Don’t live in the country, huh? Sometimes they’re the only general store for miles and miles and miles. They’re a great fit, in that niche.
My camp is outside a town of 900 souls. There’s a Dollar General and a gas-station/general-store/grocery. Almost never hit the DG, but it’s damned nice they’re there in case I need something the other place doesn’t have.
In your example, in my situation, the nearest Walmarts are 45-minutes west and 30-minutes east. Double those numbers because it’s a round trip. Do you really want to take my DG away and force me to spend the gas and time? If you proposed that in this town, you’d have a riot on your hands.
Just because a product went defunct does not mean the entire code base is obsolete to the company.
Suppose I release software that makes a profit for a while, then falls off and starts costing me money, obviously time to retire that thing. However, a ton of code in that original product was a stepping stone for newer projects. I now have two choices.
A) Drop support and give world+dog my code, giving everyone a look into my existing products.
B) Keep losing money on the old project and make up for it by overcharging for my latest work.
That’s a lose-lose proposition.
Your self-hosting solution sounds mighty fair!
All-in-one convenience is the only reason I pay Spotify, my only streaming service. Thought about dropping them, but it would be a monstrous hassle gathering, and continuing to gather, all those MP3s. Plus, I can download that content and use it in the woods with no internet connection. Sold.
Video content? What a clusterfuck. I steal every bit of it. Hell, I got Amazon Prime and don’t bother looking at video offerings. Default: 🏴☠️
the number of positions will be reduced as much as the owning class can get away with
Well, after all, you don’t hire people to do nothing. It’s simply a late-stage capitalism thing. Hopefully one day we can take the benefits of that extra productivity and share the wealth. The younger generations seem like they might move us that way in the coming decades.
Agreed! Problem solving is core to any sort of success. Whether you’re moving up or on for more pay, growing tomatoes or nurturing a relationship, you’re problem solving. But I can see AI putting the screws to those of us in tech.
Haven’t used it much so far, last job didn’t afford much coding opportunity, but I wrote a Google Apps script to populate my calendar given changes to an Excel sheet. Pretty neat!
With zero experience App scripting, I tried going the usual way, searching web pages. Got it half-ass working, got stuck. Asked ChatGPT to write it and boom, solved with an hour’s additional work.
You could say, “Yeah, but you at least had a clue as to general scripting and still had to problem solve. Plus, you came up with the idea in the first place, not the AI!” Yes! But point being, AI made the task shockingly easier. That was at a software outfit so I had the oppurtuniy to chat with my dev friends, see what they were up to. They were properly skeptical/realistic as to what AI can do, but they still used it to great effect.
Another example: Struggled like hell to teach myself database scripting, so ignorant I didn’t know the words to search and the solutions I found were more advanced answers than my beginner work required (or understood!). First script was 8 short lines, took 8 hours. Had AI been available to jump start me, I could have done that in an hour, maybe two. That’s a wild productivity boost. So while AI will never make programmers obsolete, we’ll surely need fewer of them.
Fair question! Two reasons:
I’m not the picture of fiscal responsibility. Be much more comfortable with a predictable income, especially since I’ll be too old to work.
Selling the house would be a last resort for two reasons. My wife is foreign and would be lost without me. I want to know she will always have a roof to sleep under, no matter what. Two, I really want to be able to leave it to my children, give them a jump in life when we’re both gone.
Didn’t word that well, agreed. But you need solid profit up front to backstop for emergencies and risk. I would be a one man, one house operation. I couldn’t spread the risk around like a corporate landlord with 100 or 1,000 properties.
If landlords were content to just break even
After paying on the property, maintaining and improving it, I deserve no profit for my 20-years of labor?
Are you saying that workers should be content to merely break even for their labor? Your labor is worthy, but mine is not?
I own my home. I may rent it out when I retire because I sure as fuck won’t have any money. Maybe we’ll get an RV or move to the Philippines. Dunno. But I need to get paid on that home.
For one, renters are likely to fuck shit up, because it’s not theirs, they have no stake in the property. They may simply be ignorant and ignore problems that cost $100 to fix today, $1,000 to fix tomorrow. Also, I need to buy extra liability insurance.
Then there’s routine stuff. When my ex and I bought the place we took payday loans for 2-months just to get the tools and stuff we needed to care for the place. And nearly everything we bought was used. Paid them off responsibly and quickly, but it was costly.
Ever priced a new roof? Hell, within the last 30-days our sink stopped up, the washer died, fridge finally died. and that’s only the big stuff. Even buying off FB, that was $1,000 in new appliances and repairs. Oh, and the hot water heater leaks, but that’s under control for the moment. And the roof needs patched. I’m scared to even price that, can’t afford it ATM anyway.
So yeah, I need serious “profit” just to break even.
EDIT: Do you idiots think I’m currently renting this home? FFS, try reading from the beginning.
I’ll be the last man on Earth to defend Israel, but this is how wars have always been fought, breaking the will of the population. The Allies pounded Axis civilians and the North hammered Southern civilians.
At some point in past decades, the world decided that terrorizing civilians was off the board. Maybe it’s because we can see the results with our own eyes? Israel didn’t get the memo.
Got my kids back for the summer, first time since they got phones (9 and 11-yo). They’re hooked through the fucking bag. And that’s with their mom having severely limiting their screen time.
If I so much as threaten to take their phones, they act exactly like an addict having their stash stolen. If a literal demon jumped out the phone, grabbed them by the neck and punched them in face, they’d go right back on the screen.
I listen in, and it’s all high-pitched chatter at 100mph, randomly switching topics and formats. If the internet has fried my brain at 53, god knows what it’s doing to them.
Better article:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/09/unisuper_google_cloud_outage_caused/
They restored from another cloud service. Were I in charge, I’d still be leery of not having that data on my own drives. I have my Windows libraries mapped to my ghetto RAID 0, and those folders are in turn backed to Google. If all else fails, I have a local backup. And this story reminds me, I haven’t installed VEEAM on this new PC…
The media has pumped us full of terror. The gun thing is a perfect example, but comments on that aren’t welcome around here. I’ll just say, the danger is nothing like most imagine.
Went to pick up a kayak from FB Marketplace, got the wrong house. Lady wouldn’t answer at first, and that’s with a German Shepard barking at me though the door and a Ring doorbell looking at me. When she finally came, she wouldn’t open the glass, talked to me through the door.
For context, this is in the bougie suburb and I’m a well-dressed, middle-aged white guy. And I’m small. Hardly a scary man for the time and place.
On Nextdoor.com I see 1,000 idiot posts.
“Did you see the strange man walking down Oak Street?! I’ve seen him twice now!”
“A teenager came to my door today and I didn’t know him! Has anyone else been terrorized like this?”
I live in Milton, FL, and like the last one, we’re 100% dodging this one. Weird.