It’s fine. The PCI-e is another one for a graphics card that requires more connectors to be attached.

I mean, they’re profitable for the first time since 2018. Not least thanks to a huge amount of cost cutting the past two or three years. This is more of that.

3 Abrams is correct, 8 Bradleys sounds about right, but I didn’t hear anything about HIMARS. It is odd that they’re not bragging about the Ukraine confirmed loss of a Patriot system (albeit not the radar but two launchers). I mean, that’s what they’ve been claiming forever. Maybe because they said they destroyed all of them already and can’t now claim destroying any actually?

Fucking weirdos. Still, compared to Russian losses in manpower and vehicles, this is nothing. For the numbers that Ukraine has, it’s not insignificant for sure. The main thing and difference between Russian losses and Ukraine losses is that the crews often survive the loss of the vehicles on the Ukrainian side, whereas Russia loses both vehicle and crew.

Article contradicts itself, who wrote this? Smells like AI. Says 10 were killed by snipers and next sentence says it was 1 and 70 something wounded that were killed and wounded by snipers. Which is it?

Bet that author totally read the “nearly 1 million word” verdict and didn’t make any translation errors as they accuse other outlets of. Totally legit.

Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.

I once had a sales-bro tell the client we’d “monitor the internet for X”. That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one “monitor the internet” to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.

We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

The mind boggles.

Thank you, I’m sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I’d rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.

Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D

They did not struggle to come up with it. They struggled to get a puppet of Putin to allow this funding to be passed where it needs to go. Victor orban blocked the shit out of it.

I appreciate the “all sides of the conversation” approach, but their gripe is with having to pay taxes on completely bonkers returns. That’s not a surprise for anyone.

But they contributed everything and the public services that their taxes fund contributed nothing whatsoever, ever, never, not once. How dare communism reach into their pockets at their old age. They’re just trying to do the right thing, don’t you know?

Just give Orban a rank in the Swedish military. I hear that’s how those little man syndrome wanna-be dictators like to be placated. Ensign Victor, reporting for düty.

He probably is through some back-ass-channel. These kinds of assholes always play all colors, all cards and have backup plans. He still wants to cling to his little riches even if the political winds change again. Gotta be able to show receipts when that happens.

I’ll never support a single Billionaire ever for any reason whatsoever. They’re leeches and parasites to society, our species and planet.

I was so angry for so many months. But it got my head out of my ass about a whole bunch of things. Fuck culture wars. Fuck day to day drivel. Millions aren’t a lot of money.

We’re in a class extinction war and we’re constantly told to look down, always look down, never up. Look at the poor people stealing your taxes with food stamps! Look at the poor immigrants stealing your jobs (you don’t want to do anyway)! Look at the other party being terrible about your needs! Look at your neighbor having more/less than you!

Never ever look up. And if you do: Look how much philanthropy. Look at all the genius! Never look behind the curtain.

Fuck them. Fuck every one of them, their media empires directing thought and speech and the politicians they buy.

I really love how the whole GameStop thing is so derided around a lot of places, because haha, memestock idiots.

They literally turned off the buy button until they could figure out a way of the mess they created - or at least postpone it. This event alone should have brought people into the streets calling for these assholes heads. Instead we got shitty media coverage, shitty politicking around the topic with clueless senators and almost no action taken whatsoever.

GameStop revealed how utterly, utterly rigged the “free and fair” markets truly are. Sure we all realize that those with money and power will always be ahead of everything. But that was a full mask-off moment and - to a degree - still is. They had to show their cards and it’s all fake and make belief, fully covered by unregulated entities that will never ever be held responsible. Not for the fucking mess they made in 2008, not for the fucking mess they kept making (rebranding MBS to CMBS and then getting fucked when COVID suddenly makes work from home a clearly solid model, crashing the CMBS nonsense, just like it was in 2008 with MBS nonsense)…

Like, I get it. Haha GameStop idiots got burned. But people really do not see how hard that event ripped off their mask and nearly brought the whole fucking thing down to the point where they had to blatantly intervene to stop the bleeding. And it didn’t even stop with the run a few years ago. Once the split was done, all GameStop shares simply fucking disappeared for several days for German holders, because the split was also done in a very, very suspicious manner.

Think what you will of people invested in GameStop. No single stock has ever put how fucked the market structures truly are as much on display as this one has and continues to do.

It’s all fake bullshit and it’s still the best way to try to get a leg up in a “legal” way. I truly hate all this shit so much.

Oh shit! I better go donate to the armed forces of Ukraine again.

Fuck your propaganda.

Is he funding lobbyists to affect this kind of change? No.
Is he employing top tier accountants to make sure he doesn’t pay his fair share like the poors? Betcha.
Does he funnel his wealth into charitable foundations that are a tax write off leading to him getting money rather than having to pay it, while it stays in an eco system he has full control over? Betcha.
Is he buying expensive art, property, etc. to incur expenses that are tax write offs? Betcha.

Since I’m not a Billionaire, I won’t be able to tell you all the ways that cunt is 100% pushing for a status quo while putting out fluff pieces like these that make him look good while doing literally nothing to affect the change he supposedly wants.

Wouldn’t even be surprised if this was something to get out ahead of some revelations about tax evasion, so if you ever search up Bill Gates taxes, all you get is this curated nonsense of what a stand up good lad he is, trying oh so hard to pay his fair share. Why won’t anyone take his money? Poor Bill. Must be hard not getting taxed and being utterly powerless to do anything about that. Shucks. Now he has to go another decade without ever coming close to paying his fair share.

Oh, also garbage takes like these, where he publicly opposed new tax plans - but it’s fine, it was all cute and the audience laughed and he payed soooo much, sooo many taxes. https://youtu.be/dXxP4S_WwS0

“I’m surprised the thing me and my ilk have been actively working against hasn’t magically happened despite our massive efforts to the opposite effect.”

Bet you Bill thinks these kinds of publicity stunts will exclude him from being eaten, when we go to eat the rich.

No, this is actually huge for NATO and comparatively a big show of strength. NATO isn’t a monolithic military like the US or Russian military. NATO is an alliance spanning the globe and nations from all over the world are participating. The amount of logistics required to pull it off is tremendous and that alone shows what they can do.

If we compare that to the largest “maneuver” Russia held in recent memory, that was the shoring up of their invasion forces in 2018 along the Ukranian border, disguised as a maneuver.

While meat wave tactics will eventually wear down even the staunchest defender, Russia is just as stuck in Ukraine as Ukraine is trying to push out Russia. Ukraine is a single country, not part of an alliance like NATO. While they receive a lot of aid, a lot is still being withheld (think certain long range missile systems, aircraft, etc.). Numbers don’t matter all that much against superior logistics and the ability to raze the enemies logistics to the ground.

Remember how columns of supply trucks got obliterated in the first days of the invasion? Russia tried to go for Blitzkrieg but failed hard. If your supply lines are cut, you’re done. Doesn’t matter how many soldiers you got. Once they are starved of ammunition and food, your army stops being effective at being an army. They can barely keep an army supplied that sits right at their own border, while suffering relatively few strikes at any of their infrastructure within their own borders.

NATO demonstrating that they can coordinate such large numbers and keep supply going, should sufficiently scare the ever living crap out of most opposing military analysts, because that’s how you win wars.