partial_accumen

I almost can’t blame them. A majority of Americans voted for fascism and racism. These are their customers.

The player must be in Texas. Even though the game is long since dead, they’re not legally allowed to end it unless it is a threat to their life.

Thats part of the social contract. Its crappy that that person was abusing it.

There’s a cost to keeping an agnostic solution that maintains that portability. It means forgoing many of the features that make cloud attractive. If your enterprise is small enough it is certainly doable, but if you ever need to scale the cracks start to show.

For some reason they think cloud is more stable than our own servers. But we had to move VMs off Azure because of instability!

If you’re treating Azure VMs as simply a replacement for on-prem VMs (running in VMware or KVM), then I can see where that might cause reliability issues. Best results means a different approach to running in the cloud. Cattle, not pets, etc. If you were using Azure VMs and have two VMs in different Availability Zones with your application architecture supporting the redundancy and failover cleanly, you can have a much more reliable experience. If you can evolve your application to run in k8s (AKS in the Azure world) then even more reliability can be had in cloud. However, if instead you’re putting a single VM in a single AZ for a business critical application, then yes, that is not a recipe for a good time Nonprod? Sure do it all the time, who cares. You can get away with that for awhile with prod workloads, but some events will mean downtime that is avoidable with other more cloud native approaches.

I did the on-prem philosophy for about 18 years before bolting on the cloud philosophy to my knowledge. There are pros and cons to both. Anyone that tells you that one is always the best irrespective of the circumstances and business requirements should be treated as unreliable.

We have decided to bring as much as we can in house and only put the workloads that have strict contractual uptime agreements on our VMware or HCI stack. The rest of the stuff goes on KVM or bare metal to save costs.

This is similar to the recommendations I give my customers, but its never this easy.

Entire teams are trained on managing VMware. Years of VMware compatible tools are in place and configured to support those workloads. Making a decision to change the underlying hypervisor is easy. Implementing that change is very difficult. An example of this is a customer that was all-in on VMware and using VMware’s Saltstack to orchestrate OS patching. Now workloads they move off of VMware have to have an entirely new patching orchestration tool chosen, licensed, deployed, staff trained, and operationalized. You’ve also now doubled your patching burden because you have to patch first the VMs remaining in VMware using the legacy patching method, then patch the non-VMware workloads with the second solution. Multiply this by all toolsets for monitoring, alerting, backup, etc and the switching costs skyrocket.

Broadcom knows all of this. They are counting on customers willing to choose to bleed from the wrist under Broadcom rather than bleed from the throat by switching.

The VMware is superior by far IMO because I like to have full control of my systems and roll my own stuff.

This was a strong argument before the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. Have you looked at your renewal costs yet? VMware is a great product but is far less attractive at the new pricing. Every customer I have is asking how they can get out of VMware as quickly as possible because of the new pricing.

Space Center Houston is a really enjoyable attraction for history and spaceflight. Stand next to a full sized Saturn V rocket (on its side so you can walk it end to end). Go inside the Shuttle Carrier 747 plane! Much more to see too. Spaceflight is inspiring!

No, I just don’t want them in my life.

This part we agree on.

but if you backflip on the top of a tall building, I don’t know you anymore.

The list of things that people can do that I wouldn’t want them in my life is nearly infinitely long, but I guess I don’t call that a list of “things I vehemently hate”.

Just randomly thought: I also hate people who seek thrills and extremely “unique” experiences. Like those who own pet chimpanzees, try various drugs to get high, or risk their lives for TikTok.

The pet chimpanzees thing I get. Its a wild animal and shouldn’t be a pet.

However all the other stuff is only affecting that person doing it. Why do you care what they do to themselves (as long as no one else is involved without their own consent)? How is your life negatively affected if those other people do those things to themselves? Do you want those other people having a say in what you do that doesn’t affect anyone else?

Son, that’s the cost of a new roof.

Depending on their circumstances, they might already have the new roof too. Or more likely they bought the vehicle with a minimal down payment and stretched the loan across 80 months.

What specific traits or habits do people close to you recognize that would reveal an impostor trying to mimic you?

They ask me what specific things would reveal themselves when they mimic me. Thats probably a red flag.

Nobody’s demanding they wear a mask

Which country are we talking about. In the USA there were absolutely mask mandates.

“They’re wearing a mask to stop the spread of disease, because they are sheep and I feel a need to react to this person’s wearing of a mask to prove to everyone else within eyesight I am not sheep lest they question my superiority."

FTFY, they don’t see the mask as preventing disease that needs to be prevented. They see COVID as a mild inconvenience. An inconvenience that isn’t worth doing anything to prevent it, and they get upset when anyone tells them they should care about it (even if its just for other people’s sake).

Masks are a highly-visible sign of compassion. It’s a sign that you don’t want others to suffer due to your own actions, especially if you’re suffering already.

I agree with this.

So when a person who has no compassion (but doesn’t want to admit they have no compassion) sees a mask, they feel the need to defend themselves and attack the mask.

I don’t agree with this. There is no self awareness of lack of empathy in this group. Its not like they’re recognizing masking as an empathetic action, and choose to act counter to telegraphy the don’t care about empathy.

Instead, they (wrongly) see mask mandates as some kind of subjugation (even though it isn’t). They build the narrative that “COVID is just like the flu” so no freedoms should be impinged. Personal exceptionalism demands they rail against anyone or anything demanding their obedience or compliance. They see the demand of not hurting others with the spread of disease as an infringement on their freedom.

The result of their actions is a lack of empathy, but I don’t think that is their goal and they even have any awareness about anyone else’s needs except their own.

FYI, Passive Matrix doesn’t mean monochrome. Passive Matrix were color too. If you’re actually looking for a reflective monochrome LCD, you probably want STN aka Supertwist LCD.

I’m not aware of any STN smartphones. Others have already rightly posted eink is likely a better fit for what you want.

Free rent, or so they thought

This is NOT what I thought people meant when they use the phrase “Living rent free in your head”

To my complete lack of surprise, Russia is seems to be a freer country for free software developers than the United States.

What does the United States have to do with this? Since when is Finland part of the United States? Linus Torvalds is Finnish.

Not in an academic sense but they never actually learned to form ideals

First, yes there are people that never intellectually explore the world nor the underpinnings of their beliefs after high school. This is, many times, why people are a stark difference from their prior selves when they go to college and do actually get exposed to other beliefs and are taught to question the “why” of their known “what”.

However, don’t get too cocky and arrogant in your superiority. I only have fractional knowledge of this myself, but when I was much younger I thought the way you did and I was equally ignorant as you may be now. There’s more you’re not seeing that has value.

Those same people you’re referring to do learn other things which aren’t always apparent. “Street Smarts” is one way some of these skills are described. They can generally read a room and know the social condition in it and if it is risky or becoming unsafe. They are keenly aware of navigating the fringes of society’s bureaucracies just out of necessity. This includes navigating the legal system. Many times they have social bonds, which to outsiders, defy reason. Others would look at some of these relationships as “toxic” but they don’t understand that those bonds will sometimes produce effort, money, or insight in emergency or dire situations to those on the in-group not available to the rest of us. Society has a pale phrase that tries to encapsulate this in “ride or die”, but to those that live it, its much deeper and more committed.

Emmett

Most laws aren’t retroactive. If you do the thing before it’s illegal, then you skated by. That could very easily be the answer here, especially as most all the physical automation is barely existent. If a company deploys now, they don’t pay the tax, but they will when they upgrade models.

You’ll need to provide your definition of “physical automation” for the purposes of your argument. As it stands that is NOT clear, which is part of the quagmire of all the Automation Tax approaches.

As to code automation, same rules apply. Excel macros get by, but I would apply the tax on companies that replace white collar jobs via SaaS or other applications as their core businesses model,

What does this mean? If a company is still running on-prem MS Exchange servers for company email, then the law passes, then the company switches to Office365 for email instead, does your law hit that company with an Automation tax? If so, how would the tax be applied? Amount of spend on Office365? Amount spent on salaries of former MS Exchange administrators? How long would the tax apply? A year? Forever?

What I’m also seeing is that all encumbant companies (shielded from the automation tax because they already put automation in place) would have an advantage forever against existing companies trying to make automation changes (and being hit with the tax).

Another loophole I see is companies completely liquidating or selling to a newly formed company so that there are “no jobs lost to automation, because this company from day 1 has always used automation”.

or for that line of buisness for vendors that do a lot of things. It would have to be refined as to where you draw the line, but you could.

I don’t know what this means.

Can you give a concrete example of your Automation tax? Situation before your law goes into place, the law passing, then the Automation tax a company would pay when they make a specific change in your example?

The automation tax that gates/etc proposed to fund UBI/social support networks is making more and more sense.

I’m all for UBI, but the automation tax is a quagmire.

In this theoretical new tax, tell me what qualifies to be taxed?

• An Atlas autonomous robot? Sure, absolutely. How about instead a hydraulic arm that is controlled by a human? Previously there were 4 humans that moved the widget from A to B, but now they have 1 human operating a joystick for a net loss of 3 jobs. Is that taxed?
• How about an Excel macro? Prior to the macro, there was one person filling in the spreadsheet the entire 8 hour workday. Now that person was replaced with an Excel macro that runs in 5 minutes with one click. That is automation too right? What would you tax? The cost of the person replaced?
• Who pays the tax? A company that buys an Atlas robot after the law is passed? Absolutely. How about a company that bought Atlas robots 24 hours before the law passed? How about the company that bought them a year before the law passed? Now apply the Excel macro automation. Excel macros have around since the 1990s. Are you going to go back to the first macro run and tax every company retroactively? How about if the macro only does part of the work?

Automation tax is a nice idea but a nightmare to try to make in policy. Additionally, it will have a stifling effect on any business efficiency efforts after it exists.

If the tax is based upon workers losing their jobs to automation, it will have a massive knock on effect limiting new hires. A company would be very leery of hiring a worker if they could be accused (and taxed) of automation replacement when that worker is let go.