They started selling tax stamps here for illegal drugs maybe 20-some years ago. I remember the tax department making a big deal about preserving the anonymity of the stamp buyers because they couldn't enforce the tax penalties against dealers if there was some belief that tax stamp sales were used as a ruse to arrest the buyers for drug crimes.
I think it even made the news when a couple of people actually came in and bought some tax stamps. It was all kind of obfuscated, but I kind of believe it was probably some kind of stamp collector who figured in 20 years they'd have some super rare and valuable stamps.
Go to the physical used book store and find used books by the same author. List them on Amazon for the "secret goods" price, and make sure your market knows to look for books by the author you've chosen. "This week's author is Frank Wordsworthy".
Ordinary buyers won't bother with "mispriced" books, but the ones that do buy know they're getting more than the book.
Why bother with bitcoin and the dark web when you can just bury your sales on Amazon.
That's great, but every time I try to buy stuff online by shoving bundles of cash into the monitor I just make a mess. They always want me to use electronic money.
Isn't the very big step 1 in money laundering actually converting cash into some kind of electronic asset (bank deposit, etc) FIRST? And its less easy than it sounds to deposit $9,999.99 into a bank account without some plausible and well-understood business behind the account.
I think if you have a reliable way of turning cash into bank balances you're most of the way there, the rest is just washing it on paper to bury its origins.
I'd like more information on what constitutes "water resistance" and what violates a water resistance claim.
My guess is anything buried in the ground anyplace other than a desert has some ability to withstand immersion in fresh water nearly indefinitely. A lot of low-lying areas can be prone to periodic flooding or other conditions which would amount to water immersion.
I'd guess that water pressure is probably a key variable -- "water resistance" probably isn't guaranteed for continuous immersion beyond 5-10 bar, but I would wager that most water resistant cable would hold up indefinitely in fresh water at pressures below that.
Resistance to sea water is probably a whole other standard, but again, it seems hard to believe that subterranean cable that's not resistant to sea water would be used close to coastal areas (for of course various definitions of close to coastal areas) because of the exact risk from runoff, storm surges, etc.
I guess I remain mostly unconcerned, especially because this is optical we're talking about. It won't short. You usually have a poly conduit and then several layers of jacketing.
If I used 5200, it would never come apart or be reusable. 5200 is a permanent adhesive.
4000 is ultimately removable and/or stuff can be separated if you want, plus it remains more pliable. Like bedding deck fittings, lights, that sort of thing, where you want a good seal plus some kind of flexibility. I've used it a lot for sealing screw threads -- tap hole oversize, fill with epoxy, let cure, tap to screw size, coat screw with 4000 and seat within a half-turn of flush. Seat flush 24+ hours after curing to seal.
I would only use 5200 on something like a permanent through-hull fitting and only then after I had dry-fit it 1001 times to make sure it was perfect, cuz it ain't coming out unless you cut it out once 5200 cures.
Thanks, I wasn't able to put into words like that. There's a feedback loop where Cisco makes things (at least seem) more difficult than they should be, the people who do it are invested in sorting it out, and want to keep that going by keeping their organization invested in what "only they can do".
I'll give you a weird example that makes me shop at Amazon but kind of hate myself for it.
On my boat, I have occasional use for 3M 4000 Marine Adhesive Sealant. IMHO, there is no substitute for its unique qualities.
The only local retailer for it is West Marine, and their price is about $15-16 locally. I can get it from other specialty marine product stores for the same price as Amazon (about $13) but I wind up cutting the savings by about half in shipping, plus it will take 2-3x as long to get it.
So Amazon ends up being the optimal vendor -- best price and fast, free delivery -- I got it 1 day when I ordered it last week, which is probably faster than if I got off my ass to buy it in-store (West Marine isn't convenient at all).
I'd like to order it from some specialty marine places because I value their business (and I buy a lot from them already), but 4 days and more money bugs me. I don't use enough to stock up, or trust open, half-empty containers to critical sealing, so I kind of need it when I need it. I don't mind avoiding West Marine, their sole retail presence gets me enough and fuck their high prices.
I think the Cosmopolitan version of this story is "What you should be buying RIGHT NOW on Amazon Prime Day!", with a bunch of near-paid endorsements of products whose price is either unchanged or actually up.
The local TV news channel did a piece on this last night that was almost indistinguishable from a commercial for Prime Day, about as close as they got to something resembling news was to say that "not everything is on sale" and "supplies may be limited".
What would make this a news-for-nerds story would be somebody hacking up a screen scraper a year ago and tracking a few hundred/thousand items and their prices and providing documentary proof that prices remained either unchanged or increased, available quantities nosedived unexpectedly, etc.
I'd probably go even further and suggest that the personality types associated with entrepreneurship are iconoclasts and have little respect for rules or conventional behavior.
I'd also argue that such behavior may actually be necessary, social norms and rules are often significantly oriented towards maintaining and persisting a given order. Following the rules doesn't change history as they say.
I don't think this excuses any specific act of sexism, harassment, etc, but it does kind of explain the types of people involved and how it starts.
A lot of hydro plants exist because there was a water control need for the dam in the first place and the dam was built for extremely long endurance and won't be "retired". They're easier to get at than most wind farm locations and can be upgraded with turbine and generator improvements fairly easily.
Nuclear has its own decommissioning problems, but these plants seem to have effective operating lives of 60 years and the same basic power generation improvement advantages as hydro plants. When you do finally get rid of them, it can be expensive but because they are nuclear it was likely factored into the original plan, especially considering how heavily regulated nuclear materials and power is. That doesn't mean capitalists won't get up to their usual tricks and try to stick someone else with the costs, but for the most part there's a firmly established chain of ownership and management.
I think the complicating factor in wind power generation is the amount of subsidies a lot of them received when built and some of the speculative nature involved in building them. I'm guessing that there wasn't always a lot of what-if thinking on their life cycles or set-asides associated with future decommissioning, upgrades or replacement. The early investors made sure their up front costs were paid out and the liabilities assigned to shell entities.
I'd wager that these life cycle issues got built into new wind farms built in the last 10-20 years, but the earliest ones may be a trainwreck of onwnership and liability, especially ones built on leased land. The redeeming factor is that the locations are valuable for wind generation and it seems unlikely that good sites will get abandoned completely.
Yeah, you can topple it with explosives and cut it up, but are you still in profit territory when you factor in the manpower to cut up the towers into small enough chunks to haul away (very far away?) and the materials involved in cutting them up plus the transportation costs?
It also seems like the nacelles have some equipment that's probably more valuable or even re-usable intact, not smashed by falling a few hundred feet from demolition which would complicate some kind of simple explode-and-topple strategy if you decided that you should try to partially disassemble the nacelles.
And what about the mounting base? Does that get damaged and rendered unusable for another new turbine?
The larger conceptual issue to me seems that most of these locations were chosen because they're great places to generate wind power. While some locations may be abandoned for various reasons, it seems like explode-and-topple doesn't address the real problem, replacing the actual electrical output of the original turbines.
Taking down the old turbines seems to be the smaller problem here, it's the capital cycle of replacement that's the bigger issue.
99% of the networking out there doesn't get more complicated than VLANs, QoS and spanning tree with maybe some pretty trivial static routing on top of it. You might find a little bit of OSPF routing here and there, either bigger physical campuses or multi-site environments trying to deal with automating failover between MPLS circuits and IPSec backups.
You need a CCIE for that like you need a PhD in chemistry to cook dinner.
That's not to say that CCIE isn't one of the best vendor certifications and CCIEs aren't smarter than the average bear, but it's also a pretty narrow space where it's an applicable requirement outside of larger telcos, data centers and carriers, and maybe places bought into very broad Cisco-specific product suites.
My point is mostly that the Cisco crowd likes to make "muh networking skillz" into some kind of mystical knowledge when it really isn't. It mostly seems like they hide behind a greatly elevated sense of phony expertise, which Cisco and their resellers are only all too happy to reinforce.
I can't help but think that "Cisco certified" is a giant circle jerk of empire building, premium brand affiliation and so-called network experts hiding behind their Cisco manuals telling everyone how complex switching is.
It used to be that Cisco and networking were synonymous, but not for a long time. There's too much competitive product and often a lot cheaper but a lot of orgs keep buying into the Cisco myth,
What I find weird is what is Ireland's source of capital for their sovereign wealth fund?
Most nation states with a sovereign wealth fund use them to basically extend the economic benefits of some time-limited resource extraction, usually oil. Basically to extend the party once whatever lucrative resource they extract runs out. I don't remember Ireland having much in the way of oil reserves or any other significant extraction resource.
Ireland has traditionally had a marginal domestic economy, so I wonder what source of excess capital they generate that can go into this. Maybe on paper it makes sense to invest their capital vs. domestic investment in real infrastructure -- ie, expanding a port, railway or road doesn't produce the same capital growth as investing in foreign markets. But it sure seems odd that taxation would produce more economic benefits than direct spending on their own domestic infrastructure.
But if you also told people that in a bunch of states you could actually buy weed over the counter before getting your naked body scanned in 3d at the airport they also wouldn't believe you.
Inheritances are a specific exception, and treated just like assets you owned before the marriage. What you do with the funds once married doesn't matter much - the source of the funds matter.
I get this if the inheritance had been kept in a form similar to its acquisition. Like if you inherited cash and kept in the bank, or even if you inherited securities that you sold for cash.
It's the immutability of the inheritance over time that doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense that you should be able to spend that money and then later come back and claim that the inheritance still existed.
The only way it seemed to make sense was that their house was viewed as a capital asset, and that remodeling the kitchen was a capital investment in that asset and thus retained its inheritance value. But that seems to be more about the general luck that the house increased in value and arguing that the kitchen remodel was a big part of it. What if due to circumstances of the real estate market the house had lost value? Do you say "nope, still got my $100k there"?
What about the depreciation associated with the wear and tear on the house? What if they had chosen to spend that $100k on a car that now only had a market value of $5000?
What if they had taken the $100k and put it into a joint investment account that was already at $100k, and six years later due to market losses is only worth its original $100k? She gets to claim all of the remaining value?
I mean, I don't know 100% of the nitty gritty details, it very well could have been that investing $50k of the inheritance entitled her to just a greater percentage of ownership of the house, some realty estimate that a $250k house with a new $50k kitchen is now worth $290k, so her vested interest in the house is more like 57% (original $125k of half ownership + gain of $40k in market value).
You're right, but given the left's newspeak of "undocumented immigrants" and the relentless portrayal of any kind of immigration enforcement as inherently racist it certainly seems like whatever the opposite of "the current administration" is pushing exactly the opposite narrative, that if you are Latino you have a default right to be in the US.
It seems to me that you can't even really advocate for any kind of immigration reform that includes any semblance of immigration enforcement without being seen as racist or advocating for a police state.
You're absolutely right, but I think you can get at some of the root causes here being IT vendors abandoning products before their useful life has ended as a means of ginning up new sales, new support contracts and new licensing, inevitably for higher prices and less value. The churn wheel seems to turn faster than ever.
And then you have vendors like VMware who have in some ways exhausted the market for their primary product. Nearly everyone who can remotely justify virtualization (which right now is down to 1-2 server SMBs) already has it. So now they push more ancillary products like vSAN and NSX (please, stop calling me about it) in order to keep growth positive. Tried to talk to them about Horizon View and they almost immediately went into a spiel about how important it was to use vSAN and NSX in any deployment even though they aren't technical requirements. I'm sure they will become requirements eventually.
So I can kind of see how IT decision makers feel like they are being hindered by old tech, and maybe they even are when new system X isn't compatible with existing server version Y until it is upgraded and there isn't any acceptable budgeting that adds capabilities and deal with premature upgrade cycles forced by vendors.
It's probably all part of a larger coercive push to move everything into rented cloud tenancy.
I'd love to know more about how this works, but quick Googling just leads to the conclusion that it's widely varying and extremely complicated.
If I read your statement correctly, if my wife dies, her debts held under her name only are her debts, and even joint ownership property that would get tangled up in her estate aren't subject to settlement of her debts -- like they couldn't force me to refinance the house to take out equity to pay them off.
I don't get how this could possibly work, as it seems like it would be open to abuse by people with a terminally ill spouse -- run up a bunch of debt in their name, the spouse dies and you can just erase the debt? Not that you wouldn't get shady debt collectors trying to convince the surviving spouse they "had" to pay the debt.
I know marital property in my state (Minnesota) can be complex due to my neighbor's divorce. 6 years before their divorce, she got a $100k inheritance. They spent about half of it remodeling their kitchen. During the divorce, he said that the inheritance remained somehow exclusive to her even though it had been spent as an investment into their jointly owned house. He had to make up the amount spent in the division of their assets.
When Netflix first started announcing they were spending the GDP of a small country on original content I figured we might get something like another HBO. Original programming at most other content providers was either a slave to traditional ratings, hobbled by censorship or broadcast standards, or a small-budget.
The first couple of Netflix efforts were pretty good -- House of Cards had real talent on its cast and the production value was top notch. But since then it's seemed to slip. Every time I turn on Netflix anymore, there's more "original" content than I can keep up with but every time I try something I'm totally underwhelmed. Nobody casts, cheap production values, empty, formulaic scripts, it's really ordinary.
I used to think the only obstacle to more HBO-quality content was just the usual business model in entertainment, now I'm mostly convinced that it's a fragile mixture of both money and some kind of production side magic that is very difficult to get right. HBO has too few shows (at least to fill my time), but it's because they're hard to make.
If AT&T thinks that HBO is just a sausage machine and if you only turn the handle faster you can get more sausage, they're wrong and trying to do so will just degrade the product.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a tipping point some years ago where it got less techy and more marketing/politics influenced.
Given the gyrations in ownership, management, staff and user base it seems remarkably stable, though.
They started selling tax stamps here for illegal drugs maybe 20-some years ago. I remember the tax department making a big deal about preserving the anonymity of the stamp buyers because they couldn't enforce the tax penalties against dealers if there was some belief that tax stamp sales were used as a ruse to arrest the buyers for drug crimes.
I think it even made the news when a couple of people actually came in and bought some tax stamps. It was all kind of obfuscated, but I kind of believe it was probably some kind of stamp collector who figured in 20 years they'd have some super rare and valuable stamps.
Like for real, you know this to be actually true and not a kind of "I wonder..."?
That almost seems plausible.
Go to the physical used book store and find used books by the same author. List them on Amazon for the "secret goods" price, and make sure your market knows to look for books by the author you've chosen. "This week's author is Frank Wordsworthy".
Ordinary buyers won't bother with "mispriced" books, but the ones that do buy know they're getting more than the book.
Why bother with bitcoin and the dark web when you can just bury your sales on Amazon.
That's great, but every time I try to buy stuff online by shoving bundles of cash into the monitor I just make a mess. They always want me to use electronic money.
Isn't the very big step 1 in money laundering actually converting cash into some kind of electronic asset (bank deposit, etc) FIRST? And its less easy than it sounds to deposit $9,999.99 into a bank account without some plausible and well-understood business behind the account.
I think if you have a reliable way of turning cash into bank balances you're most of the way there, the rest is just washing it on paper to bury its origins.
I'd like more information on what constitutes "water resistance" and what violates a water resistance claim.
My guess is anything buried in the ground anyplace other than a desert has some ability to withstand immersion in fresh water nearly indefinitely. A lot of low-lying areas can be prone to periodic flooding or other conditions which would amount to water immersion.
I'd guess that water pressure is probably a key variable -- "water resistance" probably isn't guaranteed for continuous immersion beyond 5-10 bar, but I would wager that most water resistant cable would hold up indefinitely in fresh water at pressures below that.
Resistance to sea water is probably a whole other standard, but again, it seems hard to believe that subterranean cable that's not resistant to sea water would be used close to coastal areas (for of course various definitions of close to coastal areas) because of the exact risk from runoff, storm surges, etc.
I guess I remain mostly unconcerned, especially because this is optical we're talking about. It won't short. You usually have a poly conduit and then several layers of jacketing.
If I used 5200, it would never come apart or be reusable. 5200 is a permanent adhesive.
4000 is ultimately removable and/or stuff can be separated if you want, plus it remains more pliable. Like bedding deck fittings, lights, that sort of thing, where you want a good seal plus some kind of flexibility. I've used it a lot for sealing screw threads -- tap hole oversize, fill with epoxy, let cure, tap to screw size, coat screw with 4000 and seat within a half-turn of flush. Seat flush 24+ hours after curing to seal.
I would only use 5200 on something like a permanent through-hull fitting and only then after I had dry-fit it 1001 times to make sure it was perfect, cuz it ain't coming out unless you cut it out once 5200 cures.
Thanks, I wasn't able to put into words like that. There's a feedback loop where Cisco makes things (at least seem) more difficult than they should be, the people who do it are invested in sorting it out, and want to keep that going by keeping their organization invested in what "only they can do".
I'll give you a weird example that makes me shop at Amazon but kind of hate myself for it.
On my boat, I have occasional use for 3M 4000 Marine Adhesive Sealant. IMHO, there is no substitute for its unique qualities.
The only local retailer for it is West Marine, and their price is about $15-16 locally. I can get it from other specialty marine product stores for the same price as Amazon (about $13) but I wind up cutting the savings by about half in shipping, plus it will take 2-3x as long to get it.
So Amazon ends up being the optimal vendor -- best price and fast, free delivery -- I got it 1 day when I ordered it last week, which is probably faster than if I got off my ass to buy it in-store (West Marine isn't convenient at all).
I'd like to order it from some specialty marine places because I value their business (and I buy a lot from them already), but 4 days and more money bugs me. I don't use enough to stock up, or trust open, half-empty containers to critical sealing, so I kind of need it when I need it. I don't mind avoiding West Marine, their sole retail presence gets me enough and fuck their high prices.
I think the Cosmopolitan version of this story is "What you should be buying RIGHT NOW on Amazon Prime Day!", with a bunch of near-paid endorsements of products whose price is either unchanged or actually up.
The local TV news channel did a piece on this last night that was almost indistinguishable from a commercial for Prime Day, about as close as they got to something resembling news was to say that "not everything is on sale" and "supplies may be limited".
What would make this a news-for-nerds story would be somebody hacking up a screen scraper a year ago and tracking a few hundred/thousand items and their prices and providing documentary proof that prices remained either unchanged or increased, available quantities nosedived unexpectedly, etc.
I'd probably go even further and suggest that the personality types associated with entrepreneurship are iconoclasts and have little respect for rules or conventional behavior.
I'd also argue that such behavior may actually be necessary, social norms and rules are often significantly oriented towards maintaining and persisting a given order. Following the rules doesn't change history as they say.
I don't think this excuses any specific act of sexism, harassment, etc, but it does kind of explain the types of people involved and how it starts.
A lot of hydro plants exist because there was a water control need for the dam in the first place and the dam was built for extremely long endurance and won't be "retired". They're easier to get at than most wind farm locations and can be upgraded with turbine and generator improvements fairly easily.
Nuclear has its own decommissioning problems, but these plants seem to have effective operating lives of 60 years and the same basic power generation improvement advantages as hydro plants. When you do finally get rid of them, it can be expensive but because they are nuclear it was likely factored into the original plan, especially considering how heavily regulated nuclear materials and power is. That doesn't mean capitalists won't get up to their usual tricks and try to stick someone else with the costs, but for the most part there's a firmly established chain of ownership and management.
I think the complicating factor in wind power generation is the amount of subsidies a lot of them received when built and some of the speculative nature involved in building them. I'm guessing that there wasn't always a lot of what-if thinking on their life cycles or set-asides associated with future decommissioning, upgrades or replacement. The early investors made sure their up front costs were paid out and the liabilities assigned to shell entities.
I'd wager that these life cycle issues got built into new wind farms built in the last 10-20 years, but the earliest ones may be a trainwreck of onwnership and liability, especially ones built on leased land. The redeeming factor is that the locations are valuable for wind generation and it seems unlikely that good sites will get abandoned completely.
Yeah, you can topple it with explosives and cut it up, but are you still in profit territory when you factor in the manpower to cut up the towers into small enough chunks to haul away (very far away?) and the materials involved in cutting them up plus the transportation costs?
It also seems like the nacelles have some equipment that's probably more valuable or even re-usable intact, not smashed by falling a few hundred feet from demolition which would complicate some kind of simple explode-and-topple strategy if you decided that you should try to partially disassemble the nacelles.
And what about the mounting base? Does that get damaged and rendered unusable for another new turbine?
The larger conceptual issue to me seems that most of these locations were chosen because they're great places to generate wind power. While some locations may be abandoned for various reasons, it seems like explode-and-topple doesn't address the real problem, replacing the actual electrical output of the original turbines.
Taking down the old turbines seems to be the smaller problem here, it's the capital cycle of replacement that's the bigger issue.
99% of the networking out there doesn't get more complicated than VLANs, QoS and spanning tree with maybe some pretty trivial static routing on top of it. You might find a little bit of OSPF routing here and there, either bigger physical campuses or multi-site environments trying to deal with automating failover between MPLS circuits and IPSec backups.
You need a CCIE for that like you need a PhD in chemistry to cook dinner.
That's not to say that CCIE isn't one of the best vendor certifications and CCIEs aren't smarter than the average bear, but it's also a pretty narrow space where it's an applicable requirement outside of larger telcos, data centers and carriers, and maybe places bought into very broad Cisco-specific product suites.
My point is mostly that the Cisco crowd likes to make "muh networking skillz" into some kind of mystical knowledge when it really isn't. It mostly seems like they hide behind a greatly elevated sense of phony expertise, which Cisco and their resellers are only all too happy to reinforce.
I can't help but think that "Cisco certified" is a giant circle jerk of empire building, premium brand affiliation and so-called network experts hiding behind their Cisco manuals telling everyone how complex switching is.
It used to be that Cisco and networking were synonymous, but not for a long time. There's too much competitive product and often a lot cheaper but a lot of orgs keep buying into the Cisco myth,
What I find weird is what is Ireland's source of capital for their sovereign wealth fund?
Most nation states with a sovereign wealth fund use them to basically extend the economic benefits of some time-limited resource extraction, usually oil. Basically to extend the party once whatever lucrative resource they extract runs out. I don't remember Ireland having much in the way of oil reserves or any other significant extraction resource.
Ireland has traditionally had a marginal domestic economy, so I wonder what source of excess capital they generate that can go into this. Maybe on paper it makes sense to invest their capital vs. domestic investment in real infrastructure -- ie, expanding a port, railway or road doesn't produce the same capital growth as investing in foreign markets. But it sure seems odd that taxation would produce more economic benefits than direct spending on their own domestic infrastructure.
But if you also told people that in a bunch of states you could actually buy weed over the counter before getting your naked body scanned in 3d at the airport they also wouldn't believe you.
If a business cannot afford to buy labor with certain talents at the going rate
For definitions of "afford" that include guaranteeing rich executive pay packages, stock buy-backs, a corporate jet.
American executives need to wake up and smell the coffee and start understanding their own personal enrichment is part of the cost structure.
Inheritances are a specific exception, and treated just like assets you owned before the marriage. What you do with the funds once married doesn't matter much - the source of the funds matter.
I get this if the inheritance had been kept in a form similar to its acquisition. Like if you inherited cash and kept in the bank, or even if you inherited securities that you sold for cash.
It's the immutability of the inheritance over time that doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense that you should be able to spend that money and then later come back and claim that the inheritance still existed.
The only way it seemed to make sense was that their house was viewed as a capital asset, and that remodeling the kitchen was a capital investment in that asset and thus retained its inheritance value. But that seems to be more about the general luck that the house increased in value and arguing that the kitchen remodel was a big part of it. What if due to circumstances of the real estate market the house had lost value? Do you say "nope, still got my $100k there"?
What about the depreciation associated with the wear and tear on the house? What if they had chosen to spend that $100k on a car that now only had a market value of $5000?
What if they had taken the $100k and put it into a joint investment account that was already at $100k, and six years later due to market losses is only worth its original $100k? She gets to claim all of the remaining value?
I mean, I don't know 100% of the nitty gritty details, it very well could have been that investing $50k of the inheritance entitled her to just a greater percentage of ownership of the house, some realty estimate that a $250k house with a new $50k kitchen is now worth $290k, so her vested interest in the house is more like 57% (original $125k of half ownership + gain of $40k in market value).
They shouldn't have, NDS was so much better than Active Directory, at least up through 4.11.
You're right, but given the left's newspeak of "undocumented immigrants" and the relentless portrayal of any kind of immigration enforcement as inherently racist it certainly seems like whatever the opposite of "the current administration" is pushing exactly the opposite narrative, that if you are Latino you have a default right to be in the US.
It seems to me that you can't even really advocate for any kind of immigration reform that includes any semblance of immigration enforcement without being seen as racist or advocating for a police state.
You're absolutely right, but I think you can get at some of the root causes here being IT vendors abandoning products before their useful life has ended as a means of ginning up new sales, new support contracts and new licensing, inevitably for higher prices and less value. The churn wheel seems to turn faster than ever.
And then you have vendors like VMware who have in some ways exhausted the market for their primary product. Nearly everyone who can remotely justify virtualization (which right now is down to 1-2 server SMBs) already has it. So now they push more ancillary products like vSAN and NSX (please, stop calling me about it) in order to keep growth positive. Tried to talk to them about Horizon View and they almost immediately went into a spiel about how important it was to use vSAN and NSX in any deployment even though they aren't technical requirements. I'm sure they will become requirements eventually.
So I can kind of see how IT decision makers feel like they are being hindered by old tech, and maybe they even are when new system X isn't compatible with existing server version Y until it is upgraded and there isn't any acceptable budgeting that adds capabilities and deal with premature upgrade cycles forced by vendors.
It's probably all part of a larger coercive push to move everything into rented cloud tenancy.
I'd love to know more about how this works, but quick Googling just leads to the conclusion that it's widely varying and extremely complicated.
If I read your statement correctly, if my wife dies, her debts held under her name only are her debts, and even joint ownership property that would get tangled up in her estate aren't subject to settlement of her debts -- like they couldn't force me to refinance the house to take out equity to pay them off.
I don't get how this could possibly work, as it seems like it would be open to abuse by people with a terminally ill spouse -- run up a bunch of debt in their name, the spouse dies and you can just erase the debt? Not that you wouldn't get shady debt collectors trying to convince the surviving spouse they "had" to pay the debt.
I know marital property in my state (Minnesota) can be complex due to my neighbor's divorce. 6 years before their divorce, she got a $100k inheritance. They spent about half of it remodeling their kitchen. During the divorce, he said that the inheritance remained somehow exclusive to her even though it had been spent as an investment into their jointly owned house. He had to make up the amount spent in the division of their assets.
I like Ozark, too, but there's far too much crap served up as "Netflix Originals" that isn't remotely HBO quality. It's barely AMC Originals quality.
When Netflix first started announcing they were spending the GDP of a small country on original content I figured we might get something like another HBO. Original programming at most other content providers was either a slave to traditional ratings, hobbled by censorship or broadcast standards, or a small-budget.
The first couple of Netflix efforts were pretty good -- House of Cards had real talent on its cast and the production value was top notch. But since then it's seemed to slip. Every time I turn on Netflix anymore, there's more "original" content than I can keep up with but every time I try something I'm totally underwhelmed. Nobody casts, cheap production values, empty, formulaic scripts, it's really ordinary.
I used to think the only obstacle to more HBO-quality content was just the usual business model in entertainment, now I'm mostly convinced that it's a fragile mixture of both money and some kind of production side magic that is very difficult to get right. HBO has too few shows (at least to fill my time), but it's because they're hard to make.
If AT&T thinks that HBO is just a sausage machine and if you only turn the handle faster you can get more sausage, they're wrong and trying to do so will just degrade the product.