Verbage:

Profit: An advantageous gain or return; benefit.

I was using the more common definition of the word, not the annoying accountant one.

Accountant profit: Financial gain from a transaction or from a period of investment or business activity, usually calculated as income in excess of costs or as the final value of an asset in excess of its initial value.

Of course the laws will have to be written in such a way that removes the ability of leeches to make financial gains on the back of other people.

Increase the tax rate to 100% on all profits from renting/leasing residential properties. You can still rent out housing but you can’t make a profit on it.

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.

He would never admit to it (I met him several times early in my career), but he was a very much a Shiva character to history.

His work destroyed thousands of years of landraces. The genetic pool that we desperately need in our race against the evolution of pests and diseases.

His work also hurt impoverished farmers in third world countries even more. As high yields drove down commodity prices. Industrialized nations subsidized their farmers to ensure supply further depressing global price.

His work fed billions and has been instrumental in reducing early childhood fatality rates.

His work also freed up massive amounts of income to spend on other things. As food prices fell other industries developed rapidly. Poverty and hunger are no longer causes by not producing enough food but from the greed and selfishness of the parasitic top wealthy people.

The place was a toxic cesspool at the time. An investment group had purchased 7 different companies and forced merged them in the space of 3 years and went on a massive hiring spree. The company I started with was 350 people. The company I left was over 4,000 people

It was an illegal layoff that I could taken them to court over. However the in-house lawyer knew what was going on and made them give me one hell of a severance package to stop me from suing them. I basically got everything I reasonably would have gotten if I sued.

That ended up being the most profitable year of my life.

My boss ended up CEO for a few years. It didn’t go well. They have 1/2 the number of employees now and 50% less market share.

I am on my 3rd layoff in 10 years.

First one I had all sort of dirt on my boss who was kissing ass to climb the corporate ladder. I was a massive liability as I knew what a waste of space he was. They laid me off with some really week excuses and a years wage/benefits to keep me quiet.

Second one we got a new CEO who decided to make massive changes to the company “to make it more profitable”. It hasn’t shown a profit since and the layoffs are a yearly tradition now.

The last one was this past fall. Smaller company over-invested when times where good. Then the market turned around and they are in trouble. One of those small “family” businesses, me and 20 others got kicked out of the family.

So as of now I have my own business. I am on track to make 100% more than I ever have before working for someone else.

Just for shits and giggles I also have an interview tomorrow for a C-suite position in a tropical country. It’s too fucking cold here.

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. :-).

This is not that new.

Android auto would allow apps to play ads when the car was in park.

After using the ad support version of Pandora for most of a decade, when the full screen video ad popped up on my 2016 work truck, it was immediately and permanently uninstalled. I used 128gb microSD in my phone instead.

I’ve never used a streaming service for music again.

I once had to sit down with a suppliers accountant because the billion dollar company I worked for couldn’t figure out why the PO and the invoices on about 50 orders were slightly off.

Reason: The supplier and billion dollar companies systems used different units of measure. So the conversion created a rounding error as the billion dollar company only went out 4 decimal places This led the the invoices being between $0.01-$0.05 off. All told the difference was $0.01.

It took us 2 hours and I had to buy the suppliers accountant lunch to get it sorted out.

I honestly would love to. Unfortunately my banking and accounting apps for my business won’t run on it.

Also the reason I have an iPad for two apps that are not on Android that I have to have for business.

M business laptop is W10 instead of Linux mint like my personal one for the same reason…

I am typing this on a pixel 8

Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.

How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.

What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.

I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.

I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…

All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.

I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don’t need/privacy issues.

The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.

iOS’s UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.

Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.

My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year… Oh joy…

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

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.

About that global warming and subtropical diseases being able to survive further north and south.

Yeah… Welcome to the new normal.

Why is basic math.

In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.

Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.

So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.

The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.

And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.