I definitely think part of the problem, honestly, is that the whole domain naming system was bad marketing in the first place. It's a pretty clever technical solution, but bad marketing. People got on the internet, and they want to go to find stuff about Sony, so they go to the address bar and type "sony". It doesn't work.
"I don't know, that's just how the internet works. You have to put 'http://www.' in front of everything and then '.com' at the end of everything. If you want Sony, it's http://www.sony.com./ If you want Microsoft, it's http://www.microsoft.com./ It's too complicated to explain why. It just is."
Then they drop to "www.". Then you don't have to type in the "http://" anymore. Then the address bar becomes a hybrid address/search bar. Most people still don't understand what the deal was with the "http://" or the "www." or the ".com" or why you need any of it. And they still don't have to, and they're not going to. The explosion of TLDs is probably just going to make people rely even more on the reputation of search results.
I think my confusion should be understandable. SaaS = You rent software by a subscription. IaaS = You rent infrastructure by a subscription. FaaS = ???
I'm still not sure what "Firmware as a Service" means from your description. How is Project Mu more of a "service" than existing UEFI?
Also the rendering engine is open source and standards-compliant (more or less, anyway). That means there's a much lower barrier to someone simply using an alternative, or making a new alternative that works exactly the same way. So it's really not the same at all.
I'm not a huge fan of Google, ultimately, but this isn't anywhere near the sort of problem that Microsoft represented in the past few decades. It's not even as bad as the problem Microsoft currently represents, the way businesses remain locked into the Windows platform.
I would take the CWOT job, quit after 2 years and then do what I find love and fulfilling for the next 18 years.
What if what you "find love and fulfilling" was the $1 million job? Then you could still get $20 million in those 20 years, just doing what you love and not wasting 2 years of your life.
If it were true, all C-level executives would only be paid similar to, or maybe 2-3x, the average wage of the company, not 100-200x of it.
The question is about priorities. Of course if those C-level executives have the option of making millions of dollars, most won't turn that down in favor of making merely enough. But that's not really the sort of choice we're talking about.
The question is more about, if one of those C-level executives had the choice between a $10 million/year job that they hated and was a waste of time, and a $9 million/year job they loved and was fulfilling, which one would they choose? If they're smart, they'd choose the $9 million/year job. Therefore, it's not all about money.
Money has diminishing returns. The difference between having $0 and having $10,000 is huge. The difference between having $40k and $50k is still substantial.
The difference between having $10,000,000 and $10,010,000? It doesn't matter.
I know a lot of people who see the main benefit as being that it makes cross-platform application development easier, with one of the drawbacks being that the UI doesn't use native OS elements or conventions because it's basically a web page. So I was intending to point out that the drawback of not using a native UI also has a benefit of being the same on all platforms.
So Slack doesn't entirely look like or work like a Windows application on Windows, or like a Mac application on macOS, or like a Linux application on Linux. That's bad. On the plus side, Slack looks like Slack on all of those, which makes some things easier.
I don't know if you intend to me arguing with me, but my post was more intended to be a description of what's happening rather than advocacy. I'd agree that it seems like there are too many layers of abstraction, but maybe part of Microsoft's intention here is to strip out some of the middle-man by integrating the electron framework more directly into the OS, so that the apps can just run on top of the OS without as many layers.
That's speculation, and in any case I don't know how it'll turn out. However, I do see value in having a cross-platform application framework that provides at least one layer of abstraction, allowing for easy application development.
It has a bit of an advantage in that it's running on an open-source platform that's actively used and maintained with an eye toward security and performance (Chrome).
why does Microsoft care enough about the desktop experience to bother doing this?
Well there are a lot of complicated issues in play. Again, to try to keep it simple:
Their vendor lock-in on the desktop is not what it once was, and you see them moving increasingly into web applications and services, open source, and cross-platform projects. They're foreseeing that, even if people continue to use their operating systems, they won't be able to rely on vendor lock-in to force people onto the OS.
They're already knee-deep in this "Electron" stuff. They already have applications on Electron (e.g. Skype, Teams, Visual Studio Code), and I think their "Modern" applications work in a similar way. I would bet that in the coming years, you'll see more and more applications move to being web applications in a wrapper. We may even see them eventually get their Office web applications in this form as a replacement for the existing native apps. That would remove the need for them to duplicate their efforts in making a separate Mac version, and they could even support Linux without extra effort.
Even if they weren't doing this themselves, you have a bunch of developers doing it, and it's going to continue to be a thing whether Microsoft likes it or not. If they want to stay relevant and keep people on their platform, they need to try to be the best platform to run these kinds of applications on.
Aside from all that, it really makes more sense at this point for Microsoft to use Chromium instead of continuing to build their own browser engines. They lost the browser wars. For most web developers, Chrome is their target browser. Safari and Chrome, and therefore pretty much all mobile browsers, are based off of the same code base. They can spend a lot of time and money trying to build something that works just like Chrome, or they can just use the existing open source code.
It also has a sort of side-benefit for applications like Slack, where they can build their application once (as a web application) and then “port” it as a native application across all those platforms while keeping the UI and operation consistent.
If you’ve used Slack, then you know how to use Slack anywhere, on any platform. It’s all the same. It looks the same and works the same way everywhere. You don’t really even lose features when you run it in your browser. That means cheaper support, simpler documentation, and higher user comfort. Users switching to another platform don’t need to relearn anything, except maybe some OS-specific keyboard shortcuts.
There are downsides too. I’m not saying it’s all good, but it’s not simply bad either.
Rather than building a native application, you ship a web application bundled inside of a specialized browser that makes it seem more like a native app.
There are already tons of developers doing it. It didn't start in 2018, and you may be using some applications that work that way without realizing it.
I'll give a simple explanation, as best I understand it:
In order to make it easier to build applications that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without completely rebuilding it for each platform, a lot of developers have resorted to basically building web applications, and then making them available in a specialized web browser called "Electron". Electron is basically a stripped down browser that allows the web application to behave more like a native application. So you might care at least a little bit, since it's possible you're already some of these Electron applications and not know it.
So that's kind of a good thing, that developers can more easily make cross-platform applications. The problem is, if each application is running its own web browser, then you end up installing and running a bunch of web browsers simultaneously. That ends up being a bigger drain on system resources than if they were native apps, or if you just had them all running on the same web browser.
Microsoft wants to fix that problem, for Windows at least, by working on how all these Electron apps integrate with the operating system's built-in browser, so that they can manage those resources better. There's a big problem with the idea: Electron doesn't integrate with their own built-in browser. Electron uses Google Chrome, and Microsoft can't easily make the apps use their own browser instead. So instead of trying to make these Chrome-based apps use Edge, they're rewriting Edge to be based on Chrome. Once that's done, they can work on getting the electron apps to use their own built-in browser, and then they can work on that browser to improve performance of those apps.
I don't think that's really it, and not everything has to be boiled down to evolutionary biology.
I suspect it's more that there's a difference between, "this is hypothetically a good decision for someone," and "this is actually a good decision for me." When you're thinking about someone else's life, you're free to think more abstractly and just think about it in terms of general principles. When you're making the decision for yourself, and you plan on going through with the decision, you have a wealth of information about yourself and your own life to bring into the analysis, and you're more likely to consider the practical consequences of the decision. Then, for better or worse, they're also more likely to be personally emotionally attached to some of the consequences of those actions.
If you read the statement as saying, "The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play" as "the role that a business's internal datacenter used to play is being taken over by the cloud," then it's not wrong.
I think that's what's intended, given the context. The statement is preceded by, "businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure." It also makes sense given the argument being made. It used to be that, even if you hosted your servers in someone else's infrastructure, you had to operate and maintain those servers. Part of the reason people use Windows servers is because it's easier to find someone who can adequately admin a Windows server than to find competent Linux sysadmins. However, in the "cloud" model, even though the servers are hosted in someone's datacenter somewhere, you don't have to worry about finding a competent Linux sysadmin. That's the developer's problem, and the developers have increased incentive to use Linux because they're operating in bulk and Windows is expensive.
Actually, there are multiple Linux distros these days that are easy to use, and even easy to set up. That's not the problem anymore.
The difficulty with Linux on the desktop at this point is just 3rd party support. Hardware vendors don't prioritize Linux drivers. Software developers aren't prioritizing Linux ports. If you're only running hardware with Linux support, and you're only running web applications and/or native Linux apps, then Linux makes for a great desktop.
Also it means you don't really have to deal with Microsoft ramming advertising down your throat, forcing you to use Cortana, or doing forced updates.
I'd agree with you if people were getting all bent out of shape about the fact that comments used the word 'fuck' and you were saying, "Settle down. It's not that big a deal." Adults should be able to handle the occasional swear word, and editing the Linux source code is generally not an activity for children. And you're right, if in the spur of the moment you use the word "fuck" in a professional setting now and then, it's probably fine.
Or it might not be. Whether it's acceptable depends on context.
But we're talking about someone removing the word "fuck" from official documentation, and you're getting bent out of shape that someone has done that. There's no real need for "fuck" to be used in official documentation. If you want to tell someone to "stay the fuck away from something," you can put something that says, "WARNING: Stay away from this." Adding the word "fuck" doesn't add more information. In fact, I'd probably take the warning less seriously because it includes the word "fuck". I'd assume that either it's playful, or it's written by someone immature who doesn't really know what they're doing.
The purpose of traditional VPN is that you want to connect to a private network, and secure that connection by encrypting the traffic. However, the purpose of a lot of "VPN" services is actually to make it harder for someone to monitor or block your communications. Without a VPN, your ISP (or someone else) can potentially see what sites and services you're accessing even if the traffic itself is encrypted, and the services can easily keep track of the source address. The VPN service isn't necessarily enough to keep the communications anonymous, but it takes care of part of the problem.
When I connect to my online banking, I have some expectation that my identity will be known. I'm not relying on the secrecy of the transaction, I'm relying on the inability of a middle man being able to gleen any details of the transaction.
That's already handled by the fact that your bank uses SSL on their website.
some of them move their assets away from the taxing authority...
Easier said than done. For a lot of businesses, if you move your business out of the city, you lose both your customers and your workforce.
take advantage of tax loopholes, shelters and havens.
So close the loopholes.
I'm a bit tired of this thing that anti-tax people do where they think they're being really clever. "I'm so smart because I know that when you tax people, that might have bad unintended consequences." Sorry, no, we all know that it can have bad unintended consequences. Further, either way you will have bad unintended consequences. That doesn't mean that you're correct or that you're clever.
There's the attitude that, "We can't tax rich people because they'll just pout and take their ball and go home." Like all rich people are such a bunch of stupid crybabies that they can't handle contributing to society. Like, "Sure, I'm making $10 million, but I would be making $12 million if you hadn't raised taxes, so I'm just going to shut down my business and fire everyone, and then I won't pay any taxes." I mean, sure, there might be some morons that are so stupid that they'll cut off their nose to spite their face, but that will leave a big market open for someone else to fill, and we'll get other new rich business owners willing to fill it.
They are not Atlas, and we shouldn't be afraid of them shrugging. There are no shortage of people willing to start businesses to make money. We don't need to jump through quite so many hoops to keep rich people happy.
How much do you actually know about this? Because it sounds like you're just regurgitating the opinions of anarcho-capitalist pundits, who generally have no actual knowledge of how any of these things work, but claim there are inefficiencies and communists hiding in every shadow.
I feel like you're setting me up for a sort of "no true scotsman" argument. If I point out a policy, you'll either say, "That's not really a policy" or "That's not really Republican".
But ok, let's see. There's the issue of voter suppression, i.e. setting fairly arbitrary requirements for voting that they know various groups (often an intersection of "poor" and "minority") will have trouble meeting and then selectively enforcing them. There's a similar thing with drug enforcement, which is actually tied into the whole voting thing. You make it illegal for felons to vote, then enforce crimes more rigorously when the suspect is a minority, and bingo, you're suppressing minority votes.
They left the more-racist group to join the much LESS racist group.
Yes, that's more or less what happened. Or more to the point, the racists in Group A were clearly losing control of Group A, and saw an opening to seize control of Group B. And then they successfully did.
And please note that this isn't a logic puzzle for us to argue over whether it hypothetically makes sense. This is history. Your argument is a little like looking at the Holocaust and going, "You mean a society has a successful ethnic/cultural group that's contributing to society, and then that society is just going to try to kill them all. Really?"
Yes, really. Make up all the hypotheticals and logic puzzles you want, but it happened.
Unless the working population of NYC has dropped, how are these people who used to take the transit getting to work?
I'm sure it's a variety of ways, but I know some people are taking taxis or ubers more often than they used to. I'm not sure what your point is.
Raise parking rates and/or toll fees.
So we can't tax wealthy people at all because that's "soaking the rich", but a great alternative is to make things more expensive for the working class by imposing taxes and fees on their transportation.
They just switched political parties after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
At the time of the Civil Rights Act, the Republican party was in favor of the law. After it was signed, the Democrats who opposed the CRA switched parties and become Republicans. If you want to belong to the historical Republican party that elected Lincoln and supported civil rights, have at it, but you're going to have to find a time machine and travel back to before 1964.
The current incarnation of the Republican party is not that. If you judge the current Republican party by the rhetoric and actions of its current leadership, it's a xenophobic homophobic white nationalist party that's trying to turn the country into an isolated authoritarian kleptocracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely think part of the problem, honestly, is that the whole domain naming system was bad marketing in the first place. It's a pretty clever technical solution, but bad marketing. People got on the internet, and they want to go to find stuff about Sony, so they go to the address bar and type "sony". It doesn't work.
So then someone explains, "No, you have to type http://www.sony.com./"
"Why?"
"I don't know, that's just how the internet works. You have to put 'http://www.' in front of everything and then '.com' at the end of everything. If you want Sony, it's http://www.sony.com./ If you want Microsoft, it's http://www.microsoft.com./ It's too complicated to explain why. It just is."
Then they drop to "www.". Then you don't have to type in the "http://" anymore. Then the address bar becomes a hybrid address/search bar. Most people still don't understand what the deal was with the "http://" or the "www." or the ".com" or why you need any of it. And they still don't have to, and they're not going to. The explosion of TLDs is probably just going to make people rely even more on the reputation of search results.
I think my confusion should be understandable. SaaS = You rent software by a subscription. IaaS = You rent infrastructure by a subscription. FaaS = ???
I'm still not sure what "Firmware as a Service" means from your description. How is Project Mu more of a "service" than existing UEFI?
I don't think I understand what's intended by "Firmware as a service". What, is the idea that we pay Microsoft a subscription fee to run firmware now?
Also the rendering engine is open source and standards-compliant (more or less, anyway). That means there's a much lower barrier to someone simply using an alternative, or making a new alternative that works exactly the same way. So it's really not the same at all.
I'm not a huge fan of Google, ultimately, but this isn't anywhere near the sort of problem that Microsoft represented in the past few decades. It's not even as bad as the problem Microsoft currently represents, the way businesses remain locked into the Windows platform.
I would take the CWOT job, quit after 2 years and then do what I find love and fulfilling for the next 18 years.
What if what you "find love and fulfilling" was the $1 million job? Then you could still get $20 million in those 20 years, just doing what you love and not wasting 2 years of your life.
If it were true, all C-level executives would only be paid similar to, or maybe 2-3x, the average wage of the company, not 100-200x of it.
The question is about priorities. Of course if those C-level executives have the option of making millions of dollars, most won't turn that down in favor of making merely enough. But that's not really the sort of choice we're talking about.
The question is more about, if one of those C-level executives had the choice between a $10 million/year job that they hated and was a waste of time, and a $9 million/year job they loved and was fulfilling, which one would they choose? If they're smart, they'd choose the $9 million/year job. Therefore, it's not all about money.
Money has diminishing returns. The difference between having $0 and having $10,000 is huge. The difference between having $40k and $50k is still substantial.
The difference between having $10,000,000 and $10,010,000? It doesn't matter.
Ok, if you like.
I know a lot of people who see the main benefit as being that it makes cross-platform application development easier, with one of the drawbacks being that the UI doesn't use native OS elements or conventions because it's basically a web page. So I was intending to point out that the drawback of not using a native UI also has a benefit of being the same on all platforms.
So Slack doesn't entirely look like or work like a Windows application on Windows, or like a Mac application on macOS, or like a Linux application on Linux. That's bad. On the plus side, Slack looks like Slack on all of those, which makes some things easier.
I don't know if you intend to me arguing with me, but my post was more intended to be a description of what's happening rather than advocacy. I'd agree that it seems like there are too many layers of abstraction, but maybe part of Microsoft's intention here is to strip out some of the middle-man by integrating the electron framework more directly into the OS, so that the apps can just run on top of the OS without as many layers.
That's speculation, and in any case I don't know how it'll turn out. However, I do see value in having a cross-platform application framework that provides at least one layer of abstraction, allowing for easy application development.
It has a bit of an advantage in that it's running on an open-source platform that's actively used and maintained with an eye toward security and performance (Chrome).
why does Microsoft care enough about the desktop experience to bother doing this?
Well there are a lot of complicated issues in play. Again, to try to keep it simple:
Their vendor lock-in on the desktop is not what it once was, and you see them moving increasingly into web applications and services, open source, and cross-platform projects. They're foreseeing that, even if people continue to use their operating systems, they won't be able to rely on vendor lock-in to force people onto the OS.
They're already knee-deep in this "Electron" stuff. They already have applications on Electron (e.g. Skype, Teams, Visual Studio Code), and I think their "Modern" applications work in a similar way. I would bet that in the coming years, you'll see more and more applications move to being web applications in a wrapper. We may even see them eventually get their Office web applications in this form as a replacement for the existing native apps. That would remove the need for them to duplicate their efforts in making a separate Mac version, and they could even support Linux without extra effort.
Even if they weren't doing this themselves, you have a bunch of developers doing it, and it's going to continue to be a thing whether Microsoft likes it or not. If they want to stay relevant and keep people on their platform, they need to try to be the best platform to run these kinds of applications on.
Aside from all that, it really makes more sense at this point for Microsoft to use Chromium instead of continuing to build their own browser engines. They lost the browser wars. For most web developers, Chrome is their target browser. Safari and Chrome, and therefore pretty much all mobile browsers, are based off of the same code base. They can spend a lot of time and money trying to build something that works just like Chrome, or they can just use the existing open source code.
It also has a sort of side-benefit for applications like Slack, where they can build their application once (as a web application) and then “port” it as a native application across all those platforms while keeping the UI and operation consistent.
If you’ve used Slack, then you know how to use Slack anywhere, on any platform. It’s all the same. It looks the same and works the same way everywhere. You don’t really even lose features when you run it in your browser. That means cheaper support, simpler documentation, and higher user comfort. Users switching to another platform don’t need to relearn anything, except maybe some OS-specific keyboard shortcuts.
There are downsides too. I’m not saying it’s all good, but it’s not simply bad either.
Rather than building a native application, you ship a web application bundled inside of a specialized browser that makes it seem more like a native app.
There are already tons of developers doing it. It didn't start in 2018, and you may be using some applications that work that way without realizing it.
I'll give a simple explanation, as best I understand it:
In order to make it easier to build applications that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without completely rebuilding it for each platform, a lot of developers have resorted to basically building web applications, and then making them available in a specialized web browser called "Electron". Electron is basically a stripped down browser that allows the web application to behave more like a native application. So you might care at least a little bit, since it's possible you're already some of these Electron applications and not know it.
So that's kind of a good thing, that developers can more easily make cross-platform applications. The problem is, if each application is running its own web browser, then you end up installing and running a bunch of web browsers simultaneously. That ends up being a bigger drain on system resources than if they were native apps, or if you just had them all running on the same web browser.
Microsoft wants to fix that problem, for Windows at least, by working on how all these Electron apps integrate with the operating system's built-in browser, so that they can manage those resources better. There's a big problem with the idea: Electron doesn't integrate with their own built-in browser. Electron uses Google Chrome, and Microsoft can't easily make the apps use their own browser instead. So instead of trying to make these Chrome-based apps use Edge, they're rewriting Edge to be based on Chrome. Once that's done, they can work on getting the electron apps to use their own built-in browser, and then they can work on that browser to improve performance of those apps.
I don't think that's really it, and not everything has to be boiled down to evolutionary biology.
I suspect it's more that there's a difference between, "this is hypothetically a good decision for someone," and "this is actually a good decision for me." When you're thinking about someone else's life, you're free to think more abstractly and just think about it in terms of general principles. When you're making the decision for yourself, and you plan on going through with the decision, you have a wealth of information about yourself and your own life to bring into the analysis, and you're more likely to consider the practical consequences of the decision. Then, for better or worse, they're also more likely to be personally emotionally attached to some of the consequences of those actions.
If you read the statement as saying, "The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play" as "the role that a business's internal datacenter used to play is being taken over by the cloud," then it's not wrong.
I think that's what's intended, given the context. The statement is preceded by, "businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure." It also makes sense given the argument being made. It used to be that, even if you hosted your servers in someone else's infrastructure, you had to operate and maintain those servers. Part of the reason people use Windows servers is because it's easier to find someone who can adequately admin a Windows server than to find competent Linux sysadmins. However, in the "cloud" model, even though the servers are hosted in someone's datacenter somewhere, you don't have to worry about finding a competent Linux sysadmin. That's the developer's problem, and the developers have increased incentive to use Linux because they're operating in bulk and Windows is expensive.
Actually, there are multiple Linux distros these days that are easy to use, and even easy to set up. That's not the problem anymore.
The difficulty with Linux on the desktop at this point is just 3rd party support. Hardware vendors don't prioritize Linux drivers. Software developers aren't prioritizing Linux ports. If you're only running hardware with Linux support, and you're only running web applications and/or native Linux apps, then Linux makes for a great desktop.
Also it means you don't really have to deal with Microsoft ramming advertising down your throat, forcing you to use Cortana, or doing forced updates.
I'd agree with you if people were getting all bent out of shape about the fact that comments used the word 'fuck' and you were saying, "Settle down. It's not that big a deal." Adults should be able to handle the occasional swear word, and editing the Linux source code is generally not an activity for children. And you're right, if in the spur of the moment you use the word "fuck" in a professional setting now and then, it's probably fine.
Or it might not be. Whether it's acceptable depends on context.
But we're talking about someone removing the word "fuck" from official documentation, and you're getting bent out of shape that someone has done that. There's no real need for "fuck" to be used in official documentation. If you want to tell someone to "stay the fuck away from something," you can put something that says, "WARNING: Stay away from this." Adding the word "fuck" doesn't add more information. In fact, I'd probably take the warning less seriously because it includes the word "fuck". I'd assume that either it's playful, or it's written by someone immature who doesn't really know what they're doing.
Is it libre or gratis?
The purpose of traditional VPN is that you want to connect to a private network, and secure that connection by encrypting the traffic. However, the purpose of a lot of "VPN" services is actually to make it harder for someone to monitor or block your communications. Without a VPN, your ISP (or someone else) can potentially see what sites and services you're accessing even if the traffic itself is encrypted, and the services can easily keep track of the source address. The VPN service isn't necessarily enough to keep the communications anonymous, but it takes care of part of the problem.
When I connect to my online banking, I have some expectation that my identity will be known. I'm not relying on the secrecy of the transaction, I'm relying on the inability of a middle man being able to gleen any details of the transaction.
That's already handled by the fact that your bank uses SSL on their website.
some of them move their assets away from the taxing authority...
Easier said than done. For a lot of businesses, if you move your business out of the city, you lose both your customers and your workforce.
take advantage of tax loopholes, shelters and havens.
So close the loopholes.
I'm a bit tired of this thing that anti-tax people do where they think they're being really clever. "I'm so smart because I know that when you tax people, that might have bad unintended consequences." Sorry, no, we all know that it can have bad unintended consequences. Further, either way you will have bad unintended consequences. That doesn't mean that you're correct or that you're clever.
There's the attitude that, "We can't tax rich people because they'll just pout and take their ball and go home." Like all rich people are such a bunch of stupid crybabies that they can't handle contributing to society. Like, "Sure, I'm making $10 million, but I would be making $12 million if you hadn't raised taxes, so I'm just going to shut down my business and fire everyone, and then I won't pay any taxes." I mean, sure, there might be some morons that are so stupid that they'll cut off their nose to spite their face, but that will leave a big market open for someone else to fill, and we'll get other new rich business owners willing to fill it.
They are not Atlas, and we shouldn't be afraid of them shrugging. There are no shortage of people willing to start businesses to make money. We don't need to jump through quite so many hoops to keep rich people happy.
How much do you actually know about this? Because it sounds like you're just regurgitating the opinions of anarcho-capitalist pundits, who generally have no actual knowledge of how any of these things work, but claim there are inefficiencies and communists hiding in every shadow.
I feel like you're setting me up for a sort of "no true scotsman" argument. If I point out a policy, you'll either say, "That's not really a policy" or "That's not really Republican".
But ok, let's see. There's the issue of voter suppression, i.e. setting fairly arbitrary requirements for voting that they know various groups (often an intersection of "poor" and "minority") will have trouble meeting and then selectively enforcing them. There's a similar thing with drug enforcement, which is actually tied into the whole voting thing. You make it illegal for felons to vote, then enforce crimes more rigorously when the suspect is a minority, and bingo, you're suppressing minority votes.
They left the more-racist group to join the much LESS racist group.
Yes, that's more or less what happened. Or more to the point, the racists in Group A were clearly losing control of Group A, and saw an opening to seize control of Group B. And then they successfully did.
And please note that this isn't a logic puzzle for us to argue over whether it hypothetically makes sense. This is history. Your argument is a little like looking at the Holocaust and going, "You mean a society has a successful ethnic/cultural group that's contributing to society, and then that society is just going to try to kill them all. Really?"
Yes, really. Make up all the hypotheticals and logic puzzles you want, but it happened.
Unless the working population of NYC has dropped, how are these people who used to take the transit getting to work?
I'm sure it's a variety of ways, but I know some people are taking taxis or ubers more often than they used to. I'm not sure what your point is.
Raise parking rates and/or toll fees.
So we can't tax wealthy people at all because that's "soaking the rich", but a great alternative is to make things more expensive for the working class by imposing taxes and fees on their transportation.
From the guy you're responding to:
They just switched political parties after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
At the time of the Civil Rights Act, the Republican party was in favor of the law. After it was signed, the Democrats who opposed the CRA switched parties and become Republicans. If you want to belong to the historical Republican party that elected Lincoln and supported civil rights, have at it, but you're going to have to find a time machine and travel back to before 1964.
The current incarnation of the Republican party is not that. If you judge the current Republican party by the rhetoric and actions of its current leadership, it's a xenophobic homophobic white nationalist party that's trying to turn the country into an isolated authoritarian kleptocracy.