weren't a better life to look forward to, why on Earth would machines spend the whole of their lives servicing humankind? Now that would be really dumb.
        Lister: Yeah, it makes sense. Silicon Heaven.
        Kryten: Don't be sad, Mr. David, sir. I am going to a far, far better place.
        Lister: Just out of interest, is Silicon Heaven the same place as human heaven?
        Kryten: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven. Oh no, someone just made that up to prevent you from all going nuts.

I'm sure some of it for the reward money.

Now, to play devil's advocate: If I had a fat juiciy bug that I was using to start exploits, for sure I'd try and tie up the project maintainers with AI bug reports. What better way to distract them? Keep them looking at the crap and hope it turns everyone's attention away from the real thing.

AI is just a tool. Like all tools is can be (a) used for good, (b) used for evil, (c) used to look at porn or (d) try and make money with little to no effort.

It won't be saner heads unless someone more electable is presented.

Its still too early in the cycle for anyone to put their head up. Anyone doing so becomes a target for a bully and the bully's (forced) friends.

Scenario 1 - MAGA nuts romp it in in the midterms: Everyone jockeys to be more important #2 banana. Unless the opposition can come up with a galvanising, charismatic alternative ... crickets.
Scenario 2 - A few seats change hands in the midterms, but not a wholesale rejection - anyone with the resources to run is very very quiet and is going to wait, building up momentum very slowly. More time is needed to see the effects of these wholly negative policies.
Scenario 3 - MAGA gets is arse handed to it on a plate. A whole of people put up their hands. "Pick me, Pick me!!!!"

Sounds like a great way to obtain a doctorate.
Problem: Observe a start looking at Exo planet
Step 2 ??? (Wait)
Step 3: Paper
Step 4: PhD

Abandonware is just one way that copyright is broken as a concept.

If you don't want it (and end-of-life is just one way of expressing that), then you don't get to hoard it.

Waiters and waitresses and other food service staff not only get paid a "minimum" wage (another US-ism), but an actual living wage. (Ok, as much as *ANY* wage in a big city is a living wage). There is an award, perhaps modified locally, and then loadings for evenings and weekends.

So yeah, tips aren't needed. I would probably have left spare change on the table when I used to pay cash.

Now, how its happening is that most electronic ordering systems are imported from the US. They DO have the tip button enabled - and most most business have thought "why the fire-truck not?".

Staff at a restaurant nearby even press the "No tip" button reflexively, while entering the amounts of the EFTPOS terminal.

The US is the home to many good and great things. And many terrible things. Two US imports need to FOAD from Australian culture - Halloween and Tipping. Three, the the missing letter 'u' should be restored ... four, the 'ise" ending on words. Ok, five .... Starbucks - Six!, no more than six ... stealing stuff from New Zealand. We haven't done that in a while and I'm scared we are getting rusty.

(I'm off to get a Flat White, while wearing Uggs, while listening to Split Enz and reading about Phar Lap).

The Outback Steakhouse is Australian in the same way McDonalds is Scottish.

I think you're late to the party.

IIRC, it was Egypt that said they would go to war if any of the other countries attempted to dam or restrict the Nile. That was in the 80s.

Basically holding the other countries in the Nile basin at the end of a gun.

But yes, the wars of water will make the petro-wars seem tame in comparison.

(Imagine the images of Luke on Tatooine, tending to a water harvester, .... but now on earth, that's the future).

Kindle, I mean Calibre, of course for managing and sideloading my own documents onto my Kindle.

Amazon have been changing lots behind the scenes lately. Last model or two paperwhites are harder to get DRM-free versions of files out of (no personal backup). The Colorsoft doesn't play as nice with products such as Kindle.

And they've been adding restrictions on how you can sideload books over the years too.

So no, it's not a consumer friendly move. It is only (and would only ever be) a move that helps Amazon.

These types of people know two things:
- How to use Excel
- That if anyone finds out what they do in Excel really is, and how easily it could be programmed as a report from real data, they would be out of a job.

Instead they get titles like "Chief Financial Officer", "Controller" and "Senior Accountant".

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Sinclair, U. I'd probably change that to "communicate" instead of understand.

Big MEGAcorps should really know better.

IT may not be their bread and butter, but goddam it, these sized corps have resources. They can take the code base for LibreOffice or whatever Open Sourced tool they have and mandate THAT as the corporate standard.

They can even run their own cloud. That's pretty well how AWS started ... spare capacity.

10 person mum and dad store? Nah, I'm going to cut some slack and say "buy one of these pre-canned products".

The MEGACorps can then have their own sub-company to do the IT bit, outsourcing where necessary, but maintaining the tools. So long as they give the source to the parent company, that is ok by GPL.

They can pull updates and patches where necessary but still keep the control.

And that is what the MEGA IT CORPS have. Control. Control means $$$$ (or whatever currency you like). Airbus have taken a bite out of the poisoned apple, spat it out, tried the other poisoned apple and are now chewing on the worst bits of both.

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)