95% of yearly US medical exams:

doctor tells patient to lose weight. patient does not comply, and is even heavier next year

Something has to be happening in the environment that's making people fatter. The only process that is statistically successful on a population level in getting people to lose significant amount of weight is a hormone regulating drug, and it has to be kept up for the rest of the life of the fat person or they'll gain it all back. Even the extreme surgical intervention of cutting the stomach seems somewhat temporary. WTF is happening?

The future with the ozempic type drugs is interesting; now a doctor will tell you to lose weight and can give you a pill that makes it more difficult for your body to absorb extra sugar and carbs and you can lose weight, even if you are diabetic already

This is becoming more and more true world-wide; it's getting so bad that we've passed 21% of the entire healthcare budget on it.

> I was just buying a laptop for my family and the prices of MacBooks here in Europe are utterly crazy.

they'll sell just fine in the US and parts of Asia

the EU is becoming poor, and its being reflected in the costs of imported goods

not one mention of Zumwalt or LCS in this article

you cannot talk about (re)building the military without discussing the decades and billions wasted pursuing pipe dreams and failed ideas

right now we are building an LCS that will be scrapped within a year of it being put to sea...we still have LCSs that even haven't had their keels laid...which will meet the same fate! say it out loud: "we don't want the LCS and will scrap them...can you build us eight more please?"

do you think the Chinese Navy is ordering boats they don't want?

and try spending some money on people, and I don't just mean better soldier pay...look at the pathetic physical condition of today's soldiers...what % of the armed forces are medically obese? go watch random military videos on youtube and see the guts hanging over the belts...its just pathetic

why jump at the sign of a first leak? you can usually get another full year of slacking off at full pay while the parent company dithers around

unless you see truly greener pastures elsewhere, getting acquired is one of the best gigs in IT

for some people a job is just a job, and any job is potentially ok.

some other suckers like myself, we need something more out of our jobs; it sucks to be like this; it makes us easier to exploit.

I've never been more miserable than when I have been paid to show up and do nothing.

Only time I'm more miserable is if I'm told to work on something I know is going to get canned.

That's why wfh is so great: You don't show up, you do nothing and you still get paid.

And you've just figured out one of the reasons return to office is being pushed now.

...and also why workers, myself included, will fight them tooth and nail over it.

well Stewart always had the choice of going it alone and building out Slack as its own brand, but he took the $$$

he had the same experience with Yahoo buying Flickr so its not like any of this should have surprised him...he still consented to the acquisition of Slack

no difference here from the WhatsApp guys who took a ton of money and then pooped on Facebook...be happy you got the money and understand that you agreed to be acquired

I’ll defend Brian Acton a bit here - he refused to sell WhatsApp until it got up to a ludicrous 19B$ for 30 full time employees? Few people are tested to that amount and then it becomes a legitimate question of opportunity cost (he gave 50M$ to signal after the sale). Even with that Meta has been a decent steward of it imo despite obvious conflicts of interest. 19B$ of character is more than most.

Slack failed to compete with Microsoft and then the CEO sold it to one of the worst possible acquisition companies in the industry (maybe only behind oracle?) not unlike his flicker sale, it’s not the same. I have a lot lower opinion of him (to the point I’d be less likely to join a company he’s running).

>>Slack failed to compete with Microsoft

I dont know that is a fair characterization, by most accounts Slack is a better product, however Microsoft has a vertical integration and with the strong push to bring most orgs on to Microsoft 365 it is hard to compete with "free" in the sense that Teams is included in the suite products you are already going to pay for anyway....

I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.

Slack had an in to expand and capture what eventually became 365, but they didn’t do it and Microsoft caught up and captured it.

> by most accounts Slack is a better product

Perhaps but it doesn't seem customers value it very much.

> I highly doubt it Microsoft would have made Teams a stand alone product each company had to buy per user that it would have gotten anywhere near the adoption it did.

To me the fact that people would pay for a chat app was an oddity in the first place. Skype (the consumer version) was mostly free.

Consumers maybe... Business pay for these things all the time.

Webex, Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, etc etc etc

Then if you add in other communications tools you can include many many other things businesses pay for

Two more facts tilt in favor of Brian Acton here:

1. Encryption made WhatsApp inherently more resistant to being polluted by Facebook. They still get access to highly sensitive metadata about contacts and groups, but they can't do the kind of things they did to rape and pillage Instagram.

2. He took his money and his free time, and has invested heavily in supporting Signal. While Meta lets WhatsApp rot and slowly becomes Yahoo, Signal is solidly on its way to become the OpenStreetMap/Internet Archive/Wikipedia of social communication apps.

There's always a number beyond which you cannot say no, regardless of your personal beliefs. Heck Stewart's investors and co-founders would have themselves overruled him if he hadn't pulled the trigger. And you have to think of all your employees whose lives you can change. $28B is a ludicrous amount of money.

its free-as-in-beer which is all 99% of orgs want

it also provides 99% of the functionality most orgs actually care about

You’ve clearly never run an org. Cost is one of many factors that matters. MS teams is also free as in beer when I’m already buying office.

I've run mattermost for a moderate sized team while doing my dev duties, it was never a bother...what specific problems did you have?

I maybe spent fifteen minutes a month on upgrades

I do not want to have a piece of undifferentiated infrastructure at my org to be tied to the employment, enthusiasm and attention of a particular engineer.

> Cars are getting so big that people can’t drive them

and likewise, people are getting so big they can't drive their cars...

in Texas, police officers in some municipalities have requested that their vehicles be modified to elevate the steering wheel...they literally cannot jam their stomachs between the seat and the wheel, and if they push the seat back far enough they cannot reach the pedals

its not like people are just healthy and then when they hit 70, poof!

obese people will have health issues from early adulthood onward

healthcare isn't the answer - the doctor says "lose weight", and people ignore it or make excuses and are even more obese at their next checkup

Hiding magic in macros

Isn't it ramping down until then? The reality check might come sooner.