The trick is to find the right message and tone for the moment. I also think change like this is necessarily incremental. It’s possible that with enough doom-and-gloom around a pending “market correcting event”, that helping everyone reduce grocery bills by eating vegetarian a few nights a week, would be the right message.
I’m going to say that every layoff has a cover story. The goal, reduce the workforce make/save money, is really the only justification needed. Everything else is PR, and an attempt to stay out of legal hot water.
That’s always worth considering. A phone app doesn’t take a big operating budget to launch and maintain. Especially for state-actors.
That’s easy. It’s more dull here, and there’s less lock-in.
No, really. Social media without the dopamine-pump-style algorithm behind it is far less stimulating. Meanwhile, the Federation model itself allows us to abandon nodes that are co-opted by bad actors. So there’s always somewhere else to go with all your favorite stuff when things go sour.
The best take on Black Flag I ever read was something like: “It’s a great game, except for all the Assassin’s Creed parts.”
Yup. Learned that one back in the 3rd grade. This stuff is hard if you’re not experienced enough to know how people work.
On the upside, I learned that one cannot buy their way into other’s good graces, especially if they’re going to require you to modify your behavior to get there; they’re lying and that was never the issue. On the downside: holy shit that hurts once it goes wrong the first time.
As an adult I can also appreciate that there are situations where you can “buy your way in” to a club or status of some sort. IMO, those situations are generally not worth it to begin with, requiring an never-ending stream of cash to keep up appearances. Plus, it surrounds you with other people that also believe, and are invested, in the program. It’s a recipe for elitism at best, and a big 'ol grift at worst. Better friends and relationships can be had for $0 everywhere else.
Whoa, you are not kidding. The toilet is powered (not so unusual for bidet toilets), but it looks like there’s no mechanical override. Just a ‘remote’ control panel with a flush button (among many other features). That I’m sure is hygienic.
The video is about how to bluetooth pair the remote to the toilet. There are so many points of possible failure here, I can’t even.
If only there was a better way…
My first thought as well!
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.
Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.
That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.
In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.
Excel-sior!
Alas, Access was too powerful to make the transition to the cloud. It couldn’t be allowed to survive.
Let me make One Note here since you Power-Pointed that out.
I think there’s enough for way more than that if we dip into the whole O365 suite.
The Prosperity Gospel folks go a step further and equate wealth and health with the will of god. That being well-off is the direct result of being in god’s good graces. It side-steps observations of financial inequality in the face of moral equality, by hand-waving exceptional wealth as deserved by truly rare and exceptional people. And that conveniently plays off of confusing causation for correlation, so we arrive at “money = godly.”
For the record: I hate that this has a name and it’s a real thing.
I was gonna say. With a crater that large, we all lose.
Venice? Wow, that’s actually kind of on-the-nose for a show of excessive wealth.
https://historywalksvenice.com/article/early-venice/why-did-venice-get-rich/
TL;DR: Venice exists in its current form (canal city on an ever sinking atoll) not because of climate change, and not because of some fishing village put their backs into it for hundreds of years, but because of money. LOTS, and lots of money from a shipping/trade boom a very long time ago.
The fact that Bezos built his obscene wealth on shipping and international commerce, just makes this even more appropriate in a gross kind of way. Like he’s deliberately connecting himself to Venice’s history, and everything that implies.
“AI e-girl” you say? I know a contractor that might have what you’re looking for.
This is why I’m mostly okay with hunting deer, here in the US. We displaced their predators so it’s on us to make up the balance. I say “mostly” since, like others are saying in this thread about taking habitat away from kangaroos, the better answer is to give them an actual functional ecosystem to live in.