Incredibly well said. And couldn't agree more! Especially after working as a game dev for Apple Arcade. We spent months proving to them their saving architecture was faulty and would lead to people losing their save file for each Apple Arcade game they play. We were ignored, and then told it was a dev problem. Cut to the launch of Arcade: every single game has several 1 star reviews about players losing their save files. This cannot be fixed by devs as it's an Apple problem, so devs have to figure out novel ways to prevent the issue from happening using their own time and resources. 1.5 years later, Apple finishes restructuring the entire backend of Arcade, fixing the problem. They tell all their devs to reimplement the saving architecture of their games to be compliant with Apples new backend or get booted from Arcade. This costs devs months of time to complete for literally zero return (Apple Arcade deals are upfront - little to no revenue is seen after launch). Apple used their trillions of dollars to ignore a massive backend issue that affected every player and developer on Apple Arcade. They then forced every dev to make an update to their game at their own expense just to keep it listed on Arcade. All while directing user frustration over the issue towards developers instead of taking accountability for launching a faulty product. Literally, these companies are run by sociopaths that have egos bigger than their paychecks. Issues like this are ignored as it's easier to place the blame on someone down the line. People like your manager end up getting promoted to the top of an office heirachy of bullshit, and everything the company makes just gets worse until whatever corpse is left is sold for parts to whatever bigger dumb company hasn't collapsed yet. It's really painful to watch, and even more painful to work with these idiots.

I suspect people (not billionaires) are realising that they can get by with less. And that the planet needs that too. And that working 40+ hours a week isn’t giving people what they really want either. Tbh, I don't think that's the case. If you look at any of the relevant metrics (CO², energy consumption, plastic waste, ...) they only know one direction globally and that's up. I think the actual issues are Russian invasion of Ukraine and associated sanctions on one of the main energy providers of Europe Trump's "trade wars" which make global supply lines unreliable and costs incalculable (global supply chains love nothing more than uncertainty) Uncertainty in regards to China/Taiwan Boomers retiring in western countries, which for the first time since pretty much ever means that the work force is shrinking instead of growing. Economical growth was mostly driven by population growth for the last half century with per-capita productivity staying very close to inflation. Disrupting changes in key industries like cars and energy. The west has been sleeping on may of these developments (e.g. electric cars, batteries, solar) and now China is curbstomping the rest of the world in regards to market share. High key interest rates (which are applied to reduce high inflation due to some of the reason above) reduce demand on financial investments into companies. The low interest rates of the 2010s and also before lead to more investments into companies. With interest going back up, investments dry up. All these changes mean that companies, countries and people in the west have much less free cash available. There’s also the value of money has never been lower either. That's been the case since every. Inflation has always been a thing and with that the value of money is monotonically decreasing. But that doesn't really matter for the whole argument, since the absolute value of money doesn't matter, only the relative value. To put it differently: If you earn €100 and the thing you want to buy costs €10, that is equivalent to if you earn €1000 and the thing you want to buy costing €100. The value of money dropping is only relevant for savings, and if people are saving too much then the economy slows down and jobs are cut, thus some inflation is positive or even required. What is an actual issue is that wages are not increasing at the same rate as the cost of things, but that's not a "value of the money" issue.

For this comment, I want to be absolutely clear that I do not give a shit about AI, and that it in no way factored into my decision to buy this iPhone 16 Pro Max. With that disclaimer out of the way: I very much look forward to a class action lawsuit. Apple advertised specific features as coming ‘very soon’ and gave short timeframes when asked directly. And they basically did not deliver on those advertising promises. Basically, I think there’s a good case to be made here that Apple knowingly engaged in false advertising in order to sell a phone that otherwise would not have sold as well. Those promised AI features WERE a deciding factor for a lot of people to upgrade to an iPhone 16. So, I’ll be looking forward to some form of compensation. It’s the principle of it.

Sorry, wasn't my intention

I have like a dozen Gmail accounts, and I know plenty of others who do too. Before I owned my own domain, I used the different accounts for different things.

trying to be reddit 2.0