There are more assholes than good people because assholery typically delivers better results in terms of wealth, power, and status, and good people have to accept a lower social status in order to maintain their goodness, but most people don’t fall into either category.

But the vast majority of people fall into an apathetic middle ground where they don’t really think too much about any kind of moral consistency and act according to paths they’re already on and the rules those paths require.

$42 million dollars. Basically nothing in terms of Google’s bottom line.

They’re doing this because they WANT to.

Talk about closing the barn door after the cows are already gone…

$45 million??? That’s a rounding error on a single day of Google’s income. I’m not even a little shocked that they have no scruples or integrity whatsoever, but I AM shocked how apparently CHEAP our democracy is.

Hell, it’ll probably cost more than that to IMPLEMENT this in any meaningful sense!

They’re going to get stopped either way. A flotilla of 27 civilian ships isn’t sneaking past one of the most advanced, heavily armed navies in the world, no matter how “sneaky” they try to be.

At least this way they’re on record for stopping the delivery.

Let’s not forget it’s convenient for conservative parties of BOTH sides to have some red meat to throw to their country’s nationalists. Normal, everyday people scarcely have the time or interaction to have strong feelings about another country whose people they don’t encounter that often, independent of history. But when you stir up your constituents to unite against an out-group, you can get them out to the polls and have a nice convenient threat to accuse the other guys of being soft against. They will become real friends when the real threat from China is greater than the political benefit of using each other to keep a united nationalist wing.

The Goncharov TV mini-series was 5 episodes of pure perfection. Best thing NBC ever did.

What could possibly go wrong with pushing the two most resource rich and populous countries in the world onto the same team aligned against you? I’m surprised nobody’s thought of such a winning strategy before.

I’ll drink to that, my friend.

Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.

Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.

“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”

Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Toyoake in Aichi

Extra time! I wouldn’t have given us 5.

That’s WAY later than I thought!

This is cause for celebration! 🎉

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this premise.

There are lots of things you can get by in life without knowledge of. If you don’t know how vaccines work, you can go right on through your life and argue that you have better things to do… until we reach a critical mass of people who are willfully ignorant and the next thing you know we have a head of health and human services who thinks eating random dead animals is a safe way to boost your immune system making decisions.

Large-scale, pervasive ignorance of things that are actually critical and consequential to the functioning of society is not without consequence. It’s a free world and people are free to take the view that they don’t care. They’re also free to completely forgo and not use technology. But both using it in your daily life AND deciding it isn’t important to know any basic knowledge about how it works? I’m not concerning myself with those people - I don’t understand OR respect their decision.

I am very understanding of “it’s too difficult, make it easier”. I am NOT understanding or accommodating of “I don’t think I should have to do it at all.”

Edit: Furthermore, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this conversation if those people really believed that produced good enough results. Most operating systems are ALREADY built with that philosophy. If Windows and other operating systems that are built based around the philosophy that you don’t need to understand anything and the OS should do everything for you was working so well, why are people looking at Linux in the first place? It’s pretty clear that that philosophy is not producing satisfactory results anymore. I would argue it CAN’T produce satisfactory results. You either want control and freedom, and the responsibility and extra work that comes along with that, or you don’t. There’s no free ride that gets you both.

The premise of the question is that it’s somehow supposed to be a flawless experience.

Nothing is flawless. Linux has a learning curve. Everything does.

The advantage to Linux is, if you learned Linux 15 years ago, then got stranded on a desert island, got rescued, and installed a new distro today, you can still count on more or less everything working exactly as you expect it to - maybe a bit smoother.

With Windows, who knows? It’s death from a thousand tiny cuts every other day to avoid a deeper, persistent, and meaningful understanding of your system. The time you spend learning how to do things in Linux isn’t WASTED. That knowledge will never STOP being useful. It’s best not to look at it as an annoyance so much as an INVESTMENT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavemen_(TV_series)

No, I didn’t expect that, which is why it was stupid to say it in the first place. You can’t turn this around and put it on the customer to have to read between the lines what the business is trying to actually say. How about, the multi-billion dollar company that has entire buildings full of lawyers doesn’t make claims that it can’t back up?

I’m not saying it’s right to expect that the Windows operating system was never going to have to have a paid upgrade again, but it was also stupid and wrong to make the claim that it wouldn’t. That’s on them. Nobody held a gun to their head and told them to lie to their customers and then later claim they didn’t mean it. And furthermore, why give them the benefit of the doubt? You think if you were in trouble because of something stupid you said, Microsoft is going to come to your aid? Is it being fair? To a company that wouldn’t care if they accidentally bankrupted you with a forced update?

And sure, they can "clarify"all they want that he didn’t mean the words that he said precisely and accurately in unambiguous English. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s not some random employee. He is an executive. He knows, and everyone else should know as well, that he speaks as a representative of the company. Otherwise what’s to keep them from lying through their teeth about whatever features they want? “It prints free money! It’ll cure all your diseases! No, no… he didn’t mean that.”