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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2025

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  • It’s rarely about literal monopoly. It’s more often about market power. Choice is one tool that consumers, and small scale producers have to ameliorate some of the consequences of market power.

    Of course having market power, is not the same as abusing it to harm consumers - but if the profit margins are ‘abnormal’ and persistent and or uneven throughout the supply chain that’s sometimes a good indicator. If choice/competition isn’t whittling down excess profits in the long run, then there might be some distorted power relationships somewhere in the market or supply chain.

    Proving/ disproving the alleged ‘unwritten rule’ might be quite interesting though. But competition investigations need to be quite wide ranging and it is notoriously difficult to prove anything.






  • yes, it’s when you tell boss, “I can’t do that in 3 hours, it’ll take two weeks”, and probably still have some unknown aspects of quality, that we might not want to sign off on. Maybe we can rush it in 1 week, if you’re ok with want want maybe’ 20% unverified.

    Boss fucks off to coprolite - gets it “done” in 3 hours. Gives it to someone else to QR. They comes back to me for advice on turd polishing (apparently that’s my SME). So I then waste time helping that person tactfully create a quality report that says it’s seriously defective and will take weeks to rectify to get it up to an acceptable standard - because it tells us nothing about how it got to it’s erroneous output.

    Now, we’ve wasted about a day between us, on dog-shite - and we’ve not learned anything useful.

    I don’t know what a “gen Z” is though, but whoever they are they should stand up to shite bosses.





  • Very possibly.

    I vaguely remember using putty on port 22 which i thought was ssh, but maybe it was telnet. we were leaving the 90s by then, so I think ssh was around. Might also have been different protocol on the uni LAN vs WAN connections.

    The libraries I remember might have been direct terminals to local server. Few catalogs were available even on the uni-wide LAN. No big deal really since you’re going to have to go there to find the book anyway.

    The catalog room was an acceptable place to have a chat or lament the size of the reading list.



  • MS should be more vulnerable, due to everything but Excel being toilet blockages.

    TLDR; MS already got big by being like IBM, lots of dumb corpo procurement cash is already keeping them afloat for about as long as qwerty keyboards - because some people got really good at/dependent on excel.

    Their dominance of corpo-procurement (and using ‘security’ to block out alternative tooling) means that vast amounts of the corpo world is based on highly specialised and over-stretched excel.

    Even in databases, where my organisation (large public sector) should be having a genuine competition to administer postGRESQL for us or something, has been loss-led into into a big new ms fabric contract by them appearing to undercut the incumbent (Oracle - ok not hard to undercut), but not actuall . . . [rant deleted]

    However, crap MS is at software, they’re extremely good at getting dumb corpos to sign on the dotted line.
    (‘always has been’ meme). And many humans being forced to use the only tool available, have built vast intricate systems on the foundation of that excel, many of them masterworks of skill in the face of those constraints. Hopefully they don’t last as long as one of the old Egyptian dynasties.