You're trying to follow an out-of-date map. Our technology-infused growth of the past 50 years has produced more widespread mental illness and psycopathy than someone in the 80's could have even imagined. At this point in our societal evolution, you cannot assume that HUMANS THEMSELVES are either normal or natural.
It's only a matter of time until Social Security starts to fail, right after we've paid all the boomers their full benefits (and just in time for me to be eligible), and then they'll have to implement "austerity measures." After that, groceries, gas, housing, health "care," and higher education will have fully broken the middle class (it's already broken me, and I have a good job and a paid-off house), and the economy (sans imaginary AI investment bullshit) will be exposed as failing. AI (such as it is) will hammer entry level jobs, and tax revenues will be impacted by this. At the same time, we're going to have to start some sort of menial UBI, but with what money, I have no idea. Service on the national debt just surpassed military spending last year. When the shit hits the fan in another 10 years, the country will have to either go to war to reset the accounting ledgers, or actually put themselves on a budget. Which do you think will happen?
Given the numbers and rates we can see at present, all economic activity right now is a process of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, it hasn't failed, but it is an absolute certainly that it WILL. It's just a question of WHEN, and it's relatively soon. We have no adults in Washington. It's clear they're ALL just trying "get theirs" before it all comes crashing down.
Companies are already following a bunch of standards like SOX, SOC2, HIPAA, etc., and documenting their adherence to checking all of the boxes, but incidents still happen every week.
When a megacorp funds a network of non-profits to lobby a bunch of politicians, draft legislation, and tell them to take it to committee, that can happen without much visibility, especially when it's been orchestrated at the state level, as this has. Where does any of this show up until there's a vote called on it? There's no open debate. No working "across the aisle" to address concerns. There's nothing left of the legislative process that started this country, or, indeed, any Western representative democracy. So someone has to be watching, see something on an agenda that raises the hairs on their necks, figure out what it is, and if there's a story there, and they're not going to get any help from anyone because everyone involved knows how the public is going to feel about it. And then, as the article indicates, even a place like Reddit is going to astroturf the effort to get the story out. (Which I've been trying to point out for YEARS, but which -- surprise, surprise! -- gets supressed.)
You literally blamed these moves on US religious prudishness, and then said that they were only about surveillance. Which is it? Just kidding. We all know it's nothing more than surveillance and control, and you just have an anti-religious axe to grind.
If the US actually gave a flying FUCK about "protecting the children," the current administration would be making good on Trump's promise to release the Epstein files -- as now ordered by a federal law passed by a overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress -- and prosecuting everyone involved.
We see what's really going on. We can't do anything about it, apparently, but we see.
I'm sorry, but what!? Right back atcha. If you'd have bothered to have looked at the chart in link I posted, you'd have seen that market share of "consumer compute" for Windows was 26% as of 10 years ago. You're going to have to do a lot better anecdata to find a 44% resurgence over the last 10 years, especially given the dismal things that have happened to it as a platform over that time.
I've said this for years. The amount of money Microsoft makes from the OS apart from corporations is a rounding error. What little they do make is from preinstalled systems, and, honestly, when was the last time you knew someone that went out and bought a Windows-based computer for anything other than gaming? I don't need a quote from someone high up in the company to know they couldn't care less how upset people are by the decisions they make about it.
Literally every corporation and government in the world is slavishly devoted to running all of their end-user computers on it, because Microsoft will let them do unspeakable things to the OS, in the name of security, that wind up having next-to-nothing to do with actually making their data more secure, and only serve to infuriate and spy on the users. My company runs THREE different "end point" security packages on my machine. There are at least 35 scripts that run at all hours of the day to make sure I'm not doing anything I shouldn't. It takes 20 minutes to be usable after a boot up. And the VPN drops several times a day, even though my internet is rock solid. It's an entire, vibrant ecosystem of outsourced, bone-headed, second-and-third-party decision making so that no one in the company or the department or the management or the supply chain has any accountability in case something goes wrong. THAT'S what Microsoft is selling, and IT HAS NO COMPETITION IN THIS CAPACITY.
For years, I've begged people on every social network I've been on, including this one, to find a source of operating system market share that has corporate purchases broken out from personal purchases. This is the closest thing I can find. It shows abysmal numbers for Microsoft, and it's at least a decade out of date. I expect that Microsoft -- who obviously underwrote the entire IT press during the 90's and 00's -- has done quite a lot of work and paid quite a lot of money to make sure that nothing definitive in this regard ever sees the light of day. They have gotten to where they are making sure that Gartner never did anything resembling this.
At some point, doesn't humankind rise up and demand that our governments stop... you know... actually fucking us like this? After all the trust-busting at the turn of the century, we're right back in another golden age of robber barons, almost as if we learned nothing about this as a civilization. Being paid in company scrip that can only be used in the company's store with products from their global monolith doesn't sound far-fetched at this point. We seem to be heading straight for the cyberpunk version of our inevitable dystopian future.
Treating corporations as "people" for policy's sake is a legal decision which has essentially killed the premise of the US democratic republic. We are now, for all intents and purposes, a corporatocracy. Perhaps an even better description would simply be oligarchy, but since our oligarchs' wealth is almost all tied up in corporate stocks, it's a very incestuous relationship.
> Being grateful even for the losses that have brought the most sorrow, the two things at the very same time, has ripped me apart, but it's also been the only way through.
Whether or not you express this sentiment as a Christian, this is a core tenet of the teachings. Despite being reminded of this by a close counselor in the beginning of my own tragedy, I have yet to fully come to terms with it. I know I need to, and I try, but I'm still bitter about it, and I know I'm still only faking it. In fact, I think I'm reading this story and your comment at precisely the time I need to in order to finally admit to myself that this is also my only way through. I gotta be honest: I never expected to hear the voice of God speaking through this forum. Thank you.
So many people so concerned about CO2 emissions from computing devices... all the way down to Microsoft setting the default timeout for Bluetooth on Windows 11 to ONE MINUTE. It took me 2 weeks of hair pulling and updating everything before I realized why my mouse and keyboard would stop working, because it NEVER occurred to me in my WILDEST dreams that an OS developer would be given the insane task of creating a timeout like this, and writing a UI to control it. Then I realized that some middle manager in the guts of Microsoft probably got a bonus by being able to tell his management that "Microsoft" was now saving a collective million pennies a year of energy costs by crippling this basic feature. Well done, guys.
Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?
It is a fundamental truism of American "capitalism" that, if there is a law for something, it was written to protect established "capital" from competition. There are no free markets in the US.
I remember a big stink about corruption in the Olympic Games when it went to Utah, and giving my mormon friend some crap about it. He pointed out that it's always been DEEPLY corrupt, and the only problem was that the Utah officials didn't go along with it, and that's what caused all the press. I don't know how much of that is actually true, but it seems analogous.
Am I missing something? Does the FTC have any authority over Sony, a Japanese company? Isn’t comparing these two companies in terms of US government regulation kind of pointless?