I had this exact same reaction less than a week ago and it prompted me to switch to Thunderbird. For years I've fallen into the "if not for gaming ..." camp of Windows users. But I'm getting closer and closer to just not caring about that any more and switching to Mac or Linux instead just to get away from Windows.
Gaming hasn't been an "excuse" for years. More games run on GNU/Linux than any gaming console, installed as easily as finding the game on Steam / GOG / itch.io etc. and clicking "install".
I actually switched to GNU/Linux in college because I wanted to play video games less. This happened right before Proton was released in 2018. Let's just say that I was very unsuccessful in my goal when switching.
Maybe not an excuse for you, but there are still games that don't work out of the box, and the solutions for third party launchers are still fragmented and/or not feature complete, in comparison to its native Windows client. Let's take Heroic Games Launcher for example, looking at GoG: it does not yet track hours played nor achievements (they have work in progress [1]); Lutris on the other hand doesn't even have cloud Sync.
Proton is also no complete, perhaps one day it'll be, it's not quite there yet. I've stumbled on some games that don't work (Obscure 1, Resident Evil 0, Dark Messiah, etc) and games that didn't work in the past but now works, with some flaws that are hard to distinguish between Windows' and Linux's fault (Thief: Deadly Shadows).
I feel like just looking at the numbers isn't really a good counter on wether or not a platform is viable.
However gaming is still very much an excuse. On my Steam Deck I even primarily use Windows after not being able to use Game Pass, issues with Kingdom Hearts, and anything through Epic game launcher being a mixed bag.
Proton is great but it really isn't a silver bullet and you may need to go to Windows if you want to play a specific game.
I installed Pop on a new PC (intel, nvidia) a couple of months ago. It's been barely more trouble than Windows and gaming so far has been successful (Cyberpunk, BG3).
(Tried Linux on the desktop every year for the previous 20-something, always hit some deal-breaker within a day or so. This time it's looking good.)
Waiting that long before the merchant gets their money is a feature, not a bug. It forces the merchant to float a balance that can be used to issue refunds and charge backs back to the consumer without the bank, card network, or consumer taking the hit.
I haven't used Blue Apron but used one of their competitors and you'd get the ingredients like this but they'd also be in a big styrofoam container (to help insulate against the elements). The other problem was if you had 2 recipes that each called for a cucumber you'd get 2 individually bagged cucumbers. I don't know if they're smarter about this but that was a big turn off when I tried it.
The spend/build-out is even bigger than that because if these cars have no driver how to they refuel? Unless they've got a robot arm capable of doing that themselves they still need a human involved. As well as somewhere to do repairs and maintenance on the cars. Right now Lyft and Uber effectively out-source that to the owner of the vehicle. So whoever is doing this roll out doesn't just need the vehicles they also need the facilities to house, maintain, and fuel them. That infrastructure is, arguably, even bigger and more complicated than buying up the cars.
You joke but I know plenty of self professed libertarians who want nothing more than to see those very services privatized. I know someone who genuinely believes a privatized police force would be the end of police violence because "then we'd at least be able to fight back." Sadly this is actually how a lot of people think.
Yeah that's overboard and I don't think common services should be profitable enterprises, but the notion that you'd have an entity with serious repercussions for doing wrong to the people they swore to protect is not unfound. As it stands now, they are self-preserving entities and collect pensions when they screw up. So while that suggestion you shared is not sensible, we do need a better checks and balance on the police. Something outside of internal affairs, like a BBB at the top of the state department.
I've used weather.gov for years and love the service. Every person I've talked to who complains about the crap coverage by the weather companies in the US that I've shown it to uses it exclusively as well. It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition. I know this isn't always the case but it certainly is here.
I don't agree with lots of things our government spends money on but stuff like this I absolutely support.
> It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition
There is no better product because it's not commercially viable to compete against the free money that NOAA receives. If NOAA didn't exist, others would try to compete commercially in that space.
In the UK the Met Office is notionally a part of the Ministry of Defence[0] but is required to be profit generating, so basically operates as a commercial enterprise. Whilst they provide free weather forecasting and alerts for the public, commercial users have to pay for data ( raw and processed ).
After 93 years the BBC decided to change from the Met Office to another source, the free market at work. The Met Office has to improve its product and / or reduce its costs to keep competing; NOAA has no such incentives towards efficiency or improvement.
[0] Correction: transferred to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011
That's probably a part of it, but the budget cuts across the government (outside of defense and law enforcement) are also a realization of goal of at least the Bannon faction of the Trump White House to basically burn the whole system of government to the ground.
I'm currently working on a product with a team and we did a bit of exploration for an idea for SMB's and had that same issue. We were talking to someone who on the surface would be a perfect fit for the product but then we asked how they handled organizing a job. They reached down into their bag, pulled out a file folder, opened it up and spread a few sheets of paper in front of us and went "will this page is this thing, this one is the other thing, and that one is another thing". An entire jobs worth of documentation and info right there laid out in front of us all at once in 3 seconds flat.
That was the moment we realized the reason our target industry was still using paper and spreadsheets. Because they're not just "good enough". In most cases, they're the best possible option. Maybe with enough iterating and testing we could've come up with a UX that could've put all that information in front of 4 people in one shot that quickly. But the odds are against it and even if we did it would've taken a long time to get there.
A lot of startup founders view "legacy" as a four letter word. But sometimes it's simply the best course. Not everything needs a high tech solution. And accepting that can be really tough sometimes.
Also spreadsheets (e.g. Excel) in the hands of a smart user are very powerful. They are incredibly flexible and will handle most data management tasks for a small/mid size organization. And with Google Sheets (which has gotten a lot better in the past couple of years) or other cloud storage, the fear of losing everything with a failed hardrive or lost laptop is gone too.
I run a small nonprofit. I get emails at least weekly from some little tech company that has an app for some aspect of my operations. I usually ignore them, but when I do answer it's always some variation of "I can do everything I need for free with Google tools." And to myself I wonder why these companies are even targeting small organizations that have almost no money for technology.
Maybe they're including Win 8.1? In that case it is 3 generations. Although Win 8.1 was an update to 8 so you could argue whether or not it should be included but lots of version lists list it separately.
People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough". That same robot might be a little slower than a person at first but it's operating for a fraction of the hourly rate and it's doing so 24/7 with no breaks and no slow downs.
Your point about millions of displaced people rising up and being unhappy is 100% valid. But you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employe people just because it's the right thing to do. Especially in the US where the entire culture is based around corporate profits only ever increasing at a rate greater than inflation. The US is in one big race to the bottom to see who can shave $0.01 off the sale price of their product. That naturally leads to two things. Monopolies and hyper efficiency. Because when your profit margin is pennies per unit you have to move one hell of a lot units to make hundreds of millions a year in revenue.
> you'll be hard pressed to find any company willing to sacrifice a slice of their earnings to employee people just because it's the right thing to do.
Sure, but that's what legislation is for. We have a minimum wage and laws protecting workers for a reason. Companies do have a disproportionate influence on politics, but only to a point. When it comes to a truly unhappy populace, politicians know what's more important to continuing to perpetuate the system.
You write that as if the US is the only economy that tries to shave prices to the lowest possible. Look where most of the electronics in the world are produced, or where most of the textiles are processed. Same with shoes. Pressure to reduce production costs is a continual factor in worldwide capitalism.
Misuse of the word "hacking" has been a plague for a while now. Setting your alarm clock is now a "life hack". Not stuffing your face is a "health/wellness hack". Balancing your checkbook is a "personal finance hack".
In this case I don't blame the media entirely because the word has been used like this for years. Is it really any surprise that altering the outcomes of an election is now "election hacking"?
