There’s a chance that leaning out the team makes things better. Bloat kills dev teams.

But… ticketing systems are a bit like fashion. We could see some new shiny system come around that does more or less the same thing, but becomes fashionable for one reason or another and eats Atlassian’s lunch.

I was thinking along the same lines, like they probably spend more on fuel. I remember when Honda pissed everyone off in the 1990s after inflating F1 budgets and then suddenly leaving the sport when the Japanese market crashed. At the time they had Honda factory R&D teams designing and building engines just for F1 teams; that was probably tens of millions a year that wasn’t even part of a team’s budget… in the 80s and 90s.

Anyhow… F1 teams have a budget cap for several years now. For 2026, it’s $215 million, and that doesn’t include engines, nor driver and team manager salaries.

Agreed, but Safeway was shitty before 2015.

PE acquisition seems more like kindred spirits finding each other than something bad happening to Safeway.

Yeah, Safeway has been shitty for a long time. I’m fortunate like you that we have a wealth of independent grocers and small ethnic markets that are so much better. They’re also a fair bit cheaper too.

+1000, but you still see it in places with plenty of money and space to work on cars.

I worked at a car repair shop when I was younger. I agree that it’s not most (as in > 50%) but the number of people who knowingly drive very unsafe vehicles is bigger than you’d think.

Not to mention the cell phone most of us carry.

Of course it’s artificial, but knowing that doesn’t change the reality for the people who have to pay the bills.

Competition and choice lowers prices. Government “investment” usually raise prices.

I don’t think so. I think the previous poster means that most insurers serve a nationwide (or international) audience. So in terms of pooled risk, the Florida hurricanes and California wildfires aren’t separate risk pools.

On your other point of comparison, we do have similar things in the states. Lots of gov programs that have “insurance” in the name, but if they ever were pooled risk insurance, they’ve morphed into social welfare programs a long time ago. They vary by state, and sometimes county, but they include Unemployment Insurance, Workers Compensation Insurance, Disability Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and even old age pension (called Social Security). Some of these, like Workers Compensation have private market competition, where others do not.

We also have agencies like FEMA that aren’t insurance, but have become a sorta relief mechanism for large scale catastrophic events. We also have things like the California Earthquake Authority, which provides earthquake insurance. I have no idea if it’s genuinely pooled risk or not, but it’s like an order of magnitude cheaper than commercial earthquake insurance was when we had before CEA existed.

Then we have a heap of programs and agencies that provide insurance (or assurance of some sort) to industries. FDIC insures bank deposits. FNMA, FHA, et al insure (or provide liquidity) to mortgage lenders. And on and on. There are probably more forms of state run or state sponsored insurance than any one person knows. There might even be some company or program called National Insurance, but not that I’m aware of.

It’s not new either. 20 years ago I interviewed at a company that did climate risk modeling for the reinsurance industry (among other risk modeling).

Not if you’re in the USA. We don’t have a right to Bare Legs.

It’s subservience, not fear on CBS’s part.

Good on Colbert for bringing a little Streisand effect to the party.

There’s a software dev parallel… tell an engineer “it can’t be done.”

One of my all time faves.

It’s sorta the opposite. It’s not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it’s that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.

Worse than that though, it’s a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It’s just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.

I think we’re using “privatized” to mean different things. You’re saying airlines should pay for their own security. That’s a reasonable position.

This administration would never let that happen. Privatization to them is about robbing the public trust. They would keep it a taxpayer funded program, but they’d triple the budget, halve the staff, and decimate the effectiveness. They don’t care how dysfunctional or corrupt it is; it’s about stealing from the public in every way they can.

The Trump regime hates federal workers. They also want them all to quit, but so they can privatize airport security, not rethink or reduce it.

Probably. Ring is pretty plain in saying that they cancelled it because it took "more time and resources than anticipated. " Not because it was the wrong idea. And yeah, it’s a carefully coded message that they want consumers to read as “We heard you, we listened, and we won’t do shitty things like that again.” But in reality, it says the opposite. It says they stopped because it costs too much, but they remain committed to the idea. No doubt some of the additional resources were dealing with the flap around the Superbowl ad and the public douchebaggery of the Flock CEO.

Of course. Google suckles the kings teet

And it doesn’t matter who the king is; it just happens to be Trump now. They gave up Sensor Vault data to help convict Trump’s January 6 insurrectionists during the previous administration, and they’ll do whatever the next regime wants too.

I’m sure it’s a spectrum, and some people may legitimately not be aware, but its been 13 years. As a society, we’ve had ample time to get literate and develop knowledge. Instead we’ve had three presidents from both major parties hold the line that Snowden was a criminal for blowing the whistle on rampant illegal surveillance, and all 3 of them just stepped on the gas.

Voters don’t even see the irony in the pedophiles’ ramping up the surveillance apparatus in the name of protecting the children.