My personal experience with buyouts from private equity investors is that they will milk every single cent out of the company as they crush its soul. They’re looking to make a huge profit, relatively quickly. Yes, the stock market is also looking to profit, and big share-holders have a lot of sway, but publicly traded companies don’t have to answer to a small number of ultra wealthy puppeteers in quite the same way private equity held companies do. Also, there are certain employee protections, particularly around layoffs, that apply to publicly traded companies but don’t apply to privately held companies. This seems to be one of the key strategies in the PE playbook:

1. Buy the company / take it private
2. Slash costs everywhere, including yearly layoffs.
3. Push the remaining employees to adopt a “lean” or “customer first” mindset, which really means “do more work, faster, for less reward”.
4. Profit?

As much as I dislike Ubisoft, I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that process upon them.

I get emails from school, with a link that opens a 3rd party app, which only displays a link that opens in the default browser. I’ve asked the school to just send me direct links to the announcements, but they say they can’t. The site doesn’t require authentication, but the URLs have UUIDs so I can’t just guess what the link would be. The app is quite literally just a data exfiltration layer that does everything it can to make sure you can’t bypass it. Good luck getting any other parents to give a shit though.

…we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm

Seems like that’s about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.

What’s a lemon party? I should Google it.

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I’ve gotten some surprisingly long lasting gems there, but you can never be sure. Like you said, I’ve also gotten a number “single use” tools from Harbor Freight. Overall though, it’s almost always been worth it.

I find the Jellyfin UX to be unbearable. It frequently shows the metadata for completely different movies, despite perfect file naming. Nearly every time I use it I have to restart it due to some weird UI bug or another.

Anything important, I write on clay tablets.

I don’t give a shit about RuneScape. But being vocal is how people give their feedback. For the players, it’s better to give feedback before the price changes, in hopes of making a difference.

I never understood the hardcore gamer mentality. Not that I care if someone else enjoys grinding or developing their skills. Good for them if that’s what they like. But it’s not what I like. I don’t play games to get gud. I play games to fantasize and relax. There’s gotta be some challenge, but I’m fine with it adjusting to meet my (generally low) skill level.

No thanks, I filled up on Dogecoin before dinner.

I too was married once.

I “discovered” caffeine the summer between 7th and 8th grade. Vanilla lattes changed everything. In high school they sold us sodas and snacks between classes. By 9th grade, I couldn’t stay awake through 2nd period (geometry) without drinking a 20 oz. Mt. Dew before class. When I realized what was happening I stopped drinking Mt. Dew. It was a rough couple of weeks. It was my first experience with drug dependence. Informed my approach to drugs for the rest of my life. I got lucky, I suppose.

Or both!

edit: My enthusiasm was well meant but misplaced. On further consideration, I don’t want government to control social media.

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And it wouldn’t matter if they did. Such contracts are not legal in the US. In fact, employers can be fined simply for requesting an employee sign a contract that restricts their right to discuss salary.

Oregon joins the chat…

I didn’t know DayZ had PvE servers. I like to watch DayZ streamers sometimes, but I could never play it PvP. That kind of thing is too stressful for me. I might have to check out PvE.

Thief, Power Wash Simulator, Dead Cells, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021.

I’m not sure I understand. As recently as a few years ago, it was common to find high quality long-form articles on just about any subject linked from your favorite subreddits/tweeters/etc. Now, it seems like the majority of “news” articles I come across are vapid, two paragraph, summaries of a Reddit post or Twitter thread, that don’t anything substantive of their own. I mean, yeah you could find a lot of that 5 years ago too, but now it’s hard to find anything else. It wasn’t that long ago that we had newspapers and magazines, both online and offline, that were actually known for hard-hitting, in-depth journalism. Then they all got sold to companies like Meredith and Conde Nast and have become nothing but thinly veiled advertising. I guess my point is that it hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way now.