I don't think Microsoft would intentionally compete with Windows, but it does seem as though they are preparing for a world where Windows is no longer their golden goose, or at least hedging their bets. Given that Windows has already decisively lost the battle for servers, this seems prudent.
Microsoft could give Windows away for free and be fine. Of course it’s still a lot of money, so they’re not going to leave a multibillion dollar business on the table. But strategically, preserving its revenue is not their priority.
How many percent of their revenue funel are dependent directly or indirectly on windows beeing the peoples workstation funneling them towards their subpar products?
In the Enterprise, they'll fight tooth and nail to maintain that synergy. In the small business and consumer markets, people are having a very slow divorce from Windows, and Microsoft is well aware. MS365 is an ok product and can absolutely thrive on its own without Windows.
Yeah, but you have to realize we are on the losing side of this war. The armies of bullshit now have an incredible advantage that actual art can never have. At least in the past, there was some equilibrium. Bullshit was cheaper to make than art (or any other quality product), but now it has become infinitely cheaper to produce, and much more expensive for us to separate from the bullshit.
Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.
We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.
>How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Categorize, curate, and share. The war is only for your attention. I have favorite creators now, and they would cease to be favorite if they suddenly started sloppin' it up. The best of them recommended cool things made by other people, who in turn recommended more things, and so on.
If instead you peddle bullshit, it won't take long to be identified as a bullshit vendor, even if you have 1000x the bullshit of the next leading brand.
Not everyone will get the message especially if you mainly consume algorithmic feeds - we all seem to have that relative who thinks you would enjoy being sent an AI Jesus image every other week.
Already the way I find out about new podcasts is from recommendations from people I know, positive reviews, or from them being associated with a podcast I listen to. For now all of those have meant I haven't been exposed to any AI ones.
I think it's simpler than that. The business owner is spending their own money. When they feel (rightly or wrongly) that they are not getting what they paid for, they will feel ripped-off and angry.
The employee is spending someone else's money - they are more likely to be rational or even blasé about losses when it is not their money.
There really is no sense in pretending that this is not a white supremacy movement. They are saying it out loud. Now we just need to figure out what this means and how to deal with it.
Irish people, German people, Scandivian people: yeah, sure, of course they have culture.
But "white" is not a culture, it's a social construct that exists primarily for exclusion. CF: people who are now, and previously weren't, considered white (Poles, Italians, some Jews, etc).
If whiteness exists only to delineate the in groups/out groups, the only "culture" of whiteness is that of protecting the power of those deemed to be "white".
So, yeah, I think "maintaining the culture of white people" inherently requires a concept of white supremacy.
Interesting point and in the European context I do agree.
I like to add that if people consider themself as "white", their respective culture is "white culture" though as I know only the USA has such a strong race concept in their culture in opposite to Canada, Brazil, Australia or Germany (all immigration countries)
This is a rude statement to claim as you are denying the existence of a group of people. Just because a group can consist of other subgroups that does not mean a larger group does not exist.
>it's a social construct that exists primarily for exclusion.
Everything can be a social construct if you want to try and frame it as one and while the actual definition may be complex it is not any more complex than other groups of people like Chinese which also consist of subgroups which people may or may not consider the same Chinese as one another. To say that the term of white is used primarily for exclusion that is wrong and I think more reflects the kind of content you consume.
Ok, but the people who look like me, who have historically been called "white people", do have a distinct, shared culture (or the people who aren't "white" wouldn't be able to point out how we act and what we do and our manner of speech). So what are these people called? What is their culture called? What are we renaming white-people tacos to? (and, no, tostadas are not the same thing as white-people tacos)
While I don't think my culture needs to be preserved nor do I care about being a "racial minority" (I live in a neighborhood where the majority of the people who live here are "non-white" - and, no, I didn't gentrify, it's actually just a very young neighborhood), I do want to be able to share my culture and traditions with other people. That's the whole basis of culture... sharing it with others.
And there's another thing. People who don't look like me call me "white people". What should they be calling me instead?
I think it would be a lot easier to shut white supremacists down if we had competent answers to these questions instead of thought terminating cliches like "white people don't have culture".
As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.
> As a Russian person, my cultural heritage is Slavic, not "white". Ignoring skin tone, I’m not sure what my Slavic background has in common with — for instance — Italian or Irish culture. In fact, Italians, Irish, and Russians would not have been considered fully white in America during various parts of the last century.
Well, yes. If you weren't dispossessed of your culture generations ago, then you won't identify with a grouping of people who were dispossessed of theirs in service to the idea of "whiteness".
You are caught up in the racial definition of whiteness, but I'm talking about culture. For the same reason a Ghanaian expat isn't black, neither would you be white. There is a reason many black Americans reject the term "African-American": it makes no sense - they were systemically dispossessed of their African roots generations ago.
Yes, we know. I am specifically talking about the resultant culture that derived from this invention. If you can understand that black culture developed out of this invention through racist policy, then it should be possible to understand how this artificial separation did the same to white people.
> What are your cultural traditions? How much do they overlap with mine as a fellow "white" person?
What are my cultural traditions? I don't have a complete answer to that. We don't exactly have a "whiteness studies" major at colleges, and I wouldn't want one without serious and thoughtful consultation with the groups of people hurt by colonization.
To study even part of a culture is lifelong work. It took black academics decades to create a complete definition of racism as we know it today. And many more decades to describe black culture, which still hasn't been fully mapped out. To untangle what white culture is and what it isn't will also take many decades.
Keep in mind, you replied to a comment that claimed that "the West" is used as another name for "White" and that's precisely how it's used in those circles.
So, to paraphrase, you deny that there's Western culture and it's part of European Culture. That is, you deny that there are cultural threads common for most of Europe and more so for Western Europe. I hope, I've said enough to convince you that you're wrong.
> But "white" is not a culture, it's a social construct that exists primarily for exclusion.
And? Using your logic, one can say that "German is not a culture, it's a social construct that exists primarily for exclusion" - if you were consistent, you'd also question the right of Germans to have a culture given that Bavaria, Saxony, etc do have cultural differences. The hair-splitting can go even further but the point should already be clear.
> So, yeah, I think "maintaining the culture of white people" inherently requires a concept of white supremacy.
So you claim that "maintaining the culture of Chinese people" inherently requires a concept of Chinese supremacy? Replace Chinese with German, Saxon, whatever... it doesn't compute.
Culture can be used as an excuse for supremacy and there are many other excuses too but fighting excuses instead of fighting supremacy can only help the supremacists.
You're conflating operational efficacy and strategic incompetence.
Operationally, and tactically AFAIK, the US has been dominant. Strategically it appears to be a massive failure, mainly because there was no actual achievable strategic goals going in to this war. Read some of the reporting on JCS advice and cabinet level decision making leading up to the war. It's illuminating (again and again) of the risks on overly loyal advisors and getting the advice you want, not the advice you need.
Nothing in the world would have stopped iran launching cheap drones at civilian ships. Article is trying to say F35 is a problem when clearly it's not.
I am not sure how many people learned it the first time. To be fair, it's really hard to build a business without major dependencies. The key is to assume they will fail and have alternatives available.
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