Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

Including 2000lb bombs, which the US Military refuses to use because the collateral damage is so massive and which Israel used in residential areas in both Gaza and Lebanon.

The useful idiots that have been going around for months defending Biden whilst he was sending Israel some of the worst conventional weapons the US has in the full knowledge that they would use them and with his own military advisors telling him how much collateral damage they cause, have a lot of blood on their hands for enabling this.

Coming from a country - Portugal - which was very Catholic not that long ago, I would say that the children of Catholic parents went through a great process of “self-reflection and criticism” and dropped Catholicism.

The religion itself is pretty much as backwards as ever.

What happened is that the number of actual practicing Catholics (you know, people who actually go to church and spend time thinking about that stuff) has fallen steeply, even if there are still many who just because they got baptized (which is something one has no choice on), get counted as religious.

Even with the Christian sects dominant in places like the US and Brazil trying to get a foothold over here, there’s nowhere the level of dominance of religion in public life there seems to be in the US. It’s funny that a country which maybe 50 or 60 years ago was, IMHO, very socially backwards compared to the US, is now more socially evolved than it.

That’s a wierd as hell take.

The first placed was the supposedly Center Left (Partido Socialista), the second was AD - a cohalition of the Center-Right “Partido Social Democrata” and the conservative party (to were the fascists migrated post Revolution) CDS - the third was the hard neoliberal party (Iniciativa Liberal) and the fourth was Chega.

The first 3 parties are neoliberals, curiously from softer to harder (if we ignore CDS, the junior party in AD, which is a traditional conservative party rather than neoliberal) and the 4th is towards the Fascist side of the rightwing.

The Iniciativa Liberal who got 3rd place is almost as far-right as the Chega, it’s just that they’re from the American-style ultra neoliberal side of the far-right whilst Chega is from the Fascist side, so they’re less into moralism, nationalism and statism and more into privatise everything including the National Health Service, remove all regulations and cut the top tax rates - i.e. basically replace the European style social net with the American model on steroids.

Curiously both Chega and Iniciativa Liberal grew from nothing roughly at the same time, both a few years after Steve Bannon came to Europe with money from several very wealthy Americans very openly to “expand the far-right in Europe”.

This was not at all a victory against the far right because the two far right parties, Iniciativa Liberal and Chega got more seats than ever before.

You would need to be seriously deluded to think that a party whose politics are those of the fat-cat rightwing of the American Democrat party (think Finance types and Tech Bros) in an European country like Portugal is to the left of anything but the new Fascists of Chega.

Enshittification is the result of the user not being in control: markets have a natural tendency to become dominated by a few companies (or even just a single one) if they have any significant barriers to entry (and said barriers to entry include things like networking effects), and once they consolidate control over a large enough share of the market those companies become less and less friendly and more and more extractive towards customers, simply because said customers don’t actually have any other options, which is what we now call enshittification.

At the same time Linux (and most Open Source software) is mainly about the owner being in control of their own stuff, not some corporate provider of software for your hardware or of a hardware + software “solution” (i.e. most modern electronics) provider.

So we’re getting to see more and more Linux-based full solutions to take control of one’s devices back from the corporations, not just Linux on the Desktop to wrestle control back from an increasingly anti-customer Microsoftw, but also, for example, stuff like OpenELEC (for TV boxes) and OPNSense (for firewalls/router).

Boris Johnson is a dumb person’s idea of an intelligent person.

Judging by the prices in the various countries I’ve lived in, in Europe, mobile data prices are a pretty good indication of a cartel.

In my experience Germany is one of the worst (by comparison to what you quoted, I use to get unlimited 4G in the UK for £10/month some years ago) though my own country, Portugal, is even worse.

I bet there were “radio spectrum” or “mobile operator license” auctions won by a handful well connected large companies and there’s nothing in the law forcing them to open their networks…

A “walled swamp”,

What’s there not to like?!