Will any patriot of democracy with a functional stinger rocket please pay attention?
I still have my original 4050DTN. It needs a new fuser and rollers, but otherwise it’s been absolutely loyal and bulletproof.
We desperately need “copycats”. There are many industries that are moribund and are in desperate need for a shake-up, but the incumbents have worked hard over the last half a century to deny almost all new entrants in an attempt to protect the status quo. They have even worked things such that any competitive threat to these incumbents are seen as a national threat to be legislatively and legally opposed.
The American ISP landscape (Internet & communication providers) being an absolutely stellar exhibit № 1. In many places it’s illegal to create your own private or municipal ISP.
In a company you always have people that don't generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
Treating IT like a cost centre instead of a revenue centre is why companies cut them to the bone and then go all SurprisedPikachu.gif when something important breaks or when hackers tear the company apart and hold them for ransom.
IT can absolutely be a revenue centre, providing value along with the rest of the company. But most leadership simply cannot think like this. They don’t have the capability. In fact, the tired joke in IT goes something like this:
Everything is working. “What do we pay you guys for?”
Everything is on fire. “What do we pay you guys for?”
No, you’re thinking of the C-Suite at the top: the Parasite Class that Hoovers up the vast majority of the value created by the employees, while providing of themselves almost nothing of value to the company. Most of them can be trivially replaced by any average Joe off of the street which no material impact on the company itself. A large minority of them are so abysmally bad at their jobs that they leave behind a trail of broken or defunct companies while getting obscene “golden parachutes” with every departure that are larger than any worker’s entire lifetime earnings potential.
At this point, conservatism is nothing more than coming up with fantastically irrational fever dreams of non-existent issues, and then getting mad about it.
I am still stuck in “2014”, which is where I was back in 1995.
But then again, I never became obscenely wealthy by grossly parasitizing off of the labour of other people, so I never had the chance to devolve and become corrupted by capitalism.
My own home was 2,000ft² when built. In 1972. That was the Canadian average at the time, as most homes built by developers were made with the same 15 (or so) floor plans with slight variations.
You’re thinking of the 50s. Those homes were indeed around 1,200ft², and there is even a pair in my neighbourhood the next block over
Don’t know what it’s like in America, but in Canada those alerts can be neither silenced nor turned off. Don’t want them? Turn the phone entirely off, and at least it won’t fire off at that time. It’ll still crop up as soon as the phone turns back on, because it’s a push notification that the system holds in a queue until the phone is back online to pick it up, just like SMS or voice mail.
A quick way of estimating annual wage for a full-time position is to take hourly, double it, then move the decimal point to the right by three spots.
So for example, the BC minimum wage is $17.40. Double that is $34.80. Annually in a full-time job, that’s about $34,800 before taxes.
And 4× that is $139,200. Current median SFH prices for used homes sit at just under $1M in my podunk tourist town. All detached SFH, $1,200,000. New construction, $1,500,000.
I mean, really - who under 50 can actually afford those prices without intergenerational wealth to give them a leg up in life?
It’s not just low minimum wage, although BC’s is currently the third highest in Canada.
No, the problem is also “investors” that buy on spec only to sell at a much higher price just before completion, as well as “investors” that buy up 5, 10, 15 or even more homes for rental income. Both of these goose home values into the stratosphere and massively constrain the supply of homes that are affordable to those wanting to stop being renters.
Were it not for “investors”, homes would likely be half or even less than what they currently are.
America alone is going to be in immense economic pain starting some time within the next 3-9 months. Shipping into America from China is dropping off a cliff, with a nearly 40% all sources drop in port activity on the west coast at this time. Seattle alone has seen a 60+% drop in Chinese shipping.
2025 is going to be an absolute economic bloodbath for most any American citizen inside America.
And there are Florida ounces, which as a Canadian confuses me to no end.