Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.

Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.

McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King. I googled them all with the word brioche and there was news for all of them.

Thank you. Brioche buns are an abomination used by the fast food industry to trigger sugar reward signals and make their burgers just a bit more addictive. They’re not used with any good intentions whatsoever.

Brilliant. She has real gravitas. That’s what you need for this role. The ability to carry the weight of history.

Can you do one of these for Windows 3.1 or 95? That would be sweet!

Honestly, I hate steam (the client) so much. I have a fair sized library of games that I never play because it’s just torture to me to start that abomination of a program. Why the fuck couldn’t they give it a simple, clean, elegant, native UI that doesn’t treat my battery with wanton disrespect?

I’m not hellbent on punishing people and I’m not lacking in compassion. I have a great deal of compassion for good people who are genuinely suffering and worse off through no fault of their own. I have been volunteering for 7 years as a tutor for newcomer families (mostly refugee families from Somalia).

These families are far from what I’d call free riders. They are tenacious and eager to contribute to society. They also happen to have a very strong community, unlike the neighbourhood I live in (more on that later).

The ruling elite aren’t the reason it won’t happen. The disappearance of local community is. I’m only 40 years old and yet I’ve noticed a DRAMATIC change in the neighbourhood where I grew up (and still live). When I was a kid everyone was kind and friendly. There were tons of other kids around like me.

Now there are hardly any kids around. I go for a walk and all I see are people my age or older, usually walking a dog with a scowl on their face. Society’s institutions are gone or moribund. Hardly anyone is friendly. Everyone is just looking out for themselves and treating their neighbours with cold suspicion.

This isn’t just my personal feelings or my weird neighbourhood. It’s everywhere and people are talking about it, if not always in the spotlight.

There are just so many people who are only in it for themselves and wealth has little to do with it. It’s the lack of community bonds. I would love to hear how a change in the political system could fix that but I won’t hold my breath for it to happen.

What you’re talking about, with families, communes, or other small communities, IS STILL WORK. It might not be compensated with money but it is compensated, usually with social capital or reputation. I do things for you and then maybe some time in the future you return the favour. All money does is allow me to (pardon the pun) cash in that favour on my own terms and potentially with someone other than the person I originally worked for.

What’s the problem with these informal economies (favours for favours)? They do not scale! As soon as the community is large enough that not everyone knows each other (the networks grow too large) then you run into the problem of being unable to punish free riders. If you do a favour for uncle Ted and then later uncle Ted refuses to lift a finger for you, you can punish him by telling the rest of the family that he’s selfish. However, you walking into uncle Ted’s office and telling his boss (who doesn’t know you) about it is unlikely to go over well.

“If I didn’t need to make money to live” is a non-starter. If you built a huge society with free food, housing, health care, internet and all that for everyone (all needs met) then you’d get millions of people choosing to smoke cannabis and play video games all day. The only way to get “free everything” society to work is with extremely small groups where reputation and social capital stand in for monetary compensation.

Lastly, I need to make a point about the individual and their choice to work for free for others or not. Take the example of an artist (say, a digital painter). They may be happy to stream on Twitch and give away all the art they create for free (with their Patreon revenue covering their living expenses). However, how likely do you think they are to take on a huge commissioned video game project for free? I’ll tell you: extremely unlikely. The free art is the art that the artist wants to produce. Commissioned art that follows narrow requirements for (say) character designs, settings, etc. is completely different: it’s work because it’s not the kind of art the artist chose to make.

“nobody will work if they don’t earn money from it”

No, it’s just a tautology resulting from how work is defined. Anything you do on your own time (not paid) is by definition not work. It’s a hobby, a chore, volunteering, etc. By contrast, anything you’re paid to do but would stop doing if you stopped being paid is work.

Looking after a sick relative may feel a whole lot like work. The difference is that if you don’t do it, who will? Asking a stranger to care for your relative for free just isn’t done. That’s why it’s work if you’re a hired nurse but not work if it’s your relative and you do it for free.

You can do this exercise with anything. Go to a restaurant and you expect to pay for your food after you eat. Go to eat dinner at your mother-in-law’s place and you don’t expect to pay. In fact, she’d likely be baffled at best and insulted at worst if you tried to pay her for your meal. Cooking food for strangers is work, cooking food for friends and family is not.

Anyway, don’t you think there’s some validity to the original statement? Why would you expect strangers to cook for you and care for your sick relatives for free? Note that even if you’re not paying them but someone else (possibly the state) then it’s still work.

GICs then!

Edit: looks like GICs are only guaranteed up to $100,000.

But honestly if you consider stocks and bonds to be gambling then you could really argue that buying anything is a gamble. Buy $100 million worth of onions and the price will go up due to scarcity, then try to sell them. Someone actually did this years ago and made a ton of money while bankrupting a lot of farmers and investors. The government responded by banning the trading of onion futures!

All this is to say it’s actually impossible to fulfill the genie’s rules if you take into account market fluctuations on the price of anything you buy.

Perhaps Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I’m sure he managed to squirrel away some of his wealth and now lives comfortably in exile, albeit with a huge bullseye on his back. But if your standard is “lose 100% of their wealth” then that almost never happens to anyone, even working class people who declare bankruptcy due to overwhelming debts.

Does Muammar Gaddafi count? He lived like a king with an anime-style cadre of elite female bodyguards, being essentially the emperor of Libya. He died after some soldiers dragged him out of a ditch and summarily executed him.

Employers are inherently ableist. They discriminate against people who are unable to do the job. They also discriminate for reasons unrelated to job performance, but then measuring job performance is very difficult even when someone has been working at a company for years.

Note that in professional sports and in Hollywood it’s quite easy to measure performance. Accordingly, you see athletes and actors compensated in a way that’s much more in line with their job performance than other industries.

There’s ample evidence to show that no one learns critical thinking in college. At best, you select for people who are better at it.

All the spatial persistence stuff was handled by the desktop database which was an invisible file that got stored on the disk. Hard drives and floppies each had their own so that if you shared a floppy with a friend the spatial properties of the floppy would travel with it. This also worked if you moved a hard drive from one system to another for the same reason.

It also worked over AppleShare network file sharing. Where it didn’t work was if you had 2 different computers since there was no way to sync information between them. You essentially treated each computer as its own thing which is really more in keeping with the spirit of spatial design. After all, it would be really weird if 2 different drawers in different rooms in your house somehow always had identical contents which stayed in sync.

Q for all those with suggestions: do any of these attempt to replicate the Spatial Finder? No other system I’ve seen (contemporary to OS 9 or since then) seems to have got this element correct (or even attempted to do so).

It’s such a key part of the OS 9 (and earlier) experience. Double click a folder and it opens where you expect it to, in the shape you left it, with the icons laid out as you left them. It’s a method of working that gives you great familiarity and confidence.

If anyone’s worked in a kitchen or workshop for a long time and developed a deep memory for the layout and the location of every tool, material, and control, then they’ll know what I’m talking about. You can move around and work incredibly efficiently, relying greatly on muscle memory.

Since the demise of OS 9, the only way to retain this level of operation has been to rely heavily on the keyboard. Since almost everything on the screen is transient and unreliably positioned (non-spatial), only the keyboard is persistent enough to allow us to work at the speed of thought and rely on muscle memory. It’s been so long now that I think people forget (or never knew) that the contents of the screen could also be persistent and spatial this way.

Why not do that? Because of inflation, you lose money doing that. It’s the last resort of someone who has no other options for saving their money, such as low level drug dealers.

You mean by investing the stock market? Or literal cash under the mattress?

There are millions of people in the U.S. whose wealth comes from the increase in the property value of their family home. This is unearned wealth.

Of course, you’ll have a hard time convincing most people of that last bit. Which is why billionaires are the more popular enemy rather than the middle class.

Too broad. Wealth hoarder describes everyone with a mortgage as well as grandma Sally and her pension plan. Anyone who saves for retirement is a wealth hoarder.

The difficulty setting in Civilization games has never been “how smart is the AI.” The AI always plays with the same level of “intelligence” (which is almost none). What the difficulty setting controls is how much the AI cheats (which is a ton at the highest levels) and how aggressive it is.

My problem with Civ 5 (as a player of the series since the beginning) is that they’ve added a ton of stuff to the game that doesn’t actually make it more interesting or challenging to play. At the same time, instead of improving the AI to make it more interesting and challenging to play against, they decided to hobble all of the strong strategies from the early games in a way that just makes the game more annoying to play.

The fun part of the Civ series has always been about building the largest, most technologically advanced empire and steamrolling all the AI’s cities. Since Civ 5 this has been flat out impossible due to the changes they made to the game which cause exponential corruption / waste for large empires and the inability to stack units which means large armies are extremely tedious to manage.

Can you name a non-bad single player strategy game?