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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • I started thinking about when Emma Goldman’s partner Alexander Berkman tried to kill a 19th century robber baron who had sent in Pinkerton to murder workers into ending a strike.

    One can make an argument about the economic conditions creating the condition’s for what the anarchists back then called “the propaganda of the deed”. But that isn’t where I am going. Instead let’s look at the aftermath.

    From an assassination perspective, the quality of the assassination was lacking. Also, Wikipedia (my bold):

    Frick was back at work within a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman’s actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[5] Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.[19]

    In other words, today’s robber barons gets less sympathy than the O.G. kind. That’s a bit interesting.







  • At work, I’ve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that’s why it’s called work.

    The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

    The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

    Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save… (drumroll)… Approximately nothing!

    But if we hadn’t done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

    We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.








  • First half is straight forward dick measurement contest. Let me paraphrase: “My companies has huuuuge revenue! Why haven’t yours? Maybe because you are so toxic? Have you thought about that, man with smaaaall revenue.”

    Notice how it’s all revenue, not profit. I think this mindset gives an insight into why so many tech bros if they stumble onto profit, quickly grows out of profit. Profit isn’t the score, revenue is. And it’s all about hitting that high score so you can feel like a big man.