I don't understand it as an investment. Guess I should've been more specific. I went with brevity thinking the context would suffice.

It's stupid; but at least more honest than trying to dress 'grok' up as the master control computer.

This was meant as a reply to the article about bitcoin correction.

So sorry,

Flowery nice words flowing from the talking points of others. who just ignore the litany of coin failures, fraud, scams on astoundingly large scales, and outright facilitation of reprehensible trade. A country that talks about turning to crypto has nothing left in options, and it won't help them.

The day that currencies are routinely valued in reference to Bitcoin, you have my attention. But that day will never come. Never? I'm saying never.

I'm very in tune with the technology and the ostensible "healthy" points of these vehicles. I don't understand them as an investment vehicle, so I don't invest in them. I'm not an ideologue. Investment is not philosophy. If you want to back it to throw off the shackles of what you perceive to be a doomed system, go for it. Have fun.

And being a doomsayer is nothing new. Get in line behind all the people who have been predicting the fall of the global financial order since the 1800s. Someday one of them will be right, but you'd be a fool to hold your breath. 10 years from now, I'll be buying my groceries in my local currency, carefully invested and grown.

In the MS case; it wouldn't be too surprising if that order is also the one that urgency dictates. Neither is totally unavailable on-prem only; or entirely without more-chatty-than-one-would-like behavior; but if your concern is about your dependence and Redmond's potential direct control their groupware stuff is moving faster than their OSes(at least if you have enterprise licenses and someone to handle keeping them quiet) in the direction of pure SaaS.

You'll get some nagging about how Azure Arc is definitely the cool kid's future of glorious hybrid manageability; but your ability to run Windows as though it were 15 years ago is definitely greater than your ability to run Office that way.

I suspect that this won't be the last case we see; as MS has shown comparatively little interest in backing down on the future being azure SaaS, and there's no real equivalent to some steep but temporary discounts for dealing with people who have fundamental privacy and operational control issues; while it's not terribly challenging to find a special discount that makes sticking with the status quo look cheaper than trying to do a migration.

Not anything. I'm sure when Federal troops take over the State Capitol and Newsom is put in prison for unspecified but certainly horrible crimes, the military governor that takes his place will make sure none of this kind anti-corporate nonsense continues.

AGI has nothing to do with the current technology that OpenAI is selling. At this point, it is just a nebulous idea. Right now, AGI is just like what cold fusion was twenty years ago. If you had invested like crazy in nuclear fusion companies because you had high expectations for them figuring out cold fusion, you would have lost a lot as fusion is still just a research toy that in no way functions as a profitable business model. As it stands, we do not know whether the existing technology OpenAI sells will ever be profitable. AGI, like cold fusion, may just be a dream.

I long ago gave up trying to understand crypto. And If I just don't understand something, I don't invest in it. So this is all just mildly interesting noise.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - Keynes

Before the Dot Com era, startups that succeeded transitioned from growth stocks in to blue chips. They settle down, focus on becoming more efficient at executing what is now proven business mode.

But modern tech stocks are expected to act like growth stocks *forever*. When they grow to their natural potential, they begin to turn to dubious practices to generate the next tranche of growth. They undermine their services in order to squeeze a bit more revenue out of them. Or they let their successful business stagnate while the rock star founder beguiles stockholders with visions of transforming into a block chain or AI company.

Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon first transitioned from being a book store to an everything store, and they just introduced Prime membership, you used the site and thought "this thing is great." Nobody thinks that anymore; it's slower, more opaque and less reliable, cluttered with knockoffs, sponsored results, and astroturf reviews. Fake sales events with phony markdowns? Who is surprised?

There zero benefit of cloud controlled home consumer grade IoT. The cost to corporations for continued security patches and updates outweigh any ROI on a long term time scale. Translation, the shit you paid good money for is at the mercy of the quarterly board report.
Personally, I've decided to cut the parasites out of the equation and go old school. I picked up a Pioneer sx-1250 receiver (circa 1977) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclassicreceivers.com%2Fp... that's been completely recapped and reworked. The sound is, well, fucking amazing. But, I have to get off my ass and push a button or turn a dial.. boo hoo.

We're going to teach most of those kids how to ask AI for everything anyway. Their value-add will be dubious at best. They can autocorrect their lives. We need them literate enough to order off of Amazon.

So long as we right-size their expectations in life it should all work out.

There is no rational conversation to be had. Anti-vaxxers have heard the best, simplest arguments, and they have rejected the premise. You can no longer get there from here, so stop trying to reason with them. Their response will be something like rejecting the source of your data as untrustworthy, which is the most effective way to reject that which you don't want to entertain.

This is a good example of the old truism: you cannot counter an emotional argument with a logical one.

Case in point. A family friend told us all back when we all were lined up for the first Covid vaccines that she was so sad for us, since we'd all be dead in six months. Had lunch with her recently... still as strongly anti-vaccine today

I obviously don't expect better from these sorts of people; but I'm honestly puzzled as to why they would turn the screws so quickly and blatantly despite having gone to all the trouble of a reshuffle and a new lineup and some spiel about being likeable rather than Alexa just being something that you sort of poke at because Prime members were given a free surveillance puck with some offer one time.

Is Panay one of those abhuman lunatics who genuinely thinks that the only objection to relentless advertising is that it isn't "relevant" or "engaging" enough? Does he have a scorpion nature that leads him to knowingly doom his own product just because that's what he is? Is he just a figurehead who got to choose the case plastics colors and smile on stage; but some adtech business unit calls all the shots?

I'd fully expect this sort of thing to betray you; but only after enough of a honeymoon period for people to be pleasantly surprised by the behavior of the launch units so that there is actually enough of an install base to betray.

And if they're still not sure, they can go and ask the pharma companies selling vitamin supplements that don't work (they're designed not to, expressly to avoid being classed as medications and that means they might be regulated).

Just create a fictional problem that your product is meant to fix. The entire "disease" of halitosis was invented by Lambert Pharmaceutical Company to sell Listerine.

Why are you paying for a liar?

(yeah, I know you mean fibre, just couldn't resist a cheap joke).

I suspect that your country, like most civilised countries has laws that state the price on the contract is the final price and must include all applicable fees, taxes and charges.

The US doesn't like that system as hiding the real price behind fees and charges makes them think they're still an affordable country to live in because the advertised price is still low, however they always pay more than the advertised price. See Also: tipping, eating out appears cheap until you realise you have to add 20% or more onto the top.