Stranger43

Costly in terms of eventually being forced to choose between allowing unionization and leaving the nordic market entirely.

It's something that just about every other big anti-union American company have had to deal with and it's in the past always led to the American company basically surrendering and allowed unionization usually without any major loss of profit/revenue, apart from the money wasted fighting the strong and very popular Scandinavian trade unions.

I think we’re making a mistake in conflating stupidity with irrationality as it’s the latter that's truly dangerous.

And irrationality doesn’t correlate with stupid in any meaningful way as people can be intelligent up to the point where some dogmatic instinctive belief means that their raw unfiltered emotions suddenly guides their decision process.

And lets be honest most actual genocides are committed by smart(often very moral) people acting on irrational fears or dreams of an utopian future that can only happen after the world is purified of some specific evil.

Selfish bastards aren't nearly as dangerous and fanatical zealots chasing some utopian dream but being fanatical don't mean your ignorant just that at one point your emotions take over from logical reasoning.

From a financial perspective IBM's model of buying up customer's by taking over smaller successfull outfits, maximizing profit's while the quality goes down the drain and using that profit to restart the process have actually been successful enough over the last 2 decades since they switched from being an engineering company to an capital fund with a tech focus.

This is probably just the same strategy ie IBM might have realized that their cloud department is as popular as it will ever be and is now entering the squaze phase of it's lifecycle.

But running that tank factory is probably the least effective way of converting tax dollars into employment.

And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.

It's probably not that simple as they could do what the EU does and create those jobs in purely civilian industries.

It's more about the political economy where funneling through certain well connected companies generate a lot of goodwill among the middlemen who then funds pac's and pay for advertisements then it's about a direct relationship between the senate and the employment status of their workers.

Isnt it also true of every big success NASA have had, that it only existed because of lobbying and political pressure.

We like to pretend that political influence on government institutions is a new "bug" and not something build into the system from day one.

I suspect the big dark secret of the public cloud is that some regions/AZ's are not all that big and that there is no secret tech that's the big players have that the smaller regional players dont when it comes to the actual physical layer.

It's on brand for "the register" whose editorial staff never miss a chance for a good pun or double entendre so the awkward phrasing is likely intentional.

A lot of this is that anything electric needs to be an order of magnitude heavier and significantly large to achieve any range due to the much lower energy density of batteries.

It's possible to have small electrics but those often have short ranges and most of the big ugly things you see on the roads in DK is kinda hybrids or follows the trend set by the hybrids.

The real way to deal with the SUV nonsense and not hurt the rural areas where you might need range is to just charge double for parking for large cars and cap the speed of large almost trucks to the same as lorries.

And were of cause forgetting VisualBasic because who cares about microsoftland those days but back when python/ruby emerged even windows server and IIS was relevant as this was kind of the peak of microsoft's dominance.

yep the Perl community kind of had issues around the turn of the millennium and the perl6 debacle did a lot to convince people that Perl was kind of a dead end.

I don't think there was any toxicity in the Ruby community but it was made up of working programmers where as the big leading voices in the python community was teaching assistants and students so it might have been more tailored to newbies.

I don't recall there being much real industrial use of python prior to Ruby emerging even if python is technically older so i think the real answer lies in why the educational sector decided that teaching python was easier and significant whitespace plays a huge part here.

And of cause the fact that the Perl community relished in inventing new and exiting shorthand tricks that allowed perl script to be essentially write only unless you stuck to an style-guide that had not been codified.

Perl like VisualBasic had a well deserved reputation for facilitating atrocious hard to debug code, and it was this reputation more then the lack of OO/XML support that led both of those to fade back into the realm of forgotten memory and business critical enterprise applications that nobody dares to touch.

Python kind of had three things that really mattered, an culture of “one correct way”, an invisible but conservative type system, and an style guide build into the language an dictated from the language designers in the form of significant whitespace and PEP-8.

Ruby could have been a contender but still had some of the “there is more than one way to do things” left over from perl(ruby was kind of an pragmatic alternative to the “real soon newer” of perl6) and it’s a bit more dynamic than python in how it handles variable internally.

And the field of academic data crunching was hurting badly from the fact that the two only viable options for most entry level researches was Excel/VisualBasic or PERL so everyone wanted some level of structure which the python community led by Guido provided, once people begun to settle on bumpy and pandas.

And pythons popularity definitely grows from the fact that it’s what non programmers learned as an alternative to Excel/SPSS/SAS/Matlab(all of whom are expensive proprietary tools) in classes focused on analyzing data.

Thats kind of not true, someone bought windows(and not as cheap as people think) it's just that nobody really sees it as something different from the computer because it's bundled.

Enterprises pay a surprising amount of money to Microsoft usually in the form of monthly/annual pr user licenses(to the time of double digit percentages of the end user device budget) and yet no amount of badness seem to make anyone in those Enterprise departments think that they have any alternative and it's the same in the laptop space, where despite having to fork out whats often a double digit percentage of the retail price to Microsoft there is no serious appetite from hardware vendors or consumers to consider that maybe we could have a market where multiple Operating systems coexisted.

And your driver argument is exactly the weirdness here as people will absolutely hold anyone but Microsoft(especially smaller opensource competitors) responsible for bad drivers but with windows it's suddenly an valid excuse for bad experiences with windows.

That assumes that the company lets journalist talk to non marketing people.

The term might in marketing department vetted communications often cover over "the techies droned out for 10 minutes using words we did not understand" and few large brands feel that comfortable letting anyone not under some kind of confidentiality agreement talk to anyone in the technical teams.

It's always puzzled me how much <insert appropriate epithet here> people are willing to take from Microsoft for products they pay good money for, without ever considering that there might be an world where not everyone buys their software from the same vendor.

Why? this is a serious question, i work at a place where we use both and i would love to standardize on ansible rather then terraform even though i hate yaml and significant whitespaces.

Terraform especially kind of feels like something that's demand far to much hand wrangling every time i set up a new instance(as few of our instances is 100% identical in config), for what it's promising.

It's worth noting that not paying fines in one country is a serious enough deal for the entire European Economic Area that it can escalate to that company not being allowed to do any trade in the entire EEC.

And this fine will increase if Facebook dont comply, it's been done before to even bigger targets like Microsoft(back when windows/office was still relevant) so just being big wont save Facebook here.

The doubling of fines was tried successfully against microsoft back in the web 1.0 when they refused to acknowledge the antitrust fine.

Basically the EU(or even Norway) is way to big a market for advertisements for the industry to just ignore so sooner of later adtech will fold and play nice.

Yep but isn't the problem that his employor demand that he drives right to the limit of his legal limit on corporate time and leaves no buffer for say getting home.

The limits on time is not meant to be "norms" but extreme cases so if they are hit daily thats an indication the the culture in the industry is rotten more then anything else.

speed and driving times have been recorded mechanically for drivers in Europe since at least the 90ies so going electronic was maybe not as radical a change for European drivers when they went electronic in 2006.

It's also worth noting that a lot of the culture around the labor market is different as the European regulators tend to be a bit more of an aggressive stance on companies creating pressures on employees and then try to shift all blame when those pressure's lead to rule breaking and accidents.

The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy.

It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span.

EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.

Firstmost an close relationship to SAP due to being headquartered in the same German region.

Secondly SuSE have an relatively good track record of delivering an stable and predictable distribution with SLES, and have been around longer then any other commercial Linux vendor, and despite several changes in ownership over the years it's never been felt as an user.

Compared to Ubuntu running SLES is breath of calmness with changes happening slow and well coordinated and while RHEL used to be the same that's changing after being taking over by IBM.

If that was that easy why did the 3rd party apps shutdown rather then raise prices to cover the API fees?

Reddit's model was kind of novel in that they did it in directly by expecting the 3rd party apps to collect the payment from their users but they did essentially just ask people to pay for 3rd party app access.

I cant recall any instance where a social media company successfully extracted actual cash directly from their users that ended well.

if you look at what reddit was asking it kind of evened out to less then $5,- a month pr user which seems to have been so much more then what the 3rd party apps was able/willing to charge that they had to fold.

But it's only really an subset of that demographic and i suspect the age spread reaches far lower then 18(reddit might pretend otherwise for regulatory purposes).

And i suspect a reason for the entire debacle is that a lot of the user base weren't seeing ads at all due to ad-blockers or the use of 3rd party apps.

It's a problem that also seems to plague twitch in that they simply aren't generating the revenue that's expected from the amount of traffic generated.

Given that the reason there were protest was that reddit wanted to monetize a part of their platform that was not generating ad revenue those two things could be completely related.

if reddit cannot monetize their users, either as a product to sell to advertisers or by converting them to paying customers it's might not be viable as a profitable business.

There seems to be a general problem with social media as a profitable business models as there don't seem to be any real path for companies to monetize their user base that don't end up causing damage.

Given that Discord and Reddit have an overlapping user base it could be realization that that's not an user base that's either no especially desirable for advertisers or one simply hard to monetize for other reasons.

They are the same entity now that's kind of what happens when a company gets merged into another company.

It's also what a lot of people expected would happen when IBM bought RedHat and the whole centos-stream debarcle happened and i suspect a lot of what were seeing is that IBM/RedHat(can we start calling them big purple now) is not seeing the growth to RHEL sales they were expecting from those changes/decisions, or might even seeing a decline in greenfield deployments of RHEL.

The US immigration services uses the term Alien, and the US State Department have historically used both.

Given how byzantine the US military industrial complex's paperwork and pretend regulation is someone might have been relying on legislation or paperwork predating the change in word usage, and that that influenced the naming of some program somewhere in the secretive world.

It's also worth noting that such a misconception definitely benefit's the military industrial complex as it draws focus towards something that is not there rather then towards what's actually happening, which again is a very common strategy within military intelligence.

When it comes to "strange lights in the sky" there is a fairly uniform body of observation around the world with some(typically dry or mountainous) regions being hotpots so there is definitely things happening in the skies we don't fully understand but that's not the same as extraterrestrial spaceships and could easily be unusual "weather patterns", or some other natural phenomena.

Where the us is alone however is in the reports of sightings/abductions of entities exiting those craft but then again most of those stories tend to either be "retrieved memories", straight up hoaxes or so vague in details that other explanations cannot be ruled out.