Also tax breaks. Many large corpos negotiated city tax breaks for bringing a certain number of employees into downtowns. If those numbers don’t meet minimums, the tax breaks go away.
Any we all know how much time, effort and expense a business person will go through to avoid paying $1 in taxes.

I’m not sure which is worse:

• greedy, irresponsible tech bros trying to convince everyone that their pinball machine can fly an airplane.
• people desperate to let the same pinball machine tell them what to do with their lives.

Oh, stop your complaining. It’s not perfect, but we’ve all seen how easy this is to fix. Just barge into Tesla tomorrow and randomly fire 20% of the employees. That’s how real leaders get things done.

/s

I read a quote somewhere to the effect, “The successful politician knows the exact time to step in front of the parade and pretend they’re leading it.”

The wild thing is, turning off autopilot and using lane keep and cruise is fine.

Mine isn’t. I don’t have or use “self driving”. I have used cruise control (what Tesla refers to as “autopilot”) but it is risky. My Tesla’s cruise control has slammed on the brakes on interstates at 65 MPH multiple times. I’ve stopped using it because it is so dangerous. If there had been a large truck behind me any of those times it would have been ugly.

I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

Eventually they’ll start demanding you run their crypto-miners in order to watch a video.

“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).

Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This computer program , er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."

Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.

We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”

Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn’t have to pay taxes or follow laws.

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

Try watching Winter on Fire on Netflix. It documents Ukraine overthrowing their dictator. It wasn’t a clean process. But hopefully the ending will be the same, with our dictator also fleeing back to Russia.

deleted by creator

You means the person(s) funding all of this?

/s

Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.

What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?

• “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
• “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.

From here on it’s going to be just more decades of, “Come on, bro. Just one more shot. My new AI that will be better. I’ve added another 5,000 Reddit pages. This one will be smart. Trust me, bro. Buy this hardware. I’ll throw in some Bitcoin and a couple of NFT. Just one more, bro.”

So, have any of you ever been in Ikea during a fire alarm?

We were shopping in an Ikea a year or so ago, in the furniture section. It’s just a bit past the entrance to “the maze”. A screeching fire alarm goes off. For about 10 minutes, everyone – including the Ikea employees – just ignore it and continue doing whatever. Then the Ikea employees start saying, “Please exit the store” or somesuch. That’s when I dawns on me that exiting the store is not as easy as it sounds. We could see no marked fire exits. The employees just said the “follow the arrows”.

Everyone knows how hard it is to get through an Ikea at the best of times. What about during a fire alarm? Well, I’m looking for the “shortcuts”, but they are not clearly marked. We do make it to a stairwell (I’ve been in this store a few times) and manage to avoid traversing the entire top and bottom floors. We’re faced with a pair of big doors marked, “Not an exit” or somesuch. We push through those doors and they dump us out at the front of the store, near the registers.

Now we’re at the front of the store, with no idea how to get out. Toward the front of the store, we see some exit doors. We try to push them open, but they’re blocked by carts on the outside. We finally get the carts pushed out of the way and people pour out into a small parking area. Note, that this Ikea has a parking garage under the store, so if the building were actually on fire, we’d be fucked because this second-level parking area we’re standing in is very close to the building and gives no easy exit to the ground and away from the building.

If there was actually a fire with smoke, people would have panicked and it would have been a deadly shit-show getting out.

Fuck going to that Ikea again.

Used to have an admin that would fully spell out every word except ‘pls’.

“pls don’t microwave fish in the breakroom”, etc.

You spell out every other word… is ‘please’ really that hard to write?

So how many of the execs said, “This job isn’t worth risking my life for” and quit? How many of them said, “Maybe we should examine how we do business and change.”? How many of them said, “My God. We’re killing people. I’m out.”?

"It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to re-package previously disclosed data for financial gain. We just learned about claims that AT&T data is being made available for sale on dark web forums, and we are conducting a full investigation.”

Translation: “We have no information whatsoever. Based on our complete lack of information, we feel confident is saying this isn’t our fault. This sort of leak could not have been foreseen by anyone, it’s not our fault. While we ‘investigate’, we’ll continue business as usual – taking in large sums of money, demanding all customer private information for even the most trivial service, store that PII insecurely, paying our C-Suite insane amounts of money for failing to keep customer data securely and claiming that there is nothing else we can do. Regards, Customer Service.”