Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
> A domain represents an ongoing maintenance commitment and cost.
There's no maintenance if you go with a hosted solution with custom domains like Squarespace, Wordpress.com and the like. Just as there is for everything digital, from a computer or a phone or internet service. A domain costs a lot less than any of those other prerequisites.
I agree DNS UX is absolutely terrible, but web hosting, SSL and redirects aren't trivial things so I understand why it is the way it is.
70% in a stock fund is extremely risky if you are close to retirement. You will not have fresh income to dollar-cost-average your way back into the black in the event of another market crash.
Back then it was possible for authors and artists to maintain a mystique about who they were. What you saw was what you got and that was it. Making social media a necessity for product marketing changed that forever.
Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".
For it to be a legitimate dig at DEI, there would need to be some evidence of significant black advancement in corporate world for reasons unrelated to their qualifications. Have there been any?
Why just in the corporate world? Is Kamala Harris not an example? Or do we think being an unimpressive DA in San Francisco who dropped out before Iowa, merited the vice presidency AND the presidential nomination that she also got handed to her?
Indeed. The biggest election win she had outside of San Francisco prior to her coronation as the nominee in 2024 was a Senate special election where she drew 40% of voters. 3 million Californians voted for her out of 7.5 million voters. California has 39 million residents, but about 5 million are non-citizens.
Actually more Californians voted for the Republican against her in the 2014 election for attorney general, than voted for Harris when she later ran for Senate in the special election.
Obama by contrast had won 3.6 million votes, in a smaller state, for a decisive 70% win in his Senate race.
Harris was a joke of a candidate who was obviously unelectable outside of a deep blue state, but she was forced on us so the DNC could virtue signal. It was a slap in the face to every qualified Democrat, many of whom would have had a chance to defeat Trump (a low bar if there ever was one).
It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist.
The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?
For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
That would be circular reasoning - we know Adams' claim is true because DEI was pervasive in the 80's, and we know DEI was pervasive in the 80's because Scott Adams said so.
Google is notorious for pulling this and numerous people have come forward pointing it out and the CEO of IBM was on air back in 2021 (?) pointing out that any white men who have a problem with not being promoted can essentially pound sand.
This is/was an incredibly common behavior in tech, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully argumentative or is incredibly isolated.
Taking being passed for promotion all the way to SCOTUS is a big ask. For decades the default position was the law defends non-white/non-men against white men. In most other western countries you still can put out job ads saying basically "white men need not apply".
For much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women.
I mean, the legal discrimination against people of color throughout history has been accompanied by extreme violence and oppression. It's a brutal legacy that cannot be overstated.
Slavery and human trafficking, lynching and extrajudicial killings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, denial of voting rights, economic exploitation, forced relocation and genocide, invasive medical practices, cultural suppression, and educational disparities... when you whinge about "decades" of legal protections for marginalized identities, I just wonder why you think you're making anywhere close to a salient or meaningful contribution to discussions of justice.
>>> For much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women.
For much of history, most countries did not have an upper class made up of white men.
Do you believe that the law should treat people differently based on the color of their skin? Do you believe my father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, should be given disadvantages due to his being white, even though neither he nor his ancestors had anything to do with slavery in this country? Do you believe the likes of Claudine Gay, who hails from a wealthy family and grew up in the very picture of privilege, should be given advantages due to her being black?
Do you believe in punishing the son for the sins of the father? Do you believe in punishing someone who just happens to look like the sinners of the past? Do you believe that nonwhite people's ancestors did not commit the same atrocities at some point or another in history as white people's ancestors?
I'm not white, but I find ideas you espouse to be just simple racism, and nowhere close to "justice".
Your father-in-law, an Eastern European immigrant who fled communism, benefits from ongoing racialized distributions of privilege, power, and money.
So, yes, I do believe he is "cutting in line," and should have the humility to stand in solidarity with, rather than standing on the necks of, marginalized communities. Your father-in-law is not climbing out of anywhere so deep a hole as the Black and Hispanic populations on this continent. Not even close.
Even the Gulag Archipelago pales in comparison to the centuries of slavery, genocide, rape, and disenfranchisement we have visited on these peoples in order to accrue the wealth that your father-in-law now has the privilege to work for.
You're still talking promoting group A at the cost of group B for what group C did to group D, people in groups A and B having not much to do with C and D. Even considering descendants of original group D, the benefits are overwhelmingly reaped by those affected by whatever extant systemic injustice remains the least.
The people who effected slavery and what not are long dead. A poor white boy of today or 30 years ago getting penalized in favor of a black lawyer's daughter achieves nothing in terms of justice.
Well, I can’t speak to that with enough confidence to say it was “not a thing”, but I never saw that sort of thing in the eighties. Although, it would not necessarily be unusual for a manager to be that blunt and open at that time without fear of lawsuits, so that part tracks as possibly true for me if there was some sort of effort within his company.
However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
Just to throw my anecdote in ... In the 1980s, I met a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower scores.
So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era.
Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")
I'm not disagreeing with you, but this is the exact same argument that some people use to say that racism is no longer an issue. "I've never seen racism"
“Politically Correct” came out of the late 80s / early 90s era. I’m certain you saw socially insane things in the 80s. I’ve had similarly insane anecdotes of investors holding court in strip clubs dangling venture capital in front of our firm in the late 2010s. Shitty people in power will always exist.
Strippers... brothels... and /hypothetically/ I could tell one story from a well known company where a sales team got in trouble for trying to expense hookers AND blow on a business trip.
How many times have we read about managers that explicitly tells women they won't get promoted because they are expected to get pregnant and later leave? Sometimes the conversation even get recorded on tape.
Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.
My SIL, this week(!) was told by her supervisor that if she tries to apply for another team and doesn't get that job, she'll be set back in her career progression in her team. Asshole managers are everywhere.
People did all kinds of crazy shit at work (and everywhere else too) in the 80s before everyone lawyered up - guys would literally pinch a girl's ass, people used slurs to each other regularly (and often laughed about it), they smoked and drank all the time. A manager somewhere telling a rejected candidate straight up "sorry man but I've got to hire a <<insert minority>> this time" is not at all difficult to believe.
It was 1999 I think, I was doing a placement at a media company. One of the PAs was heavily pregnant, an old guy in the office said to her "My my Jane, your breasts are coming along nicely."
The problem is that people are horrible narrators about their own issues/past. They like to leave out critical information.
The idea of a company in the 80's going around that they are promoting Asians to positions over white people, sounds as far fetched as finding oil in my backyard. The reverse is way more likely in that time periode.
More then likely, he was not qualified for the job. But people often have a hard time accepting this, and feel entitled for position. Often by virtue of working somewhere longer. When passed over for promotion, then they create narratives its not themselves who is the issue, but it must be somebody else their fault.
So when you 20, 30, 40 years later tell the story, are you going to say "well, i was not qualified" or are you going to double down that you got passed over for a promotion, because "somebody had it out for me", or as "DEI hire" as that was the trending topic in conservative circles. What is a little lie to make yourself feel better, and have the world perceive you as the victim of horrible DEI hiring practices ... in the 80s!!!
If people think racism is rampaging today, they really did not live in the 80's... So yea, if it smell funny, you know there is bull.... involved.
If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account. I’ve listened to him for years and find it credible. Also, for a long time there was a strong taboo against white men complaining about discrimination, which makes it easy to imagine it never happened—regardless of whether it did.
> If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account.
You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines.
The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's.
Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color).
And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;)
I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)
> The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s
No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.
> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.
When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.
> I am betting you’re a white male
And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.
> No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking.
This is true.
What is false is a blanket "We're not hiring or promoting white men" as a result during that time period.
That was an era when lip service was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.
> That was an era when lip srvice was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.
This is a pipeline fact. But that doesn't mean individuals didn't try to redress the balance themselves. Just as some schoolteachers will give kids of colour higher marks to make up for the bad things that they were told happened to all of them.
While he may have been told that (or more likely "remembered" things that way), it simply wasn't something that was commonplace in the 1980s.
Where exactly was he working that had a "no white men at the top" policy in the 1980s?
Death Row Records was founded in 1991, Bad Boy Records was founded 1993(?) and in that industry sub domain it should have been intuitively obvious to the meanest intellect that no white men would reach the top well before they (if any) joined as lowly office clerks.
He has been proven to be an extremely unreliably narrator on multiple occasions and is prone to changing his story. I think he has always had such inclinations, but other folks kept him restrained and I’m not sure what happened there in the end.
I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI.
Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1].
Or perhaps it was killed due to DEI but he didn't feel comfortable being honest about it at the time because there is a powerful taboo against white men claiming discrimination.
People get this a lot. They want a woman to fill the role or quota, or they want X attribute to shore up "representation". In South Africa people will be openly told that they will never get a promotion because of their race and sex.
Even if we believed that, why is one such experience an understandable trigger to turn to fascism? It is nice double standard, because those who are not white men are expected to accept similar unfairness without becoming fascists themselves.
How is this racism? It's a complaint about alleged racism and a pun on corporate "Identifies as black" DEI events. He is not saying anything negative about asian candidate or black character.
It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism.
And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.
Ibram Kendi wrote about how the only way to not be racist is to deliberately treat people differently based on their race. He was quite popular for this for a while.
But also for the DEI thing specifically, what's going on is that objecting to the implementation details is proof that you oppose the stated goal. Even if what you're doing is pointing out that the implementation is counter-productive to the stated goal. I think it might be some sort of tribalism thing.
Why wouldn’t it have been that in that decade? The concept of DEI (whether or not it was specifically called as such) has been around at least far back as the 1980s. I think it actually goes back even to the 1960s.
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