Yeah, they play this game enough that I simply question fucking everything. They will explain every single line item in a way that I can map back to a timeline, or they will take it off.
This has to be done in person, where they can't be, uh, accidentally disconnected, but I've found the rate-of-return on that time hard to beat. They discover all sorts of "mistakes" when you're taking up their billing specialists' time.
It is a bit like haggling over your car price after you already bought it; the main thing to get over is the social discomfort of being a pain in the ass, so they can't use that against you.
Worse that old network gear is technically incompetent business partners.
Speaking in very general terms, let's just say that we've had to maintain an extremely locked down machine running a version of sshd from about a decade ago hosted in its own DMZ, all for one particular partner. It is monitored for everything we can think of, and I still find myself stressing about possible ways someone could escape from that machine - I'm mostly surprised we haven't been attacked through them yet.
Their problem is they bought proprietary software that's no longer supported, and look at it as a one-time purchase rather than a forward commitment. Our problem is the nontechnical relationship is important and we can't cut them off.
> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff
Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.
It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.
There's a reason for that. If civilian PTSD were more widely acknowledged, insurance would be paying out more and people would want employers to do something about high-stress jobs.
> Top of the list: train drivers.
I rather suspect front-line in Trust and Safety at any major social media outfit is up there, too.
> their histrionics won’t change Boeing’s incumbency
You seem to entirely miss the possibility that this has nothing to do with "punishing" anyone, and that people simply don't want to stress out about dying during their flight.
You can call it irrational if you like, that feeling of superiority and a few bucks will get you a snack. The brain worm is there, I know I'll be thinking about it next time I book tickets.
Other folks have mentioned several other reasons, I'll just mention screen tech. My first monitor (bought in '93) was a 640x480 pixel 13" CRT screen. (And that was expensive - the Mac Classic had 512 × 342 mono, pretty comparable to the Apple Watch.)
Doing a lot of reading on that was rough on the eyes and you were scrolling constantly. I printed a lot back then.
The examples were chosen by the author to make a point precisely because they are well known.
But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk.
> If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%
How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.
I can't tell if this is typical hn pedantry or genuine misunderstanding, so I'll point out that I was not referring to "some entity named Simone", I was referring to the particular Simone in this very comment thread, for whom we have strong evidence about preferred pronouns.
> Of course, it's still safer to look them up if you don't actually know the person in question and want to use he or she.
Yep, me too. I worked at Sybase at the time, and installed it to use a beta PowerBuilder to (try to) build some internal tools. Granted, I in my early 20s and far less experienced with this stuff, but found PB utterly incomprehensible. Unix started making sense fairly quickly, although I still had years of learning ahead to get to competent.
Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos, DECs, SGIs...
Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was kind of unix-ish.
You're right that it is in-group signaling[1]. But it is also socializing. Comparative-opinion jawboning passes time and serves as a social learning mechanism as well as an assortive signifier. That sort of thing is also, by volume, a huge fraction of interpersonal communication - much like gossip, it is a double-edged mechanism hard-wired into human behavior.
Like I said, let me know when your utopia has eliminated assortive signaling about sports, tools, accents, clothes, art, food, housing, hairstyles, schools, employers, sex, shoes, religion, cars, text-messaging background colors, music, politics... all of which is far more pervasive, and some of which has historically escalated into literal wars.
[1] I also personally agree that it is boring. I couldn't care less what editor people use unless they've configured it wrong in a way that messes up a repo I have to use, and even then only to the extent that I probably have to explain to them how to fix it.