Monthly Archives: October 2025

Unknown's avatar Pete 4:16 am on October 29, 2025
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The Hypocrisy of “Strengthening” 

The Leadership Immunity

So, if the business is so strong, why the massive layoff?

The answer is simple, and it has nothing to do with “strengthening culture” or “increasing ownership.” It’s about increasing shareholder value.

Layoffs, especially during periods of high profit, are a well-worn tactic to immediately boost stock prices and profit margins. By cutting 14,000 salaries, benefits, and overhead, Amazon can present a more favorable balance sheet to Wall Street. It’s a direct transfer of stability from employees to investors.

This is the heart of the hypocrisy: Framing a decision made for financial markets as a necessary step for innovation and customer obsession.

While the memo speaks of shared sacrifice and a leaner future, it’s vital to ask: who is actually sharing in the sacrifice?

The executive who signed this letter, Beth Galetti, is not feeling this “leanness.” According to Amazon’s own regulatory filings, her total compensation for 2023 was nearly $14 million, the vast majority of which came in the form of stock awards.

Let that sink in.

The executive presiding over the elimination of 14,000 jobs—jobs that provided mortgages, healthcare, and stability for families—was rewarded with a compensation package worth over 300 times the median Amazon employee’s pay.

This is the ultimate hypocrisy. The “tough decisions” are not being made by people who face any financial insecurity. Their multi-million dollar packages, tied directly to stock performance, incentivize short-term cost-cutting like mass layoffs. For them, “strengthening the organization” means boosting the metrics that directly inflate their own net worth.

Unknown's avatar Pete 6:16 am on October 23, 2025
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AI’s Unintended Path to Self-Destruction

You feel it, don’t you? A low hum of unease beneath the surface of daily life. It’s there when you scroll through your phone, a feed of curated perfection alongside headlines of impending collapse. It’s there in conversations about work, the economy, the future. It’s a sense that the wheels are still turning, but the train is heading for a cliff, and everyone in the locomotive is just arguing over the music selection.

This isn’t just burnout. This isn’t just the news cycle. This is a collective, intuitive understanding that our world is barreling towards a future that feels… self-destructive. And nowhere is this feeling more acute than in our relationship with the breakneck rise of Artificial Intelligence.

We were promised a future of jetpacks and leisure, a world where technology would free us. Instead, we’re handed opaque algorithms that dictate our choices, social media that fractures our communities, and an AI arms race that feels less like progress and more like a runaway train with no one at the controls.

The path we’re on is not the only one. The feeling that something is wrong is the first, and most crucial, step toward changing course. It’s the proof that we haven’t yet surrendered our vision for a world that is not just smart, but also wise; not just connected, but also compassionate.

The future isn’t a destination we arrive at. It’s a thing we build, every day, with our attention, our choices, and our voices. Let’s start building one we actually want to live in.

Unknown's avatar Pete 1:37 pm on October 10, 2025  

Great a new Battlefield game that makes me revisit Windows…..

Let’s get one thing straight: I am not a Windows user.

My daily driver is a sane, rational operating system that treats me like a competent adult. I use it for work, for creativity, for everything. But once in a blue moon, the stars align in a way that requires me to boot into Windows. Maybe it’s a specific piece of hardware, a game with a draconian anti-cheat, or helping a less-technical family member.

It’s always a reluctant visit. A digital trip to a noisy, crowded mall after years of tranquility. And every single time, without fail, Microsoft finds a new, more aggressive way to make me regret my decision.

My latest foray into the world of the Blue Screen of Life™ was no different. I was greeted not by a welcome screen, but by a full-court press of psychological manipulation.

First, it’s the begging for a Microsoft account. The “Sign In” screen is giant and in-your-face, while the “Offline Account” or “Domain Join” option is now a ghost—a tiny, greyed-out link you have to scour the screen for. I’ve heard on Windows 11 Home, they’ve even removed the ethernet trick. You literally have to pretend you have no internet to access the basic human right of a local account.

Let that sink in. To exercise a fundamental choice over your own machine—the choice to keep your data local and your identity separate from a corporate cloud—you have to trick the operating system. Since when is my computer my adversary?

But it doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Once you’ve navigated the labyrinth and carved out your pathetic little local account, the onslaught begins.

“Get OneDrive!” “Back up to the cloud!” “Your files aren’t safe here!” “Don’t you want to be connected?”

It’s a constant, dripping faucet of anxiety-driven marketing. It’s in the setup. It’s in the file explorer. It’s a notification, a pop-up, a brightly colored button where the “Save” button should be. It’s the digital equivalent of a street vendor following you down the block, screaming in your ear about a timeshare.

Why is this so messed up?

Because it’s a blatant, cynical power grab. Microsoft isn’t just selling you an operating system anymore; they’re selling you a subscription to an ecosystem. Your data, your identity, your habits—that’s the product. A local account is a leak in their revenue stream. A user who isn’t tethered to their cloud is a user they can’t monetize as effectively.

They are systematically removing user agency and calling it a “feature.” They are framing the desire for privacy and local control as an archaic, difficult-to-access “legacy option,” like changing the BIOS or editing the registry.

This isn’t progress. This is enclosure. They are fencing off the digital commons of personal computing and telling us we have to pay a toll—in data, in dependency, in our very user identity—to simply use the machine we own.

I don’t want my operating system to be a service. I don’t want my files automatically synced to a server I don’t control. I just want to install a program, save a file to the hard drive I paid for, and be left the hell alone.

Every time I use Windows, this is what I’m reminded of. It’s not an operating system; it’s an advertisement with delusions of grandeur, desperate to handcuff you to its ecosystem before you can even get anything done.

So, congratulations, Microsoft. You’ve succeeded. You’ve made your platform so hostile to casual, privacy-minded users that my next blue-moon visit will be even more reluctant. And my main operating system? It looks better every single day.