fakedang

Microsoft does not care about consumer branding because their enterprise branding game is A1.

A few days back, I spent some time going through a World Book encyclopaedia set that my parents had bought for me when I was 4. It was basically an expensive investment back then into what would turn into a lifelong reading habit.

Most of the information in it is practically worthless today unfortunately - Saddam Hussein still alive, as were Katharine Hepburn and King Hussein of Jordan, no mention of Ceres and Pluto was still a planet, and the Internet and software had barely a mention. Most articles had less information than a standard Wikipedia article.

That being said, the way information was presented in them still outshines anything one may find on the internet today. Even the simple elements - neat diagrams and relevant images, proper sectioning and organization of the text, footnotes to other relevant articles...

Long gone are the days when I would simply take a bowl of ice cream and a volume and just read it end to end.

But the COVID cheques were the only ones done at a scale comparable enough to what a UBI programme would look like in the US, one that could inform government on what usage would look like.

Free housing is just another form of UBS that I was talking about.

UBI is not the panacea imo. We need UBS, and not the bank - universal basic services. Whether that's healthcare, education, unemployment, free transportation, food stamps for the needy, housing loans, more government jobs, etc.

UBI was an experiment carried out during COVID and all it did was elevate prices and push a lot of people into Robinhood, while elevating the debt crisis.

It's extortion when you tell the business as a conditional statement. Perhaps you're lived a fortunate life as to not have dealt with a mafia gang ever in your sheltered life.

I was talking about the Chinese.

I was talking about the Chinese.

That's because the technology is already there, if plants were willing to run at a bit of a higher OpEx and add some CapEx. Amine scrubbing coupled with decades-old technology like Rotary Packed Beds Reactors can already capture 90% of CO2 at minimum. The UAE's Ruwais facility already does this onsite and uses the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (aka fracking for the last bits of oil in wells). This has the benefit of sequestering CO2 while also not using water for fracking as an option.

Scale of deployment vs scale of funding.

None that operate at the scale of deployment that BMGF operates in.

It's telling when the largest maker of these devices themselves put societal controls in place to curb the excesses of this device - yet they're failing miserably too. Or are they? Perhaps the result is also what they want internally.

A bit tough to do when almost all Islamic-majority countries are located in Asia or Africa, where they're prone to dictatorial tendencies and nepotism runs galore. But the few European ones are doing alright - Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, heck might even argue Turkey (people outside Istanbul voting for Islamist Erdogan is still democracy in action).

Which state so I can avoid it?

This has to be by far one of the most ignorant and bigoted answers I've ever read on this site, or on this question in particular.

If Islam is as unique as you say it is, why is it that Pakistan is able to constantly hold its ground against India, ever since the independence of both countries? Why Afghanistan beat conventional armies regularly, including the most powerful military in the world? Why Chechnya was such a thorn in Russia?

The answer is much simpler - Arab society is built upon tribes, and the tribal system continues today. Rulers of autocratic countries want loyalists from their allied tribes at the top of the military, and tribes do their best to look after solely their own interests. Never mind that oil wealth has also enabled insane defence spending, which means with the right positioning, some well-placed members of the military could stand to earn millions in bribes and skimming, which makes a career in the military all the more lucrative for the tribes.

Which is why ISIS was so skilled and so much of a threat to the Arab countries - because their motivation was not to enrich themselves, it was purely driven by their radical ideology. The best killers are those who don't give a shit about their own lives.

In this case, the account clearly stated: -

1.) We don't like your poster so you better remove it or we'll badmouth you within our network.

2.) You have 1 day to comply.

3.) You can instead work with an artist we will recommend (aka connected to us), and we'll cease.

Textbook mafia-style extortion.

The difference between data sovereignty and regulatory capture is that the populace generally wants data sovereignty. The populace does not want big corporations dictating the rules of the trade.

"It would be a pity if I were to tarnish jlarocco's reputation within my network. I even have his GitHub from his profile. I'll just talk shit about him to all the CTOs on the block and ensure he doesn't get a job again..."

See how that works? That's why you should care. The so-called influencer-orienter culture has become a plague after social media. And these F&B businesses are the ones hit hardest - remember all those movies in the 90s and 00s about how some up and coming entrepreneur or chef had to win the approval of some hoity-toity food journalist?

Also, rest assured, I'm not serious about badmouthing you or anyone here for that matter - just trying to illustrate a point.

There are no good intentions here. This is the mafia playbook through and through - "It would be a pity if something were to happen to your <insert valuable property or reputation here>".

Maybe don't guess and read the article? European data sovereignty and CLOUD act.

Sabotage is sabotage, doesn't have to be the same down to the minutae to be called similar.

Which is why High IQ President specifically responded to Amodei.

What's wrong with Coinbase? Sure they're in the crypto realm, but it's not like they're actively damaging the ecosystem. Coinbase has been far more reserved than Binance or the n number of crypto exchanges outside the US.

Lots of bad marketing moves by Nike - wonder which middle management genius' idea it was to put that big ass poster right on the facade of a historic building, if anyone remembers.

And their manufacturing quality has gone down the drain. Their sneakers fall apart in months while German brand sneakers still manage to retain their quality.

Satellite tech like Starlinks need either very visible dishes, or in Starlink's case, local ground stations, to operate. I'm sure there are Iranian ground stations though, just that they're configured to mine crypto or obscure hacking attempts by government-backed groups.

Gavin Newsom vs Gavin Belsom.

The tax is just Gavin positioning before the 2028 elections.

Even taxing 1% of wealth annually makes more sense than this.

And oh yeah, let's fund healthcare, but let's also sleep on the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis.

On the other side, Prop 41 and 42 are absolute jokes. It's like Robert California himself wrote those laws or something.

But at that point in time, there's 19k in money. And future repayments of that loan back to the bank are less valuable to it than that current value figure. Because a bank can do a lot more shenanigans with that loan figure than it can with just the deposits.

More like the vulture PE for startups.

It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.

Not to mention, more abrasive - every process engineer's nightmare.

Basically Apple had Samsung et al validate the use case for a flip phone before executing their move. The others proved there is a market for this, hence Apple jumped on the bandwagon.

This is not like the iPhone mini, where they were competing with both lower end phone companies, and their own older refurb models. This one's all about ostentation.