Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

Nowadays, there are really only two classes:

• The Owners class, which is people who live off the money that’s made by the assets they own.
• The Worker class, which is people who live off the money they get from selling their work.

What was called “Middle Class” generally are just workers who earn a bit more, though the older Middle Class did at times manage to save enough to buy enough assets that they could start living of the income from those assets and not have to work anymore. That’s not the case for young people nowadays who would qualify as Middle Class due to their level of formal education and the kind of work they do because it’s way harder for them to save and asset prices are through the roof.

What kind of fucked up country is this were the police didn’t immediatly came to this altercation and detained the guy.

I mean, he’s not only being violent, he’s even making death threats.

Before transistors there were vacuum tubes which did the same thing but using very different principles (and were also way bigger, even than traditional transistors and billions of times more than the transistors in the most modern ICs)

Before electric milling or even steam milling, flour used to be milled using watermills and windmills which, IMHO, are way cooler.

Including 2000lb bombs, which the US Military refuses to use because the collateral damage is so massive and which Israel used in residential areas in both Gaza and Lebanon.

The useful idiots that have been going around for months defending Biden whilst he was sending Israel some of the worst conventional weapons the US has in the full knowledge that they would use them and with his own military advisors telling him how much collateral damage they cause, have a lot of blood on their hands for enabling this.

Well, they managed to pull about a billion people out of poverty over the last 4 decades or so, which means that mainly they were following leftwing ideals.

(I come from a country which had actual Fascism until the 70s and what the Fascists did was the exact opposite of that: the vast majority of people were dirt poor and kept dirt poor whilst a tiny elite tightly interwined with the Fascist Government gorged themselves on the wealth of the country).

However, it’s been some time since China did that lifting of the masses out of poverty, and they’ve been shifting to Capitalism whilst keeping the Authorianism from their implementation of leftwing policies (they called it Communism, but they never really reached such utopical state, so I’m wary of calling that Communism).

Are they even left of center nowadays? I don’t know enough in detail how modern China operates to pass judgement on that - outside of China we mostly hear of what’s done in domains that reflect the part of their ideology that falls on the Libertarian-Authoritarian axis, not the stuff that falls on the Left-Right one.

I don’t think they’ve yet moved all the way to Fascism, though, even if they’ve kept the Authoritarianism going.

Not all Authoritarians are Fascists.

That said, I would agree that whomever supports Putin, supports Fascism - there is nothing at all Leftwing in present day Russia, quite the contrary.

China is more complicated.

Boris Johnson is a dumb person’s idea of an intelligent person.

Legitimate Interest is an attempt at working around the GDPR using a loophole in the ruling meant to permit processing of data in situations such as when a business has a trading relationship with a client.

However the legal clarification from the EU Commission says: “Your company/organisation must also check that by pursuing its legitimate interests the rights and freedoms of those individuals are not seriously impacted, otherwise your company/organisation cannot rely on grounds of legitimate interest as a justification for processing the data and another legal ground must be found.” (see here) and there is a “right to privacy” in EU law.

So supposedly that nearly endless list of “partners” (read: advert providers, trackers and other assorted businesses who make money from breaking people’s privacy) cannot use legitimate interest to track you as that would break your right to privacy.

That said, in practice they probably do, and until they get fined hard they’ll keep on doing it, so as others said, don’t used a Chrome-based browser and use a good Ad Blocker add-on.

Judging by the prices in the various countries I’ve lived in, in Europe, mobile data prices are a pretty good indication of a cartel.

In my experience Germany is one of the worst (by comparison to what you quoted, I use to get unlimited 4G in the UK for £10/month some years ago) though my own country, Portugal, is even worse.

I bet there were “radio spectrum” or “mobile operator license” auctions won by a handful well connected large companies and there’s nothing in the law forcing them to open their networks…

Lebensraum!

Surely the really bad 3D rendering video we were provided by the Israeli authorities is proof enough and we should implicitly believe their “totally independent, trust me I wouldn’t lie to you” assessments???!!!

Right?!

Here in Portugal the IT guys at the National Health Service recently blocked access to the Medical Doctor’s Union website from inside the national health service intranet.

The doctors are currently refusing to work any more overtime than the annual mandatory maximum of 150h so there are all sorts of problems in the national health service at the moment, mainly with hospitals having to close down emergency services to walk-in patients (this being AskLemmy, I’ll refrain from diving into the politics of it) so the whole things smells of something more than a mere mistake.

Anyways, this has got to be one of the dumbest abuses of firewalling “dangerous” websites I’ve seen in a long while.

I actually feel sorry for that first placed kid on the picture: he formally won but clearly feels beaten by the sheer enthusiasm of the 3rd place one.

In decent nations, an EULA is considered an attempt by the seller to, after the purchase, change the terms of the implicit contract which was the sale, so it’s has no legal standing whatsoever.

Absolutelly, the seller can set contract terms before the sale is done (and even then there are lots of limitations to avoid things like bait & switch, so it usualy has to be pretty clear and upfront and there are certain rights that a retail buyer simply cannot loose, even contractually), but never after the sale has been done.

EULAs only have legal standing in a few places, including a few States in the US.

Over a decade ago I worked as a freelancer for an Investment Bank (the largest one that went bankrupt in the 2008 Crash, which was a few years later) were the head of the Proprietary Trading Desk (the team of Traders who invest for the profit of the bank) asked me if I could change the software so that they could see the investments of the Client Trading Desk (who invest for clients with client money) was making, with the assent of the latter team.

Now if the guys investing money for the bank know what they guys investing customer money are doing they can do things like Front-Run the customer trades (or serve them at exactly the right price to barelly beat the competiotion) thus making more profits for the bank and hence get bigger bonuses. This is why Financial regulations say that there is supposed to be so-called Chinese Walls between the proprietary trading and the customer trading activities: they’re supposed to be segregated and not visible to each other.

Note that the heads of both teams were mates and already regularly had chats, so they might already have been exchanging this info informally.

I was quite fresh in there (less than 1 year) and the software system I worked in at the time was used by both teams, but when I started looking into it I saw that the separation was very explicitly coded in software and that got me thinking about what I had learned from the mandatory compliance training I had done when I first joined (so, yeah, that stuff is not totally useless!!!)

So I asked for written confirmation from the heads of both teams, and just got some vague response e-mails, no clear “do such and such”.

So I played the fool and took it to a seperate team called Compliance (responsible for compliance with financial regulations) saying I just wanted to make sure it was all prim and proper, “just in case”.

Of course, it kinda blew up (locally) and I ended up called to a meeting with the heads of the Prop Desk and whatnot - all stern looks and barelly contained angry tones - were I kept playing the fool.

Ultimatelly it ended up not being a problem for me at all, to the point that after that bank went bust and its component parts were sold to another bank, the technical team manager asked me to come back to work with the same IT group (remember, I was a freelancer) with even greater responsabilities, so this didn’t exactly damage my career.

That said, over the years there were various cases of IT guys in large investment banks who went along with “innocent” requests from the Traders and ended up as the fall-guys for subsequent breaking of Finance Regulations, serving jail time, so had I gone along with that request I would’ve actually risked ending up in jail.

(Financial Regulators were and are a complete total joke when it comes to large banks, which actually makes it more likely that some poor techie guy will be made the fall guy to protected the bank and its heads).

I holes in your pants became fashionable, so too can holes in your walls!