So while most of the software is open source rather than proprietary, you still have a fair point that customers pay for support (as they do with most enterprise products). One could theoretically use the product without first-party software updates, managing the open source oneself... but that would have practical impediments (and runs counter to the all-in-one simplicity that customers value in the Oxide product).
Two points about your last point. First, software improvements benefit all customers; as the business grows, the effective cost per customer shrinks. Also, most customers grow their Oxide deployment or will replace hardware after a depreciation cycle. The sustainability of investments into the software (and the product generally) is on solid ground.
Back in the 90s and 00s, lots of companies churned out software products that were sold once, supported forever. It was a sort of Ponzi scheme, supporting old customers with money from new customers. Which was okay during a period of high growth. But sooner or later the market matures, growth plateaues, and the cost of ongoing maintenance becomes a much bigger problem.
Right now you're growing fast and swimming in VC money, so this is probably not an issue. At some point, though, you might find that even hardware depreciation cycles don't provide as much of a cushion as you hope they will. In an economic downturn, people might suddenly realize that Oxide hardware actually remains serviceable much longer than they expected. :)
Unless you’re wild camping, campsites have addresses. So do marinas where a ship would need to be docked more or less regularly to establish residency.
As for being a nomad, you don’t need a driver’s license or any kind of ID to wander if you’re willing to sleep rough. If you want to drive on public roadways though, you better have a primary address where the courts can send someone if you kill someone in a traffic accident and bail.
Docking is expensive, so no. It's also only needed once per 5 years or so for maintenance.
Government fining you a ticket doesn't mean your address has to be on the drivers license. They could register the number plate to an SSN for instance.
Did you skip my last sentence? A traffic ticket is not the worst thing you can do in an automobile. And not everyone eligible for a drivers license will have an SSN.
This all goes away if you require social media companies to charge users for access. The addiction to free stuff is what’s really killing the internet.
You think feds won't pay for bot accounts? Record labels already pay for botted streams, so I'm pretty sure MOSSAD would pay to bot Facebook. Hell, it already happens on X.
The problem mentioned in the parent comment was the volume of fake accounts overloading customer support. If it’s no longer free to create spam accounts for phishing etc, the profitability of scamming will shrink and decrease the incentives. I don’t think feds are exactly slamming the support queue.
More importantly than the bot problem, it would decrease social media usage in the aggregate while also encouraging more competition. Much easier to bootstrap a business if you’re not having to compete with big tech offering the same thing for free because they can subsidize the losses.
Lmao you can’t. Eugenics is evil and denies reproductive rights, bodily autonomy at the most basic animal level. It is literally the idea of creating a master race and culling off anyone who doesn’t conform.
If you find yourself in a situation where you want to do something Nazis did — just not that way — you are halfway there.
yea, it's very suspect. regardless, every idiot who claims to have "found the science" has failed to produce anything beyond studies of n=10 (10 is PUSHING IT).
I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No?
I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.
What a ridiculous excuse. People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then. No?
Working for Microsoft doesn’t make them bad engineers or bad people, but it does make them Microsoft employees. And they get to bear its reputation whether they want to or not. If it makes them uncomfortable then they should make a change or grow thicker skin.
Oversaturation of the labor supply for software engineers has been looming for a while now. Gen Z was sold on infinite growth in the ZIRP era which was never going to happen, but everyone still jumped in. What we’re seeing is structural unemployment. Not everyone’s gonna make it.
There are companies I wouldn't candidate for, even with kids I think, although it's hard to say, I don't have kids, and apparently there is a mind-shift happening when you get one. Oracle, Palantir come to mind. But maybe not Microsoft, I don't know about that one. It's probably bad, but maybe not "I prefer to watch my kids starving" kind of bad.
Having kids is also a bullshit excuse. Choosing comfort over conscience is your prerogative but you’re just teaching your kids the same values.
Yeah, tech monopolist that enables genocide to contemporary gestapo isn’t an equal comparison. But my point was that you can’t ignore the moral hazards of employment by handwaving “gotta eat somehow”. There are a million ways to feed your kids. Saying you have to work a high paid job to feed them non-GMO certified organic produce from Erewhon because that’s the only standard of living you can possibly survive with, that’s a choice.
I also want to reiterate that I’m not judging the people who choose to work there. I’m just saying that by signing the employment contract they accept the reasonable public perception that the products they work on are shit. And to some marginal degree, they are complicit in all their employer’s wrongdoings.
Your commentary doesn't come off as honorable or righteous in any way to me. It comes off as self centered and self righteous. As if we all owe it to you to put you before our children.
I don't know if that's your intention but that's what I'm reading.
I genuinely hope you don't agree with that reading, because I doubt you'd have a nice life with that outlook. You'd be very unlikable.
What I’d consider unlikable is implying that someone might have no choice but to work for Microsoft in order to provide for their family. It carries with it an air of privilege and condescension implying that working a lesser job or for lesser pay would be insufficient to provide for a family’s basic needs.
What lesser job? People are unemployed after six months. Meanwhile MS hired other people for less to replace those that left. Nobody won here.
It's not about "lesser" jobs being actually lesser. The point is that you don't actually have a choice. Big companies that nobody likes are in control of the economy and you can't do anything except join the unemployed until you get rehired from the pool of desperate people willing to do their bidding.
(All of this with a grain of salt. Not literally everyone is in this situation, but there are certainly many who are.)
I'm just saying, maybe don't be so quick to judge.
I’m not sure why you’re so set on taking away free will.
> you can't do anything except join the unemployed until you get rehired from the pool of desperate people willing to do their bidding.
So there is a choice then. Does unemployment kill you in some way? Is going to a food bank a death sentence? Can you not adjust your lifestyle spending to match a lower salary if it means getting a job sooner? Is there no way to save up for periods of unemployment so you can be choosy about your next job?
It's not a choice. Making kids eat from a food bank and sleep in a shelter is morally inferior to working at Microsoft. You're saying, repeatedly, that they should make your morally inferior choice and they deserve to be judged if they don't. Only a monster could call that a choice.
Look at yourself:
>Having kids is also a bullshit excuse. Choosing comfort over conscience is your prerogative but you’re just teaching your kids the same values.
Your conscience tells you that children should be forced to sleep in shelters and eat from food banks just so that you won't have to see ads when you use Microsoft Windows.
Please DON'T teach anyone your values. Your moral compass points to the trash.
Look at the list here. 2084 pages already, 12 entries per page: that's 25 000 criminals. They're listing their crimes. 25 000 criminals already arrested is a huge lot.
Be honest with yourself and think about the victims.
I'd say a lot of the people joining ICE do believe the US has already enough criminals that are US citizens and want to help stop the insanity that is mass uncontrolled migration.
Out of 600 000 people arrested by ICE, as I understand it already 25 000 are violent criminals that we know of. That's more nearly 5% of all those arrested. 1 in 20 people.
Where do you draw the limit? You want full open borders, but at what cost?
I read a lot of "Arrested for: kidnapping, rape".
Is, say, 1 in 100 people coming in being a criminal OK?
Where do you draw the line?
Dems are literally fighting so that sanctuary cities do not hand over convicted criminals to ICE: so that one day they can be released in the streets.
Is this what you want to fight for?
Are you that convinced, from your moral high ground where you judge Microsoft employees and ICE agents, that you'll be on the right side of history?
You are missing out the entire point. In a justice system, a single innocent in prison is a thousand times worse than a free criminal. This is where most people draw the line if they think about it. Because when you put innocents under arrest, suddenly you are no better than dictatorships and terrorist state.
The real justice is investing in a security system that tracks, investigates, and condemn actual criminals, in a targetted way, so that honest people can live securely and free. Believe it or not, plenty of countries manage to do that pretty well.
Well considering the administration has repeatedly called Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good "TERRORISTS", I would consider "1400 ISIS terrorists" a highly dubious statistic, in fact in a brief search for a reputable source of your claim of "1400 ISIS terrorists" I've not found any source for that, link???
You ask "Is, say, 1 in 100 people coming in being a criminal OK?"
Well considering that about 1.4% of the overall population is current incarcerated in our "Land of the Free", yeah 1 in 100 would be an improvement!
People are against ICE in growing numbers because of their tactics of run around hide their identities like bandits and gestapo thugs. Their ignoring of court orders, constant lies, constant blatant violations of the 1st, 2nd, 4th amendments constantly, and violations of rights of people such as immigrants following the processes of asylum, several citizens that have been arrested wrongly, and the terrible tortuous treatment an the joy and pride this corrupt disgusting administration takes in being cruel to people!
If you were wrongfully arrested at a DUI checkpoint one night, but hey, 1 in 20 people arrested there are drunk drivers! Would you be okay with that? I certainly wouldn't.
If SWAT started driving around gunning people down in the street but every last "victim" turned out to be guilty of murder would that be okay? I certainly don't think so. There's a legal process that needs to be followed.
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