Decline in upwards social mobility in the US (The very first graph is pretty illustrative)

I suspect almost all of those 47% are the old people who grew up when it was still the case for most people that they could actually improve their lot in life if the worked hard. That has worsened over time for decades and is not at all the case for the younger generations.

I had a very similar feeling moving back from driving in The Netherlands to driving in Portugal.

(Mind you, in Portugal cars do reliably pull over to let emergency vehicles through)

No higher ROI AND they now have a mission critical dependency on a powerful third party (rather than on the far more fragmented and generally weaker counterparties which are employees).

Even on pure business terms and not even considering the longer term accumulation of problems and hence fall in returns over time due to second order problems of using AI in certain areas (i.e. the consequences of the much higher high-severity-error rates of AI compared to even barelly trained humans or the inability of AI to learn and improve) it’s a seriously incompetent choice.

I mean, you can excuse a Manager for not understanding the higher level structural problems of AI given how much the messaging around it for non-techies so far has just swamped people with “butterflies and rainbows” views on AI, but considering the risks of dependencies on third parties is a central skill for any decent Upper level manager as is looking at what an investment is returning and pivoting when it’s not delivering.

The Government of a country with a centuries-old traditition of keeping the plebes under control and who are currently licking the arse of the modern day version of the NAZIs will never accept that there are technical limitations for their project of detecting and suppressing in the cradle any realistic organised forces for change.

Literally the only time in the last 3 centuries that Britain moved away from the mindset that the upper classes should control the rest was after over a million working class Britons with military training came back from WWII, and by the 80s they were already walking back on the achievements of that period.

Worry not, the bought up or blackmailed politicians in power in Europe and America will still try it.

Everybody has opinions.

Some people confuse being strongly and loudly opinionate about many things with intellectual capability.

Personally I think it’s the oposite: you have to be really dumb to believe anybody could possibly trully understand most things and, worse, to think you yourself are such a person.

It is hilarious how America is suiciding itself at multiple levels with its latest dick-wagging:

• It’s seriously pissing off its allies and pushing neutrals away.
• It’s showing the US’ force projection capabilities as a much smaller and weaker stick than they have been boasted as being.
• It’s acceleraring the move away from Oil and the USD status as Reserve Currency is linked to Oil trade and when it ends, well, Helloo hyperinflation!
• It’s acceleraring the move away from Oil when the US is commercially doubling down on Oil, which means that the US is stuck in a commercially fast shrinking market and in developing yesterday’s Technologies.

IMHO, we are right now living the end days of an Empire, something that even in the Modern Era only seems to happen maybe once a century.

It’s almost as if the Free Market isn’t at all good at finding the optimal balance at a Strategical level …

Now, just take that analysis a little bit further by adding the consideration that those elected to manage the nation aren’t actually doing that and wondering why.

I bet it will yield interesting results about whose interests such people really serve.

It’s often best the short and sharp pain of pulling out a tooth than the lesser but chronical pain (and possible nasty eventual consequences) of a rotting tooth.

All I hear is nothing-indexing with nothing.

Also, already 10 years ago, corporate backends were pretty much already all running on Linux.

In big companies the stuff running in Windows has long been just been the Views in a multi-tiered Model-View-Controller systems architecture, whilst the data and logic sat in servers.

From my own experience, on the technical side it’s mainly the sunk cost into making the custom frontends in Windows and certain apps used to fill the gaps not covered by corporate systems (for example Excel and Outlook) that have held Windows in place.

On the management side, it’s probably a question of support contracts and friendly rather than professional relationships with specific Windows-only 3rd party vendors.

Not at all denying your point (which I totally agree with), just pointing out that in big enough companies to have their own software developers and proprietary systems, the movement away from Windows has been going on longer than that, just less visible to most people because what was being moved over was back and middle tier stuff.

Whilst people kept dreaming about the Year Of Linux On The Desktop, Linux had, since the 90s, quietly and steadilly been eating away at the responsabilities of software running on the Desktop.

If only the muppets in my homeland were half as competent as the bloody French.

I shall not lower myself to use the newfangled Mathematical inventions of the Arabs and instead keep doing Mathematics like the Romans!

This one specifically had people’s addresses, so it was reasonably simple to match to people’s identities if you had other data containing identity and address.

Experience has taught me that Intelligence and Wisdom are very different things, and whilst the former can help get the latter faster, having lots of the former in no way form or shape guarantees any of the latter or even that one will get any of it.

I would even say that there’s a level of high intelligence but not high enough (I mentally call them “Entry Level Geniouses”) that leads people who think they’re so much better than everybody else whilst not being intelligent enough to figure out the limits in capability and breath of use of intelligence alone, so they never figure out the whole “All I know is that I know nothing” and don’t really start walking down the path to Wisdom. Elon Musk is probably a good example.

As soon as a kind of Tech starts getting fanboys, you start getting ignorant bollocks about it, not just from the fanboys but also from the kind of people that, just as emotionally, set themselves against the fanboys not because of any understanding of the weaknesses of the Tech itself but purelly as a psychological need to set themselves against the fanboys.

Linux used to have a huge barrier to entry - for example, you used to literally have to understand how CRTs worked in order to configure X and get it running - which kept the fanboyism down and the few whose like for it went all the way into fanboyisms were at least technically savvy so mainly understood what they were talking about, but nowadays the “quality” of fanboys is closer to the level of game, celebrity or or political fanboys - people highly emotionally engaged that don’t have any in depth understanding and are only “experts” on the highly visible superficial stuff.

Anyways, all this to say that fanboyism, whilst being a bad way to relate to Tech (IMHO, and the same for people who set themselves against fanboys as just as mindless contrarians), does indicate to me that Linux is definitelly becoming established as mainstream rather than the OS for mainly server side experts and hobbyists that it was for decades.

The UK is about a decade ahead of the rest of Europe, and not at all in a good way.

About a decade ago, when I still lived in Britain, the project to keep central copies of GP patient data came and it was possible to Opt-Out.

I expresselly filled the paperwork to opt out of it with my GP, because by then I did not at all trust British Governments (all this was after the Snowden Revelations, plus having been in Finance in the 2008 crash and seen how that was dealt with by both British major parties, I fully believed they were corrupt as fuck) and expected that all that healtcare data would be misused including, sooner or later, being sold out (or even given) to the Private sector.

Here we are now, and lo and behold…

PS: By the way, if I remember it correctly this data was already sold to Google years ago, supposedly “anonimized” but in such a weak and inefective way it was proven it could easilly be de-anonimized.

I bet it’s like the one discovered in Portugal which is of a mineral form of it for which there is no technology to industrially extract the lithium.

In other words, about as feasible as “we can extract all the <insert mineral> we want from sea water”.