I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.

My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.

Ehh… As somebody who is old enough to remember before the standardization and consolidation of software, I disagree with you.

A workforce that are trained in more software options makes them more valuable to the company. It pushes for constant innovation. It’s not efficient, but innovative processes almost never are. It also increases the difficulty to replacing experienced employees.

The widespread adoption of Photoshop as the standard has depressed wages and increased job insecurity. I also suspect that the trend of simplification in designs is the direct result of this. Mediocre talented designers are selling boring easy to create designs to artistically blind CEO’s.

Fucking hell, I understood that. I have slipped and fallen into the dark side. Learn from my mistakes and turn back before you get to this point. There is no hope for me now.

Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.

As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.

The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don’t give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can’t get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn’t eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.

Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn’t start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.

Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.

Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.

Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan… See above.

Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.

There are many more of these that are around.

Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a “Theoretical” $200K max.

That’s okay, we can reschedule the 1 of the 60 TFCV meetings about theupcoming 5 TPS meetings, that so we can be prepared for the 2 SMR meetings in 3 and 4 months, which is needed for the the BRM meeting in 6 months. Then we’ll see if anything is decided at the BRM meeting. If not we’ll repeat the meeting schedule for the foreseeable future.

I have a work phone and a personal phone. The work phone i answer calls from I known numbers all the time. My contact information gets passed around as part of my business. For a while I had scammers hitting my number 3-4 times per day. I answered and fucked with them every time. A little free stress relief through the day. Now I almost never get them anymore.

My personal phone I have always screened all the calls. It still gets hit with scammers 2-3 times per week.

I guess you are right. There is a list going around of numbers who waste their time.

Tech tends to goes through stages:

A need or idea is created. Usually by a small independent entity.

A proof of concept is developed and starts to gain ground.

Investors pour money into the concept to an extreme degree. Tech grows in functionality, matures and develops into a useful tool.

The the investors demand a return on the investment and the money dries up.

Company either goes bankrupt or their product goes to shit.

Write a series of single query per e-mail.

Set then up on delayed delivery every hour through their workday.

It only takes once or twice until people read your entire e-mails.

Freereadfeed.com

Then use the library for the rest of the series if needed. :-).

Have played every version of BF since it came out. Haven’t purchased or played BF2042 since they abandoned BF1 & BF5 still full of bugs.

EA doesn’t give a fuck about the quality of their games anymore. To be fair, none of the major studios do anymore. They are too big and try to race through development to make sure that this years sales numbers are bigger than last year’s.

Basically, make a “business argument” for the upgrades. CEO’s are generally business bros with limited practical experience. They understand sales and people pleasing/kiss assing. So the right argument is usually how it will increase sales and make their employees more productive and happier.

Unfortunately with the current equipment being 7 years old, “anything is better than the shit we currently have”. With win10 being put to pasture, your company needs to do a full replacement. So buy the cheaper ones that the CEO wants, then work on convincing him to buy the higher end ones when the cheap shit dies in the next 2-4 years.

Phrase it like "Due to the urgency of our upgrade needs and budgetary constraints, I understand why we need to buy lower quality equipment. This equipment has a life expectancy of 2-4 years. I recommend when these lower quality models need replacement we go with a higher quality model and a life expectancy of 5-7 years. This will in the long term reduce our expected cost by $xxxx/year.

If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.

I upgraded from Windows XP to Vista after the 2nd servicepack fixed most of the shit. By that point it was a tolerable OS.

I am currently hoping for a major service pack next year to fix all the stupid shit they did in Windows 11.

You know kind of like when they fucked up windows 8, attempted a quick fix in 8.1 and finally fixed it in win10.

Of course they are at 4 major updates with win11 and it’s still shit so the hope is very thin.

The last major antitrust action on this scale in the U.S. 8 years to process.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

This type of lawsuit is why the billionaire bro’s are backing the senile rapist and felon. Making them play somewhat fair ruins their business plan.

Firing middle managers is a fun way to kill the company. Not that cleaning house is a bad idea. Unfortunately the people making decisions of who to keep and who to let go are usually idiots.

Middle Managers are promoted for two reasons: technical expertise and ass-kissing expertise. Now the technical experts tend to not mix well with incompetent parasitic c-suite types idiots. The ass-kissers are beloved by the c-suite as that is their only role in life.

So when firings come around guess who they get rid of? Then 1-3 years later everyone is shocked when everything starts to fall apart.

They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.

illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.

Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…

I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.

Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.

The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.

I did a little assassin creed run this summer. Started with Unity and went to Odyssey.

Unity by far has the best story-line. The game mechanics are also more focused on being an assassin, not a brawler. Sneak and stab, drop smoke and disappear when you get in trouble.

Syndicate - they changed the focus to more brawling. However the mechanics were pretty bad and the storyline was predictable and stupid to say the least. You can still play the assasin for most of it if you want.

Origins - They went all out into brawling with this one. Complicated all of the controls. Easiest way to make it through the game is as an archer. The story lines are dull and some are just plain weird. The offer you tons of different options in gear but only a few are worth keeping. Not much chance to actually assainate anyone. Lots of weird half baked stuff like the naval warfare in the story line but nowhere else.

Odyssey - it’s basically the same as origins. They spent more time fleshing out the mechanics. Added in a ton of options but you only use a few. Added in a ton more brawling combat and very little assassination. In many instances trying to play as an assassin is just not possible. The combat is often broken. Beating the bosses is all the same. Spam arrows while dodging until they weaken, get a hit in and run away- repeat. Save often because the game crashes regularly.

Yes I played all the way through and beat the main quests and side quest on all of them.

The one I see the most is:

“We avoided any semblance of rational experimental design and got significant results.”