“Tabloids” was the word you were looking for.

You can buy an ARM laptop right now.

Yeah, if not for me the government would have responded appropriately and bankrupted the company.

I bought a bit of BP shortly after the oil spill.

I was hoping to lose it all, but had the feeling I’d end up making money. I did make money.

All those shareholders should have been fucked.

OOP is great, and can be much simpler than what you’ve seen.

It’s Java culture that’s terrible. The word “Factory” is a code smell all on its own.

Just like any tool, don’t overuse it. Don’t force extra layers of abstraction.

I agree with your argument, but not what you’ve applied it to.

“Federation” isn’t the main feature of Lemmy, and we don’t need to focus on it. It’s enough that it exists. When selling a house, would the first thing you focus on be the insurance rates if something goes wrong?

Because they want to merge with another company and need regulator approval.

I used to work at a third party store that worked on a different model and was pretty incredible.

The owner took all the commissions and paid everyone a straight (decent) salary. This caused a number of changes in how the place was run.

Better customer service. It didn’t matter to us if you were coming in to buy a phone or for a problem with your bill. I’ll happily spend two hours on the phone with the company trying to fix your bill without selling you a thing.

We had strict standards for process, and our paperwork would be reviewed by someone who did entirely executive stuff. Our stuff always had 'I’s dotted and 'T’s crossed. What I learned from this is that the company was regularly and routinely trying to scam agents. Every month we’d have to reconcile payments with the company and there would always be discrepancies.

Interestingly, we’d have you sign a separate contract with us instead of the company. If you cancelled service within six months (the charge back period), we would fine you up to $400 and require return of the equipment. This would cover any legitimate charge backs. We had a lawyer on retainer and would regularly sue people for breaching this contract and not paying the fine.

We kept a stock of loaner phones. If you broke your phone and couldn’t immediately replace it for whatever reason, we’d loan you a phone for a few days.

Our customers were loyal, and we had a special relationship with the company.

This was back when the companies were paying agents well. Over time, the company got more and more greedy, and squeezed any decent business model out of the market. The execs who knew our situation loved it because we beat the hell out of any other places for customer service, and we had several large contracts with local companies.

Of course these execs who knew us were slowly replaced MBA penny pinchers who didn’t know and didn’t care about our unique circumstance.

One of the earliest squeezes was that the company confiscated accounts that had more than a hundred lines. Those would be now run by the company’s B2B department instead of the agent(s) who landed the contract.

Oh, and another interesting tidbit. We’d often waive paperwork fees for one reason or another. We got a corporate email that said our competitor had higher fees and didn’t waive them. So you can guess what we did. Raise the fees and stop waiving them. This is how competition works in the real world. Why would anyone go the other way?

I don’t think our stores exist anymore, but they were pretty great while they lasted.

Honestly I’ve never thought about it this much. I’ll have to make an effort to stop writing in past tense.

Usually just start with the verb.

“fix a NULL pointer dereference in …”

Steam recently removed their arbitration clause, largely because paying for a thousand arbitration cases is worse than dealing with a class action.

Well, it’ll be putting stain on the grid, more than likely.

Especially on mobile.

Mumble is another strong, open source, self-hosted option.

Kessler Syndrome trumps this application of Moore’s Law.

Important government secrets will be strictly separated from personal/civilian devices. The only classified information being transmitted by personal devices is the location and human knowledge of the owners.

He doesn’t. He may serve Russian interests at times, but he’s not a direct report the way Tim Pool and many of our government elected officials are.

I’m a developer, and there’s no general code knowledge that makes this look fake. Json is pretty standard. Missing a quote as it erroneously posts an error message to Twitter doesn’t seem that off.

If you’re more familiar with ChatGPT, maybe you can find issues. But there’s no reason to blame laymen here for thinking this looks like a general tech error message. It does.

Just to give a concrete example, there are a couple blatantly political posts on !fediverse. Do they belong there? Absolutely not. But by the time I saw them days later, the damage was done and they were already taken care of by downvotes. Should I really mod remove a week old post with 50 downvotes? The discussion there about why it didn’t belong was fine, and didn’t need to be hidden further.

If votes are anonymous and federated, it’s very easy for me to add or subtract 900 votes from whatever I want.

You should consider anything you do on social media to be public. Even if Facebook tries to claim that it’s not.