It seems like companies that have publicly and widely disavowed the importance of the PC are coming to regret that decision as it turns out the platform is nowhere near dead.

— Jeff Kampman (@jkampman_tr) June 15, 2018

Exactly. The PC never had a chance in hell of dying. It’s the only place where productivity is possible, and probably will be for another ~25 years or more.

What happened is just what I said and thought would happen: those who are too dumb to use a computer, or didn’t have time to learn enough to properly use a PC or whatever the reason, went out and bought tablets or a smartphone or some other limited consumption device. At the same time, PCs started lasting much longer as both quality improved and chip improvement on the consumer side slowed quite a lot, making the average PC last 5+ years instead of 2-3.

These two factors reduced the market for a while, as was obvious would occur.

Further prediction: PCs will be where the money is (enteprise/creatives spend so so so much money compared to consumer), so as Jeff points out companies will eventually be forced back to the PC as that’s where they can pull in cash by the truckload. There is evidence of this in the market already. Expect more in the future.

I’m confused about all the liberal cool kids who are advocating not shopping at Amazon because of their terrible labor practices. Meanwhile, other warehouses, warehouse contractors, etc. have been conducting similar or worse labor practices for 20+ years and not a peep has been heard about any of that from these same people.

I support Amazon labor unionizing and I support much harsher regulation, by the way. Jeff Bezos should not have $150 billion. No one should have that much money.

Virtue signaling just makes me angry in a way that few other things do, and this in particular bothers me because I think this instance emerges from the fact that these addlepated liberals identify with Amazon workers more because they see them as less blue-collar than someone working at the Wal-Mart warehouse or the like.

Don’t shop at Amazon all you want. But that isn’t actually helping anything, and probably hurts more than it helps because it’s yet another distraction.

What’s the greatest “point of divergence” in your life, a point where you made a choice, and you still kinda wonder what would have happened had you made the other one?

— Todd VanDerWerff (@tvoti) July 16, 2018

Joining the army. A few months after I joined, a few former friends of mine fired a gun into what they thought was an empty car. It wasn’t empty and they severely injured a woman. They were caught, and went to jail for quite a long time.

If I hadn’t joined up there’s a chance I would’ve been in the car with them. I would’ve tried to stop them (I know myself pretty well), but not sure I would’ve been able to or even realized what they were going to do in time.

That’s not the only way I was likely to end up in jail or dead in North Florida, but that one was immediate and obvious. So glad I did not stay there.