ndarwincorn

> ability to switch jobs easily

that's a funny way to write 'willingness to act collectively with fellow workers'

While I agree with your point, if you're going to critique law enforcement this only goes halfway:

In the US, the idea of the publicly funded law enforcement officer can trace its lineage back to antebellum slave catchers.

Much like they now (and forever) frame any perceived difficulty as preventing them from doing their job, they've successfully re-framed their role in society as protecting and serving (people) instead of protecting and serving (property rights), despite that obviously not being the case.

Carbon emissions aren't the only impact humans have on the environment. As one other commenter pointed out, the further humans sprawl the more we encroach on wildlife habitat.

This trope of environment === greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is dangerous.

> Chromium is...vendor neutral.

That's pretty misleading. When you want to sync state across Chromium installs, you use a Google account, and that's really just scratching the surface.

Chromium comes with quite a bit of Google baked-in.

The trick is declining to sign them, provided you have enough tact to do so in a way that doesn't signal that you're hard to work with in general.

Judging off Glassdoor reviews, most of their devs are embedded ('forward-deployed' in their militaristic lingo).

From that and my own short interview experience a few years ago, a lot of their revenue comes from bespoke ETL for clients into an on-prem software deployment and there's no concrete push to move to something more off-the-shelf.

This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time.

Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)

This is reading more and more like you're begging the question. One of the sibling replies that predates this comment by a quarter of an hour already addresses your specific missing connecting dot here. Not to mention the article itself, which is also well cited.

It's good. I suggest you read it. Interrogating my two sentence oversimplification of the forest is not a useful way to learn about this.

Everyone replying answered this, I'd just like to point out that the answer to 'could you elaborate a bit more' is to read the parent article.

Another excerpt:

> In 2013, the GSA Inspector General traced a similar situation with different contractors. Managers at GSA overruled line contracting officers to raise prices taxpayer pay for contractors Carahsoft, Deloitte and Oracle. Government managers at GSA micro-managed and harassed their subordinates and damaged the careers of contracting officers trying to negotiate fair prices for the taxpayer.

This entirely misses the forest for the trees. And granted the author's bias gets in the way of his attempt to point out that forest. Their bias aligns with mine, but with less editorialization IMO the following would be more clear:

It's not that the work is or isn't valuable, or where that value is. It's that McKinsey charges 72% more than a competitor for the same consulting, and that there's a massive perverse incentive for public servants in charge of awarding contracts to pick the most expensive one.

From the article, bias left in:

Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

...

And this gets to the second reason why McKinsey can charge so much, which has to do less with McKinsey and more with an incentive to overpay more generally. It’s more likely something called the ‘Industrial Funding Fee,’ or IFF. The GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service gets a cut of whatever certain contractors spend using the GSA’s schedule, and this cut is the IFF. The IFF is priced at .75% of the total amount of a government contract. In the case of McKinsey, since 2006, “FAS has realized $7.2 million in Industrial Funding Fee revenue.”

...

Does McKinsey do a good job? The answer is that it’s probably no better or worse than anyone else. I’m sure there are times when McKinsey is quite helpful, but it’s in all probability vastly overpriced for what it is, which is basically a group of smart people who know how to use powerpoint presentations and speak in soothing tones. You can just go through news clippings and find areas McKinsey did cookie cutter nonsense. For instance, McKinsey helped ruin an IT implementation for intelligence services. In the immigration story, MacDougall shows that the consulting firm encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees. That’s cruelty, not efficiency.

True for me as well, similar setup (amdgpu, not nouveau, except at work).

The only time FF 'crashes' is when I update while it's running, and even then it gracefully degrades and lets me know I have to restart it. With the 'restore previous session' menu option (an option that only exists in piecemeal and implemented much worse in Chrome), this is a mild inconvenience.

Chromium crashes much more frequently for me on Linux.

In the financialized world we live in rent seeking should be the top of the list.

> 'the athletic' and its clones

None of which have actually taken off their runway as far as I know.

It's sort of a convenience fee. I agree with your App Mafia take but my guess is folks that can't be troubled to use F-Droid probably weren't going to donate in the first place.

For instance, D-Sub is available for free on F-Droid but costs something like ~$4 on Google Play.

AndOTP is available on F-Droid, not sure about Wireguard but I'd assume so.