Aren’t these things trackable? Don’t phones have an IMEI and can’t they be remote-bricked if stolen?

I mean, police don’t care, but Apple could render these useless if they wanted to.

If you thought Viagra and Ozempic had a market, just wait…

This will be huge amongst the wealthy.

Oh, if only that were true.

But what about that one guy who writes absolutely brilliant VB?

I suspect getting shot had something to do with it.

But us, rallies aren’t his narcissistic supply any more. Now they’re a source of fear and dread.

The Econoline (and maybe the Transit) seems to be the vehicle of choice for people who actually work.

No, it’s because enforcement is a joke, not licensing.

One of the things that’s hard for a European to understand is how shoddy and capricious law enforcement in North America can be. You know those lovely conditional speed limits that Germany has? No way that works in North America because the police won’t do anything except sit in their interceptors on the last two days of they month doing speed traps.

Swerve, fail to signal, brake-check, basically drive like you’re Bumblebee in Michael Bay’s Transformers 2, that’s fine. Just stay below the speed limit on the last two days of the month.

Aren’t most trucks equipped with interlocks that prevent travelling at speed when the bed isn’t fully lowered?

You really should read Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance to understand why this is important, and why “the only way to counter speech is with more speech” isn’t just wrong, it’s actually counterproductive.

Here’s the short version, if it helps.

Yeah, XP was pretty good.

I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.

That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:

• NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
• Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
• NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
• 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
• 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
• Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)

Anchoring the bottom

• 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
• 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
• 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
• NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
• CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
• 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)

A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.

Oil is fungible, lesbianism is not.

Not sure what my point is, there.

Because Google was so focused and strategic before the pandemic rollseyes.

The issue is Google’s broken governance and incentive system, which gives product owners and executives incentives for new products and actively disincentivizes maintaining and improving existing products…and that was a thing from well before the pandemic hit.

It’s why Google launched three pay systems and had five messaging systems at the same time.

And, finally, this is all because of the strategy set by senior leaders.

Do they have tiki torches? Are they talking about replacing Arabs?

Because holy shit do these people not have any sense of self awareness.

As someone from a country with single-payer: this still seems backwards and barbaric.

When I’m in medical distress, the last thing I want to worry about is what it’ll cost. That’s why I pay taxes to make all this work.

“Price transparency” seems like a way to avoid the core problem.

This’ll be interesting, because staying in power is the only way Netanyahu stays out of court, if not out of prison.

This isn’t going to stop until the rich are afraid.

In case you’re wondering why fascism is on the rise, it’s seen by the wealthy as a safe way to manage populist rage; get people angry about out- groups and they’ll ignore the rich picking their pockets.

The wealthy don’t think they’re a line in Niemoller’s poem.

Halo is almost a quarter century.

Wolfenstein is 30ish

Now, imagine how us Gen-Xers who grew up with Karateka or Epic Games feel.

And Sears. And many, many others.

I maintain we need to measure social group distance in a unit I’ll call “Niemollers”, after the pastor and poet.

As in “how many Niemollers am I away from '…and there was no one left to speak for me '”

Because the Log Cabin Republicans are probably three Niemollers. He’ll Clarence Thomas is five, maximum.

This is such a smart move: it really cuts the legs out from under the “…bbbbut Hamas are terrorist!!” bad-faith arguments.