Funny you mention Microsoft because I used to see bug reports for Windows. I can tell you there was a ton of low quality "SOMEONE HACKED MY COMPUTER" or similar feedback (and sometimes just unintelligible ranting) that was completely inactionable or unreproducible. I otherwise do agree with your premise that large monopolistic businesses can sit on large swaths of feedback without worrying about competition - and that this is a problem.
However, for most software projects and businesses, the lack of repeated feedback is a signal that the issue isn't important.
As a user I would hope that the software author/publisher is prioritizing important problems. Closing one ticket is not indicative of organizational rot, as you say.
Yep. On the other side of the curtain this often isn't nefarious. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis of spending time on something that one user is complaining about versus a backlog of higher business priorities. I've seen this in my work and it makes me sad for the user, but it often does take a bit of effort to spear these bug reports through.
This is an often conjectured example. California allows for that, but it falls under a foreign LLC registration to get it recognized by the state. It turns out that the annual foreign registration fee matches the in-state one. So this ends up costing more if you want it to be enforceable.
LLC annual registration is up to $800/yr in CA, including foreign LLC's. I don't think $800/yr for privacy is a "very tiny". Not to mention you would need to pay an owner of record, probably a professional, to have their name on the LLC.
EDIT: A quick web search shows that an estimated annual cost of $50-$400 for a registered agent in CA. So the cost is closer to $1k/yr.
Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later.
Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut.
There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
Unlike solar, wind at the utility scale virtually always improves load factors, lcoe, and a host of other economics vs a personal installation.
Generally utility scale solar buys cheap panels that aren't as energy dense as those purchased by rooftop consumers, so you could make the argument. However, the efficiency and energy density of the ever-growing turbines installed by utilities, particularly off-shore, are far more efficient than anything you would install yourself. E.g. average annual wind speed typically improves with altitude, and having a taller turbine can reach those larger sustained wind speeds. Whereas, utilities and consumers almost always install solar near-ish ground level and see the same sky, perhaps the utility installs in a sunnier corner of geography. Consumers potentially benefit from the shading of panels, and lower distribution costs.
I don't think it's a fair argument to say that EVs are an ineffective use of battery capacity. They are certainly more affordable and accessible than home batteries.
Have you seen the cost of home batteries? Napkin math shows their installed-cost in my region of the US is the same as the fractional cost of an EV. But the EV comes with a free drivetrain, seats, and airbags!
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. From your comment I take it that you weren't using a time-series collection to store data in mdb which uses industry-standard compression techniques?
If "extending Activation Lock to other components" means what I think it does, then the phone's owner should have control over this and 3rd party repairs should be fine. It may cut out the market for unofficial parts, but does that even exist today? Is anyone making iphone compatible batteries with any scale? (I'm curious if so)
The thrust of this move devalues phones to thieves, which I generally think is a good thing. Cutting down the hardly salvageable value even further should help the "market" sort this out and lead to less theft. I like it.
It's a fair point that nuclear (and all power plants) need maintenance windows where they come offline (and occasionally unplanned outages). But this is not the same as saying nuclear is not dispatchable, that's just incorrect.
How much is society willing to spend collectively to upgrade our housing stock for this? Not to mention triple-paned windows are not standard by any sufficiently large builder on new construction. Double-paned? Certainly.
Geothermal is great. But in an already built city, it's not feasible to install quickly. There is also a lack of legal framework or precedent in place to heat multiple properties from a single source. I tried very hard to obtain a quote for this and it was well over 50k for a single family home, and nobody would actually do it because of the big city I live in. Want a heat pump too? That's another 25k. Throwing down 100k up-front is not a reasonable request to a typical homeowner.