jack_tripper

If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product.

Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.

Student: no

The student's paper: "And you know what else helps wounds heal besides Aloe Vera? Playing War Thunder! The most comprehensive free-to-play, cross-platform, MMO military game"

What did I say?

Of course this price hike is inevitably dragging Xbox brand into the hole long term, but those in charge of the price hikes probably expect not to be around when that happens,.

I share the same opinion. If you're (on paper) the biggest economic block in the world, but you can be so easily bullied, then you've already failed >20 years ago.

But I don't think it was bullying, but the other way around. EU countries were just buying favoritism for US military protection, because it was still way cheaper than ripping the bandaid and building its own domestic military industry of similar power and scale.

Most defense spending uses the same motivation. You're not seeking to buying the best or cheapest hardware, you seek to buy powerful friends.

Except the data doesn't prove that. You chose to interpreted it that way.

That really doesn't mean SW engineers could be good lawyers or doctors. It's a very superficial evidence.

Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.

There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.

Citation heavily needed.

Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.

And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?

That couldn't be more vague. That's like saying I want a car like the ones in that parking lot over there.

You have no idea that some parties in Poland, Hungary or Romania would make Donald Trump look left wing.

When I asked you what type of left parties you claim are lacking, I expected to hear the exact policies you want but are lacking, not pointing at random parties that not everyone knows.

And we've have enough left wing and green policies in Europe since they're the ones who championed the "refugees welcome" open borders problem, gas dependence on Russian gas and denuclearisation.

No, I agree. But pulling the ladder from under them is not the biggest issue per se since every generation after them did them same if they could get on the ladder, the big problem with boomers is their immense hypocrisy.

GenX and Millennials knew that the situation was every man for himself grab everything you can while the going is still good, but crucially IMHO they didn't try to gaslight the next generations that this system of gains is somehow fair or the result of hard work and self sacrifice.

But boomers indulged in the period of sexual liberation and drug use, while then preaching about conservative family values and war on drugs when they got older, they enjoyed crazy good housing market and unionized jobs while preaching you should pull yourself by your bootstraps for a job that treats you like a disposable cog and won't buy you a house, they vocally hate socialism while depending on a generous social security system they designed for themselves and costing the taxpayer a huge amount on socialized government healthcare programs paid by the younger generations, etc the examples could go on. You can't hate boomers enough for this. Granted, not all are this hypocritical, but enough for the dots to form a line on the graph.

As a millennial kid at the time, I remember the 90's movies and sitcoms (Office Space, Friends, the Matrix, Fight Club, etc) where the biggest problem GenX had at the time was, *checks notes*, the lack of purpose from being bored out of their minds by a safe and mundane 9-5 cubicle job that paid the bills to support a family and indulge in mindless consumerism to fill the void.

Oh boy, if only we knew that was as good as it would ever be from then on.

I remember the mass layoffs Yahoo had at the dot com bubble crash, when they had a 5-15 minute 1:1 with every worker they laid off. Now you just wake up one day to find your account locked and you put it together that you got laid off, then you read in the news about mass layoffs happening while they're now hiring the same positions in India and their stock is going up.

No wonder young people now would rather just see the whole system burn to the ground and roast marshmallows on the resulting bonfire, when you're being stack-ranked, min-maxed and farmed like cattle on the altar of shareholder returns.

Is that like the meme on how communism isn't bad, because we never had "real communism"?

When the majority disagrees with me then there must be some anti-democratic meddling or foreign interference going on.

Because wealth inequality and housing unaffordability has increased regardless if left or right wing were in power.

There's no good and bad one here, they're both just cosplaying.

And we all want many thing in life, like for example I would want my bus to work every 5 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, but everything nice in life has a hefty price, and if you make a large part of the economy bankrupt or leave and workers unemployed or broke from rising costs, in exchange for financially unrealistic environmental targets that only a small part of the population can tolerate("let them eat cake"), then that might not sit well with a large part of the democratic voting population who has to bare the brunt of your wishes.

A balance has to be found between what's nice and desirable and what's economically feasible without causing economic hardship on others, otherwise something breaks and you get rising extremism and .

It kinda is though, since massive sums of money never comes for free with no strings attached but favors are expected in return. And those strings attached typically are to undermine the best interest of the working class to enrich those paying the lobby money.

>Calls to ban lobbying is the usual "slippery slope" that leads to authoritarianism.

Where do you see me calling to ban lobbying?

Not difficult to see why when both parties have implemented policies that have become very unpopular with the masses. You're not gonna win voters on "let them eat cake" policies when the no. 1 concern of voters is keeping their job and affording the ever increasing bills.

Both left and green parties have been writing cheques that the working class had to cash, so now they're experiencing the backlash consequences of their actions. It's just democracy at work.

They need to "git gud" and give the people what they want if they want votes. It's really not rocket science, but self reflection seems to be heavily lacking in politics due to how detached the ruling class are from the working class.

And the thing is, lobbying by domestic and foreign interests has been so normalized, that most people are already numb to it. Like Putin was even visiting his Austrian politicians buddies who then got jobs at Russian oil and gas companies after their terms and nobody in EU kicked much fuss about it when it was all done public and in the open and in 2022 we got to experience the consequences.

So as long as nobody from politics is going to jail for treason or insurrection, or at least lose their seat and generous pension over such blatant cases of corruption and treason, this will only continue or even grow larger, as those in power have proven to be unaccountable to anyone.

I don't know how we(the public) can fix this peacefully an democratically, as any party I can vote for gets captured by lobbyist interests who seek to undermine our interests.

Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry

And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.

Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.