This is a bizarrely revisionist take. Perhaps you weren't around at the time but that was not standard MO in the slightest. Obviously they were incredibly scummy in other ways, but that was not one of them.
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.
I suppose it depends on what kind of users you have in mind; enthusiasts, versus average users. Before they became outright user-hostile they were known for their anti-competitive behavior and buggy products. People were calling them "Micro$oft" by the 90s, at the latest. And United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation started in '98.
In the mid-90s, when I started my career, I was convinced (and very sad) that Microsoft had won the computing business and I was doomed to work on their software the rest of my life.
So, perhaps "general" sentiment wasn't there yet, but certainly plenty of us held no love for the company. The only software from Microsoft I've ever really appreciated was Microsoft Musical Instruments.
Counterpoint: Bill Gates' appearance in the Simpsons clearly depicts him as a nefarious bully. I think the Windows XP and the Gates Foundation actually resuscitated his image a bit. Windows was a bit hit or miss. Blue Screen of Death plagued Windows 98, Windows ME was a joke, even early XP wasn't great. (I personally wasn't a fan of XP when it came out, switching instead to Windows NT before moving over to Linux c. 2004.)
Bill Gates the ruthless business-nerd was definitely a stereotype 30 years ago, though to your point I don't remember anyone talking about them revoking licenses for purchased software.
I received mine in 2020 and have decided to move back home. The uncertainty in general just keeps me up at night. Feels like the goalposts could move at any moment. I know I'm likely overreacting but it is what it is.
You have ICE officers randomly abducting people off appearance alone and then detaining them for days if not weeks. If you were a citizen the whole time, cool who cares.
No one in America has any rights.
That aside, even as someone who's been in this country for generations, I've been exploring options to leave.
America is behind most of the developed world in terms of standards of living. I was in Asia for a while and I felt a fraction of the fear I constantly do at home.
GC holder of 25 years with citizen parents. I agree with you and I stress about this daily. It's always been a shitty deal though - we are taxed with no representation in government.
>we are taxed with no representation in government.
In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes? I'm an EU citizen and living in another EU country and am not allowed to vote in that country's government elections, just local ones. If you want to vote at government level then you need to apply and get citizenship which also comes with the responsibility(or obligation more accurately) of military draft.
Everything about this seems pretty fair to me. I'm not sure why not to you. If you're not a citizen you shouldn't be allowed to vote at gov level since you're not subject to a draft, because in case the shit hits the fan militarily, unlike citizens, you can just pack your bags and go back to your home country and avoid dying in the front lines. So why would any country let people who aren't subject to draft vote? Makes no sense. You don't have the same skin in the game as citizens who are draftable just because you pay some taxes.
Now if you're paying taxes in a foreign country where you can't vote, it means you're there voluntarily because you're getting a much better deal than being in your own country where you can vote. Probably you're in the US because you make orders of magnitude more money than in your own country, but nobody in the US dragged you there against your will to work and pay them taxes, you agreed to this situation voluntarily because it also benefits you personally, and you would just as easily leave if it stopped benefiting you.
> In which country can you emigrate to and be allowed votes in government representation just because you pay taxes?
There are a few, with varying degrees of residency time (and possibly other conditions) required. New Zealand requires being a resident for a year.
The UK is particularly interesting, if you're a citizen of a common wealth nation you can vote in national UK elections if you're a resident.
Personally, I agree with you though. I didn't vote in the UK despite being able too. Let the citizens decide the future of their nation, I have the privilege to leave (and have done so already). Feels wrong for me to influence the nation when I'm not fully invested in the outcome.
As a person, why should you not have a say in how things are governed where you live?
The idea that you should be required to swear some loyalty to a government before you get a say in how the place you live is governed is the position that’s actually absurd.
(Yes, I do think there should be a global republic and that there should be full freedom of movement. It’s way past time for that.)
Because as a non-citizen, you are technically still a guest?
If you love the place you're living in and want to actively participate in its governance, including implementing any changes, you should obtain citizenship.
And even if you do, your stake would still be less than those who've been living there all their lives, across many generations. Maybe the natives actually don't want the changes that the immigrants want to see implemented.
(not going to argue the finer details of ethics like racism or xenophobia, etc. which I acknowledge can often come up in cases like this).
It make sense, you don't want to give voting rights to someone who might decide not to continue living in your country anymore. If they are serious about it, then they must go through the process of obtaining citizenship. I have same issue with dual citizenships, it is absurd that someone holding foreign passport can have major decision making roles in your government.
We did not meet continuous residency requirements for 10-15 years due to travel for my dad's work. Afterwards, it took me nearly 5 years to meet that requirement due to the fact that I lived and graduated abroad for highschool. I tried around COVID, was denied based on truthfully admitting I had smoked some weed in the previous 5 years while I lived in Colorado. That reset my clock for another five years. I constantly wrestle with whether I even want to be associated with this country for the rest of my life. I'm prideful and a high earner, there's only so much I'll accept before moving my family and assets somewhere else.
Hope that provides some color. To all the fans of the current immigration policies - you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
> we are taxed with no representation in government
This is true in most highly-developed democratic nations. If it is so important to you, then you should become a citizen, or return to your home country (so that you may vote). And curiously, does your home country not have the same rule? Do you find that position hypocritical?
The choice is not so binary, as anyone seriously discussing this topic should immediately recognize. There are indeed ways for foreigners to participate in local politics in many countries, here is some data if you're interested in learning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage
My country does in fact provide this right to foreign residents who live a certain amount of time in the country. Even if it didn't, it would not be a hypocritical position to state something is bad. Do you think I wrote the laws? Hardly seems like a good-faith argument or even a sound one!
Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's suffragists who used it in the late 19th century.
Maybe in some sense "no taxation without suffrage" would be more accurate, but it would be a worse slogan. In any case, "no taxation without representation" is a well known phrase, it's been around for over 250 years, and I don't think much is achieved by nitpicking its wording.
You do have congressional representatives and senators who represent you and your interests and can take action on your behalf just as they would if you were a citizen. I have had decent luck in getting assistance from them despite not being a citizen.
Yes and colonial Americans had personages they didn't choose representing their interests at court so clearly that was not what they meant by it, let alone as members of the British empire their interests were represented by the king the highest position in the land...
To exist is to be taxed. If you exist at all in the US, you will be taxed. You may even be taxed even if you are not in the US. So saying that taxation somehow implies voting ability would be quite absurd. This doesn't hold true anywhere in the world.
When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or against". (If that were true, there'd be no need to demand it.)
They mean "I would like our government to stop taxing people who don't get to vote for it" or "It is unjust for a government to tax people who don't get to vote for it" or something of that sort.
The fact that things aren't already the way you want them to be doesn't make it absurd to demand that they change to be that way.
(You might argument that governments don't give a damn what anyone demands and for that reason it is absurd to demand change. But I think that in fact governments do take notice of what people want, if they fear what the people might do if they don't get it. Whether that's voting them out of office or putting their heads on pikes or anything in between. And they will take more notice if more people are demanding whatever it is, and a large part of the point of saying things like "No taxation without representation!" is to get other people who aren't in the government to sympathize with your cause and maybe start demanding the same thing. So I think it's manifestly not absurd to make such demands, as such. Some particular demands -- "No taxation without $1M/year universal basic income!" -- would be absurd, but this one seems obviously not to be in that category.)
There is a typical ladder here though of non-immigrant/temp visitor, legal permanent resident, and citizen. The main practical distinction bw the last two is the ability to vote and hold office. What concretely is the demand here? That the last two should effectively merge into one? Or is it that everybody along this ladder should get to vote and that citizenship is a separate axis?
The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote.
Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people have thought so. Some other people have thought not. I'm not trying to settle that question; just trying to bring some clarity as to what the issue is.
America is also run by a cabal of pedophiles and despite that being pretty out in the open at this point, there have been no consequences for them at all. It's not a good looking situation when even CSA and genocide are met with an "eh, what can you do?" shrug by a populace that has been led to accept worse and worse every year.
Don't forget the blatant corruption at a scale we've never seen. Literal crypto scams are being run out of the Whitehouse, and no one seems to care. Complaining about Hunter Biden being on the board of some company seems so quaint at this point.
If this was actually true, there wouldn't be so many people from the developed world trying to immigrate to the US, and upset about the US government making this harder.
That just means the US is better than the place they’re moving from. It doesn’t mean the US is among the best places in the world. Also, public perception of how good things are through US media (Hollywood) is different from reality.
Many, many people immigrate for an imagination of what life in the US will be. Objectively speaking, the US really is far behind most of the developed world in standards of living .
Also, money. Salaries are simply higher in the US (even if life is worse and less fulfilling overall)
I'm an American currently living in the Philippines, and that's utter nonsense and I know it. Developing world countries are so far behind the US in infrastructure, clean water, food quality, pollution, overpopulation, waste disposal, cleanliness, littering, open public spaces, and numerous other vectors that your comment blithely ignores.
The only possible way you could write a comment like that with a straight face is that you've never walked through a barrio in a developing world country with brick block contruction and tin roofs with tires holding the roof on, or favelas in Brazil with crowding, unsanitary conditions and resulting disease, drug crime, and gang warfare.
The standard of living in the US is vastly better than in these third-world shitholes, and it requires a stunning amount of out-of-touch suicidal empathy to project that it doesn't.
The US is not "behind the developed world", it's literally the developed world. The lightbulb. The airplane. The telephone. NASA. Space X. Tesla. And on and on...
When people talk about being behind or ahead the developed world, they are talking about the average person's availability of food, housing, internet, AC, transportation, healthcare, education, culture, day to day life, etc. Not century+ old tech or the handful of Billionaires' pet projects. Or, well, really, most of the time people just mean "The US is not like a subset of European (Likely Nordic) countries".
But that's besides the point, because I'm not the person making the argument. I was just pointing out that the comment was misread and misresponded to.
Not every (slightly) authoritarian government is akin to a regime that was responsible for the industrial scale killing of more than 11 million people.
Perhaps you should wait to make that case, we're starting to see ramifications from USAID cuts as the worse one, but there's also health and nutrition effects from Medicaid/SNAP reductions, and whatever in the world is happening on immigration and detention with insane ICE behaviour, plus second order effects from abortion and public health changes.
Whether it would happen or not is immaterial. The perceived threat is enough. I've been here on a green card since 2016 and haven't left the country since his second term since I share the exact same fears.
I'm not saying its not, but I have always found MS articles / docs to be insufferable to read. 300 words to explain something that's nothing more than an API call
“I was using, at times, pretty lackluster equipment, simply because I had no money to buy anything better,” he said. Later, he moved on to digital audio tape, or DAT, and, as technology progressed, to solid-state digital recorders."
I'd agree with this take where possible. Trying to explain the idea requires all the listeners to imagine the same thing in their head. If you can show them something, it's worth a thousand words..
I have this with a colleague right now who has a rather solid idea (I think). Trying to convince him that at least some diagramming would help get it across.
What is the blue and green bubble thing? I've never used an iPhone so don't understand the term. Does it classify messages as iMessage and non-iMessage?
iOS has two built-in messaging apps. Like all phones, they have SMS built in, and hardly anyone uses it for anything except SMS 2FA codes.
And then they have iMessage, aka blue bubbles, which are kinda like Signal or Whatsapp or Telegram. Everyone in Europe uses whatsapp, and a lot of people in the US use iMessage. If you don't use whatsapp in europe, you'll have a rough time communicating with some social groups, and the same thing for iMessage in the US.
However, unlike every other messenger app I can think of, iMessage isn't cross platform.
Also unlike every other messenger I can think of, it comes installed by default and for some reason uses the same app as the SMS app, and also claims encryption but randomly switches to SMS and breaks encryption making it obviously the least secure of all the apps (and also backs up your keys to iCloud in a way apple can access them by default, neither here nor there).
Blue bubbles are when iMessage is acting as the iMessage app, and has encryption and can use features like sending high resolution photos, location, invites, and a bunch of other apple-specific features.
Green bubbles are when the iMessage app has converted itself into the SMS and RCS app, and has a reduced feature set, like being unable to remove people from group chats.
It's frankly a quite confusing decision to have two quite different apps built into the same app and indicate which feature-set is active based on the color of a UI element. I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple. I'm frankly surprised the EU hasn't forced apple to show a prompt for "default messenger app" on startup with the options being "Whatsapp", "iMessage", etc etc, like they do for default browser.
No, Apple has one built-in messaging app: Messages. It switches between SMS, RCS, and iMessage automatically depending on the capabilities of the devices.
> I think everyone would prefer if apple split it into the 'Messages' app (SMS + RCS) and an optional 'iMessage' app which doesn't come installed by default, but you can download on the app store from Apple.
No, I don't think anyone would prefer that. People on iOS like iMessage, not SMS + RCS. Nobody is confused by it, they all know that green bubbles means you're texting someone who doesn't have an iPhone. It works seamlessly, it's just annoying when you want to have along conversation with a friend on Android because it doesn't have any nice iMessage extras available – that's why people don't like green bubbles.
//Edit : I see from another comment that you say you worked there in the 2000s. Inclined to believe you, but having worked in the industry since the mid-90s I'm absolutely confident the general sentiment about Microsoft was not yet hatred. That came later.