I dont think "society" has failed because older people get lonely. And I also dont think you can truly judge someone's desire for companionship, or even love, until you're in your 60s or 70s and the quantity and quality of social interactions have rapidly diminished.
Most people do all their Windows activity from one single specific location. It's Android and iOS that know you just drove down and made a stop at your city's most popular drug marketplace, or that you and your secretary were in the same hotel at 7pm yesterday.
Regardless of account type, there are many things that could require you to need those Bitlocker keys to get your data. Don't just associate them with an account, have Windows save the keys to a text file, and save that text file somewhere external, on a NAS or Dropbox or email itnto yourself or whatever, and print out 2 or 3 hard copies and keep them close by. I'm 1000x more worried about losing my data to a Windows crash/error than to theft or any other external actor.
Just because this one "investment" (or wager, or gamble, or speculation - whatever term you'd prefer) eventually succeeded* that doesn't set a precedent that we should excuse blatant fraud or encourage even more speculation with other people's money.
*of course, it could still go to zero in the future
> critically relied on a VBA macro to handle billions
Why is this surprising (or a secret)? It probably runs entirely bug-free and has done so for a decade or three - it would be hard to imagine still running if it regularly had issues or sent just a small percentage of those billions of dollars to the wrong place. What does your modernization do better?
I think its the exact opposite. One of the best features of art, in any form, is that it offers different perspectives, viewpoints, ideas. Think of how many people changed something major in their life due to a song, a movie, a photograph. Now think of how little would happen if AI just repeated back what "it knows" you already like. Your entire life would just be a derivative of things you liked as a 6-year old. Nothing new, nothing challenging, nothing fresh.
Smoking is typically a bad example, IMO, because it really takes a lot to actually kill you^. Like 50 years, usually (even 30, in your example, is on the low side). Further, there really are no visible downsides among smokers in their first 10 years or so. Meanwhile lots of other bad habits - hard drugs, alcohol, over-eating, even just sloppiness or laziness - often have real, visible, negative effects pretty quickly.
^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers
Just fyi, this is not a temporary phenomenon, not a phase. People dont like spam, robocalls, persistent advertising, even as we use the tools that enable them. They definitely wont like massive job losses, if that actually comes to fruition. Constant surveillance, "slop" news and entertainment, significantly reduced human contact - not popular. Like most technologies, AI benefits a small group - those who control the means of production - but everyone else loses out.
I'd say it is indeed a huge surprise that a struggling company refused to do business with another entity which was trying to purchase tens of millions of dollars of its product.
AMC is the dumbest company (or more specifically, its CEO Adam Aron is the dumbest executive). MoviePass came in out of nowhere and became the largest purchaser of movie tickets... millions every week. And AMC actively fought against them, refused to even let them buy tickets at full price, and led the charge to drive them out of business. For what alternative? Mostly, nothing but empty seats.
AMC's stock price is $1.59 as I write this vs $50-70 while MoviePass was peaking around 2018. AMC had to do a 10-to-1 reverse stock split to avoid being delisted, they may need to do another one. They even got a brief "meme stock" spike over $250 and managed to do absolutely nothing productive (except pay the CEO more) with this new capital access.
Airlines are popular employers specifically because they offer a clear vision of future pay increases and better, more prestigious, schedules. People, especially pilots, are willing to put up with a lot early on because they are confident that sticking with the plan will eventually allow them to earn double and triple their early-career salaries.
Same thing happens in law, investment banking, etc... the hardest workers are often the youngest and least-paid. They do it because they know big money may come later.
The problem with this model is that the staff and insurance are essentially fixed costs, so if they sell 500 burgers on Saturday but only 250 on Tuesday, then the insurance cost-per-burger on Tues is double what it is on Sat. Staffing might increase by an extra body or two on the busy days but won't double, so it also has a much higher cost-per-burger on Tues.
I am not a restauranteur, just a customer (and observer) but I dont think many restaurant operators understand this concept either. Many seem to be raising prices to cover higher costs-per-item due to fewer customers to spread the fixed costs over. And then the higher prices turn more people off, now prices need to be raised again. Death spiraling themselves.
Restaurant portion sizes have definitely increased - a lot - since the 1940s-50s. Maybe some minor pullback the last few years but still way larger than back then. A McDonald's Quarter-pounder was considered very large, that was in 1971, many sit-down restaurant burgers today are 5-8 oz.
Supply and demand. Among many other changes, the demographics of the typical Boulder resident changed significantly - originally nature lovers and hippies for whom earning money was not a primary motivation - post-2000 shifted to educated, highly-compensated desk workers who can bid up prices. And lots more people in total seeking to live in a small area, which also lifts prices significantly.
Kind of a weird flex - you're basically saying that you aren't any better than the Indian teams at writing efficient queries or optimizing existing ones, the only talent you've demonstrated is ability to ask Claude Code. It's like you are announcing your own obsolescence.
Lol, your position is, don't watch tv, just watch YouTube. That's not really a radical shift.
Fine if it works for you, but TV has plenty of things going for it... big screens, watch from 10 ft away on a couch, watch with other people, regular schedule (i.e. Jeopardy on the same time every day), live sports, local news, shows with generally high production values. But probably most importantly, passivity - yes that is a feature.