dimitrios1

Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.

In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.

They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?

If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.

I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.

In the early days of the Holy (Western) Roman Empire, the various Germanic Emperors would only come down into Rome during the colder months when it was safe from malaria, and head out north to the cold when it got warm because Rome was a hotbed for malaria.

wonder if the pendulum will shift back to mechanical components being cheaper than the electrical alternatives with the ever increasing demand for electrical components.

> If we could only think about this, surely our approaches, our thoughts would change, we would be different people.

Oh boy, nobody tell them about Nihilism.

In the past you had reckless manufacturing and extracting -- chemical spills and dumping, burning of an incredible amount of coal, deforestation, etc. But it was tapered by fewer people overall with disposable income, and the lack of throwaway culture and waste, less plastic, etc.

Now we have more efficient processes with less waste, we have renewable sources of forestation, renewable energy sources, less coal, less chemical spills and dumping, but every body can afford and have the things that were once considered luxuries. Everyone has an HVAC now. Everyone purchases tons upon tons of little plastic pieces of shit and throws them in the trash. If you have a blueberry with a little bit of mold on it, now you throw away the pack. You have to fight for the right to repair your cheap plastic shit with silicon parts in it. You are expected to replace your plastic shit every 1-2 years with more plastic shit. We drink water and soda out of plastic bottles in absurd amounts. We use more electricity than ever before.

There has to be a balance somewhere. We have to have a culture shift at some point.

> Mainstream/AAA modern games more or less tell you exactly what to do and exactly where to do it

Just to clarify, are you stating this as a truism that I may be oblivious to, or as in your own personal experience?

Otherwise, this is proof that two different people can have such vastly different experiences. I find modern AAA games to be rich of actions and choices. There are more "open world" games now than ever. And while your statement is true of the main storyline, I think there's so much diversity in games now that the main story line is often just a "thing you get around to" after you get bored of whatever side quests or exploration you are performing.

> Because of ethical reasons I want to stay as far away as possible from anything that is insurance, finance

All insurance, and all finance?

If so, then you pretty much have to stay far away from America. Everyone has insurance, and everyone utilizes finance.

Perhaps step 0 is to mature a little bit on your perspectives in life, and realize not everyone is some big evil corpo-bot.

Intentions matter. HTML is a presentation layer at this point. No one "programs" in HTML in as much as they have to, if they do it at all (delegating it to their favorite framework to generate most of it). Most of programming for the web is done in Javascript. I like quips as much as the next guy or gal, but it feels like people are being intentionally obtuse in this instance.

> but adding their own bloat.

Brave runs faster and consumes less memory for me. Perhaps their additions aren't bloat at all?

I believe the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and creator of the world's most popular web language can maintain a web browser.

Agreed. I am very close with my remote teammates, and when we meet for our yearly onsite, it feels like we've all been working side by side in the trenches...just like in an office.

We also miss the fact that you can be traveling to an office for years and not actually know anybody. This is especially true of this big large tech campuses.

Yes! Good catch. The COVID years still all feel like 1 long year..

I have been working full time remote since Sept 2021 (correction, 2020, just before pandemic).

It's not even that I don't value the face-to-face conversations and human interaction, I absolutely do. It just doesn't come close to the immense value I gain by WFH.

A side benefit: I was able to move closer to my church community, so my "human interaction" need is being fulfilled richer than ever now.

(One of the most frustrating things in all the WFH vs RTO discourse is that there is this false dichotomy being presented. It's either extroverted people who are energized by others, or introverts who'd rather be in the dark closet by themselves. I am as extroverted as they come, and I thrived in the office environment. Still wouldn't trade WFH for the world.)

And the modern Democratic party is...? Just curious where you stand and what your biases are.

What do I need to prove? That I produced x widgets in y hours? How about my team meets their goals and KPIs YoY consistently. How about there's work on the board, and theres 2 weeks to get it done, and we get it done. What more surveillance do you need? If theres dead weight on the team, it will be brought to light one way or another, through manager 1 on 1's, peer feedback, check ins, personal goals, etc.

Since we are talking which to avoid, just to add a translation suggestion, Peter Green's is highly regarded.

There is a fundamental disconnect between people such as yourself, and the grievances about our broken system that we have today.

I agree, in a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with the concept of lobbying. I would go out on a limb (well not quite a limb, I have family members that were lobbyists) and say the majority of lobbying that occurs in the US is actually good.

But where it's bad, it's really bad. The loudest and most influential voices are the ones with the most money, and sometimes that's good, but a lot of times thats bad. They promise golden parachutes and shower politicians with money so much so that even if the politician gets burned, they are promised a career at the lobbying firm or with one of the "hookups". Again this is bad, because now instead of being accountable to the constituency, our politicians are accountable to their benefactors.

There's a lot more reasons this is wrong, but this is the primary gist. I hope we can all agree this is an issue.

ReasonML suffered tremendously when the community split and went off to do ReScript. I don't think either have recovered the original luster.

> The quality of framing wood you choose does not factor into home longevity at all.

This is just absolutely false.

Older growth wood is more stable and more likely to resist moisture.

We have zero examples of homes built with fast growth SPF (etc) lasting 100 years or more. Hell even 75. On the contrary, we have a plethora of examples of old growth pine lasting centuries. Just look at the cold, wet, and snowy northeast. Plenty of moisture there, yet the historic homes still stand.

No contractor I've spoken to thinks the homes being built today will last half a century or longer.

edit: I will stand by my comment. Lets see how many 70's and 80s era houses last until 2040.

You've seen Yellowstone, no? I don't think violence is an issue anymore for americans.

CCPA also has a right to delete clause

Culture is preserved at the top. It starts at the bottom. The problem is too many leaders read an Adam Grant or Simon Sinek book and all of a sudden think they are the latest incarnation of the tech leadership buddha and impose their will on the team.

NATO is still relevant because its effectively a death pact. I don't want to be in a death pact with a leader who stages their own coups, and is actively commiting acts of aggression against other Western countries as well as still in an ongoing invasion of Cyprus.

Authoritarian regime rife with corruption that can easily be bribed and bypass any regulations as needed with western protections -- perfect for any crony capitalist. The real amazement is that they were ever allowed to be part of NATO.

I still think this is a overall net increase. The stigma wasn't preventing people from getting diagnosed and treated

Zoloft was Pfizer's second best selling drug during most of the 90s. So people were still going to get diagnosed and treated despite the stigma. They just wouldn't tell anyone about it, other than their therapist.

I believe it's mostly just a direct jab at C++. Almost every other language has fast or fast enough compilation speeds.

You asked me to clarify what I felt they were lacking. I was pretty explicit about the fact that this was my opinion based upon my previous experience working at .NET shops and using C#. So no, I am not kidding.

What in your opinion makes .NET so well designed?

I would need to see 2022 as well. Many banks announced changes middle of 2021 and 2022.

Regulations carry a cost of compliance. When regulations are being clamored for by the big players, I can pretty much guarantee you it is not out of altruism.

> And charge poor people $30 every time they dip under $0 even by a penny.

The list of large corporate banks that charge NSF fees and overdrafts is vanishingly small.

OTOH, I know of plenty of credit unions that still do both.