petersellers

> These distributions are then reinvested by shareholders to more efficient purposes.

Why do you think this is true (specifically the "more efficient purposes" part)?

Because they'd have more capital to reinvest in their business, as I stated. But even if they don't reinvest it the rest of us still benefit in the form of increased tax receipts.

Right, because Microsoft 100% consists of highly paid software engineering roles located in the US.

You can increase the income taxes of wealthy people considerably (specifically income taxes, not business taxes). A 50%+ marginal rate will help motivate C-level execs to opt for re-investing profits into their business rather than into buybacks of their stock to boost their own personal income. At the same time you'd be helping to provide services that will benefit the lives of the bottom 90% of the country with higher tax receipts.

Wealth inequality has been getting steadily worse in the US for decades, and moves like what Microsoft is doing only make that worse.

> OTel _does_ prevent lock-in on the agent side (making it easier to switch vendors) with open source components and consistent schemas, but OTel doesn't enable you to do anything that you couldn't do before with a specific vendor

This is exactly the reason why we are moving away from NewRelic's SDK to an OpenTelemetry SDK (even though we are still using NewRelic to ingest everything). If (more like when) we decide to switch vendors, it will be much easier to do so.

It's also pretty cool that a ton of sailing vocabulary has made its way into common English vernacular. I guess with the UK being the most powerful country in the world at one time (and projecting their power via their Navy) it's not too surprising.

"Our economy's in the toilet, we should start another war to stimulate spending!"

It obviously doesn't scale linearly though.

Take the poor family living paycheck to paycheck - they spend practically every cent they earn on the basic necessities. Whereas I find it highly doubtful that your wealthy friends are spending every single dollar they earn every year (surely they save/invest a large percentage of their earnings, right?)

There have been a number of studies done that demonstrate that a consumption tax (which is effectively what this is) is considered to be regressive because they disproportionately affect poor people.

I'm all for simplifying the tax code (e.g. eliminating many deductions) as long as we also eliminate loopholes that rich people often use to avoid paying taxes on their income.

I tried several times and it seemed to miss the point of the article every time.

This is part of what makes political discourse so challenging today. It's really easy to conjure up evidence in the form of poorly written articles with bad sources (or outright fabrications), but exponentially more difficult to go and fact check every one of these sources any time they are trotted out.

> Not to put a fine point on it, but if you want to know what it was like back then, just say something like "I don't think we should finance the war in Ukraine. What is happening in Eastern Europe isn't our problem. Neutrality is the best policy" and see the rhetoric you'll hear

What's happening now is not remotely comparable to what the US did in response to 9/11 - if anything, it's the opposite (we are defending a country from being invaded for BS reasons vs invading another country for BS reasons)

> Zippydb is honestly one of the best parts of fb infra. It let you select levels of consistency vs latency

How is that different from Cassandra's Tunable consistency model?

https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/4.1/cassandra/architecture/...

The person you replied to mentioned a refund from Sony, so we can assume then that they got the PS4 version. Unfortunately, the last-gen console versions of the game were horrendously broken and had major performance problems. I don't blame people for being mad at CDPR for releasing the game on those platforms - the game was clearly not designed for the older platforms and the company took a lot of flak for releasing it on them.

I say all this as someone who has enjoyed the game immensely on PC - it's one of my favorite single player games of all time. It's just a shame that CDPR got greedy and tried to sell it on platforms that couldn't handle it.

> If surgery was made "easy" then it would be a one size fits all and anyone with an outlier condition would not get medical care.

On the contrary, I think it would be a lot easier to treat an outlier condition because doctors would have a lot more time to expand their skills and study uncommon conditions.

> in that case USA will ensure that they do not get taken over by a geopolitical adversary in the coming decade

How will the USA ensure that?

Yeah, the person you replied to really seemed to be grasping at straws there. How many laptops for sale now have this level of support for external monitors?

Pretty impressive, all things considered. Looks like it's roughly on par with an AMD 5800X, which is a Desktop CPU with 8C/16T and a 105W TDP.

> The pixel 4 is older and much more of a budget device compared to the iphone 12, I am not sure why you are comparing the two.

The Pixel 4 and the iPhone 12 both MSRP'd at $799 when they were released. Not sure how the Pixel is considered "much more of a budget device" in comparison. Technically the iPhone 12 mini is $100 cheaper than either of those, with the same basic hardware as the larger 12.

It's hard to tell whether you are being sarcastic or oblivious with those last few words of your comment.

Honest question - how do you accurately gauge public approval in a country like China?

> If Apple really didn’t care about privacy they’d end e2ee and scan on the server side like Google and Microsoft.

It's not black or white. Clearly Apple does care more about privacy than most other tech companies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be critical of them when they make a mistake.

Also, Apple doesn't use e2ee now. AFAIK it's possible for them to decrypt the contents of your iCloud content, and they will do so and forward your data if legally required to.

> Most people don’t care. I’m giving you solutions and you’re taking about convenience how hard it is. Plugging in your phone is trivial.

I don't see what is so hard for you to understand about this - because of Apple's decision, I gain nothing and lose privacy. I shouldn't have to jump through extra hoops to avoid that, and it's reasonable to dislike Apple's position on this. In order to replicate the same functionality I would have to remember to sync my phone every night, and if I ever forgot and my phone died, I just lost data. Yours is an indefensible position when a MUCH easier solution exists today.

> I assume you’re going to stick with iCloud even despite this “privacy” issue? If not, what are you switching to?

That's a bold assumption. I haven't decided yet, for a couple reasons. One is that it's a pain in the ass to switch providers, so I'm going to wait and see if Apple actually follows through with it. Two is that it's possible that Apple is only implementing this so that they can in fact implement full e2ee and then tell law enforcement to kick rocks when they ask for user data (only allowing them to see the CSAM results before they are uploaded to the cloud). I might be willing to accept that compromise, but it's not clear that that is what their plan is.

> NCMEC is an arm of the government. Either they share voluntarily or they get subpoenaed endlessly.

A subpoena is a lot different than scanning every single photo on every user's device automatically.

> Why do you think all of these companies even do this? lol

Because most companies don't give a shit about privacy? And they will cave at even the slightest government pressure to do so. Honestly it's probably easier for them that way (but worse for the consumer).

> in any case I've given you the solution on how to use iCloud and not be scanned. Take your photos, sync your iDevice to your computer and manually upload to iCloud photos. there you go.

Gee thanks, your "solution" is 1000x harder to use than just using iCloud Photos on your iPhone. One of the biggest selling points of it now is for convenience, and this is pretty obvious so I'm starting to think you're just trolling at this point.

> iCloud Photos can be used on Windows, for example. This scanning only applies to iOS devices. You could use iCloud Photos and not be subject to the scanning.

That's great for the <0.001% of people who use iCloud Photos without an iPhone. Everyone else is SOL.

>Nothing about what they're doing is contradictory with privacy beyond what they're already doing. The only reason they're even implementing it this way is because they do care about privacy. They could just not encrypt and scan on the server like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Box.com and more.

False dichotomy. Apple doesn't have to do either of these things.

The article you linked makes a surprising claim, and it contradicts what the EFF said recently about this here - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

> Currently, although Apple holds the keys to view Photos stored in iCloud Photos, it does not scan these images

It also seems weird that the EFF wouldn't have complained about this before if Apple was known to be doing server-side scanning for some time now.

I also am not going to watch through an hour video, but I scanned the transcript and I didn't see anything that said that Apple currently (at that time) scanned content.

> You turn it off by turning off iCloud photos, I never claimed otherwise.

I just have to point out the ridiculousness of this statement. With your logic any feature in any product can be "turned off" by not using the entire product at all. For example, the radio in my car sounds like shit, I guess I should just stop driving completely to avoid having to hear it.

In reality, this new "feature" will be a requirement of using iCloud Photos. The feature itself cannot be turned off. If your answer is to stop using iCloud Photos, that is no help for the millions of people who currently use iCloud Photos.

> If you don’t trust Apple why would you use iCloud anyway? Makes no sense.

I've trusted Apple for a long time because I felt like they were one of the only companies that cared about consumer privacy. After these actions I am less convinced of that. I'm not sure why that stance is so surprising.

Here's the distinction: I used to be able to use iCloud photos without having my photos scanned, and now I can't. So I have to make a choice of either dropping iCloud photos completely or submit to having all of my photos scanned.

I don't think they have been doing server-side scanning until now, hence the publicity. Do you have any evidence that shows they've been doing this before?

Please show evidence where the feature can be turned off (without having to completely disable iCloud photos).

Only if you disable iCloud photos completely. So no, you cannot turn off the feature unless you stop using iCloud photos.

There are two different "features" being implemented - Messages scanning for minors on a family plan (which can be turned off) and iCloud Photo scanning (which can't be turned off, as far as I know). So no, you can't just turn it off.