I’m less upset that all SSNs might end up compromised and more upset that no one is going to get punished for it. If a career Federal Employee did this, they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But since it was Elon’s friends who did it, everyone in power will just shrug and say “who knew this would be such a big deal”…

Voting Blue? No Vote For You!

If you can afford a BMW in the first place, you can afford the blinker fluid subscription…

If BMW truly wants to innovate, they should work on fixing their turn signals. They must always be in a state of disrepair, because I rarely see a BMW driver use them…

That company’s name? Plock. No, it’s not just Flock with a Sharpie mark over the “F”, trust us!

Legally, they can’t be sure you didn’t sell the account, even if the email address is the same.

Not defending the policy here, it’s bullshit. But I’m simply pointing out that they have excuses to beat any logic you throw at them. Logic has nothing to do with it, so it can’t be beaten by logic either.

I’ve seen whistles with the number for the local rapid response hotline printed right on them. Must have been one of those fancy multi-filament printers.

It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. Michael Dell did it, after all, but he did it in a different time.

And Dell is actually a good case study for all this. It went public rather quickly after it started growing, but grew a bit stagnant by the 2000’s. So much so that 2013, Michael Dell orchestrated a leveraged buyout of his own company (with the help of venture capital) to make it private again. He pretty much admitted that the changes he wanted to make to the company would be impossible while it was still public. It stayed private for a while, but went public again as part of some deal made after it acquired the parent company of VMware.

Another notable thing is that Carl Ichan owned a large chunk of Dell, both in its first public incarnation and in its private incarnation. When Dell tried to take it private, Ichan challenged the plan, and thought about putting in his own bid, only to back off when he decided it wasn’t worth the effort to revive the company. Still, he was publicly against Dell’s buyout plan but was outvoted by other shareholders. Yet, he must have still held a part of the private company, because Ichan also protested it’s second plan to go public, and sued to force Dell to increase its terms to the private holders.

Michael Dell is no saint, but I conclude that he realized that the company meant more than a spreadsheet, and needed a purpose to justify its existence. He also realized that in order to sustain a business over the long term, having to constantly sustain quarterly numbers may be counterproductive. I think Carl Ichan, on the other hand, only cares about Number Go Up, and doesn’t care at all about how the company makes that happen. Over the long term, that will never be sustainable, but fuck you all, he got his bag already.

This is yet another thing I blame on American Business sacrificing itself on the altar of Shareholder Value. It’s no longer acceptable for a public business to simply make a profit. It has to grow that profit, every quarter, without fail.

So, simply having a good consumer product division that makes money won’t be enough. At some point some executive will decide that he can’t possibly get his bonus if that’s all they do, and decide they need to blow it all up to chase larger profits elsewhere.

Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware. They still need components, though, so will have to navigate getting that from public companies who won’t return their calls. And even once they are successful, the first thing they will do is cash out and go public, and the cycle starts again.

Crikey

You can’t tell me what to do

This is, at least, trying to solve an actual problem. It remains to be seen whether the solution is more cost effective (and durable) as bifocals. As a human of a certain age myself, I would welcome being able to see without having to tilt my head awkwardly.

But something tells me this tech is not self-contained, and requires an always-on connection to some cloud resource which is guzzling electricity and water. No thanks! Bifocals are cheaper.

For a C64 emulator, sure, but we can do better now.

Yes, this would be awesome, but for the love of all that is holy can it please not be BASIC?

I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.

Nethack

Honestly, I think the difference is how much software is in these things now. Everything is a computer. And software is something that is very cheap to do half-assed, but expensive to do well (and reliably).

TVs are a perfect example of this. The TV of 40 years ago had an analog tuner directly attached to a CRT. It did only one thing, and did it well. Today’s TVs are basically embedded computers with large screens. And the embedded software was probably written by the lowest bidder.

Reddit was one of the most human places on the Internet, until King Steven the Turd decided that it’s human interactions were a valuable resource that he could sell.

Now, it’s all just bots talking to bots to learn how to sound human.

Move Zig, for great justice

We’ll all have to go back to having sex with your wife