Conserve thier god given right to exploit everyone and everything for thier short term benefit.

Well my question was really about what “should” means to you. I have 2 kids, so my effective tax rate is like 25% or something. If I understand things right, the billionaires work things so they have very little taxable income, making thier 35% more like 1% of their actual income. So are you saying if a millionaire still pays thier taxes based on actual income, not using the method that billionaires use to lower their taxable income, then they are paying the taxes that they should pay?

I tell ya, the present thing is rough. When I was a kid, I got cards from aunts and uncles. But now they all send gifts. So there is 5 gifts right there. Then there is the grandparents. They have so much time to shop, they can bring 5+ gifts for each kid and only spend $50. So we are already at 15 and we didn’t even buy anything yet. It’s nuts.
Also, everything seems to have to be a gift now. Can’t just buy a thing and give it to them. It has to wait to be a present. Or maybe that’s just my wife. But also, when I was a kid, even in the rural area I lived, there was a convenience story where we could buy gum, or baseball cards and stuff for very little money. Now a pack of Pokémon is like $6 for way less cards. The only cheap things kids can buy is candy, and we aren’t supposed to let them do that anymore either. So everything ends up as a present.

Lol, have you seen the cost of daycare… $1000 per month easy in most cities. Probably not what you meant, but it still made me laugh.

That last sentence is odd. What do you mean should be going to taxes? Sounds like you define wealthy by what taxes they pay. I know the billionaires have lots of loopholes to pay a lower percent, is using those loopholes your deciding factor?

Yeah, it isn’t a new thing. It’s just that the pundits think there are people in dark caves writing code all day with zero human contact. Hasn’t been like that for a long time. Coding is the easy part of the job now for the vast majority if competent coders. Figuring out how to balance what the users want, and what the prod7ct manager tells you to do is the really hard part.

It’s dead, not eradicated. It’s just not what people spend all day doing like they used tp.

They aren’t wrong, just late. Coding is already dead. Most coders I know spend very little time writing new code. Meeting/discussions about requirements, debugging, fighting with pipelines or tests. I once read that a good programmer writes 10 to 100 lines of fully functional, tested, working, and meeting the actual need code a day. I believe it.

Yeah I never understood why ads make so much money. Seems like some kind of gift is going on.

Selling personal data at all should just be banned. It says personal right in the name… Giving away free services with forced adds is exploitation in my opinion. The first step to solving the issue is to require everything have a paid option that gets rid of adds and doesn’t sell personal data for additional profit. The hard part with that is preventing them from just setting the price unreasonably high.

Or… do both. Buy premium because you are actually getting something for your money… a platform. And support ad blockers to stop the ads where the product is just a webpage.

I was thinking, imagine the media companies demand the power company turn off your power because you downloaded a pirated movie. Or gas stations stop selling gas to you because you speed.

I use Firefox as my main on my home pc. I keep running into things that don’t work on Firefox. Not by saying they don’t, just by throwing errors that make it sound like I put the wrong data in a field. Is there some magic extension to fix that?

I know one family like that. Kids prefer activities to phones. But the rest not so much. The kids get together and do things in spurts separated by phone time. Usually whatever they are doing, at least one of them is on the phone. So it is really kid dependent.

I wonder how many of the over 1000 VPs will get canned. You read that right. I worked there at the beginning of my career. I know a lot of people who are now VPs. Only one of them was actually any good. One guy couldn’t even manage his own staff meetings when he was a first line manager. Nice guy, not dumb or anything, but not brilliant, and a terrible organizer.

Newsflash, Solarwinds still exists too. Not sure I could name a company that screwed up so big and actually paid the price.

Yeah, see that is the issue. The social logins (though not for anything real money related) and the photo backups are so well integrated. Nothing really competes. My personal emails are even less of a concern to me than the rest.

I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.

Cause there are always more patients… but more data will let them get more press when it enables more interesting demos.

Humorous thought just occurred to me. What if the governments of the world are really a false flag operation to keep us from believing that a capable government could exist. And that there is a real one that knows about aliens and so much more… There has to be a book about that somewhere.