The ultimate answer:

They have been making these things for decades, they know how to make them better, they know how to make them more durable, they know how to making them even simpler to use and fix, they choose not to, for profit. That should be structurally discouraged.

Charge the manufacturers for the FULL, REAL environmental impact of shipping materials and end of life disposal of their products. Yes, that cost will be passed to the consumers, as it should be. It also rewards sale of more durable goods.

For clarity, I have done it myself - plenty, but not just on Unix boxes.

I had a remote relay box: 8 channels of power control, so I could at least power cycle machines from remote when all else failed.

I actually ended up not using it much at all, it was a nice security blanket, but the last time I decided that I wanted to power cycle something was about 6 years ago, and at that time I realized it had been over 3 years since I had previously used it, and that usage was more of a “let’s make sure this thing is working like I think it should” test.

It’s not Unix, it’s you.

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Back in the 1990s I developed an app over the course of 6 years, first 3 in C/DOS then we ported that to C++/Borland/Win95 and continued developing it for another 3 years. I was the only coder, we had a dedicated tester / documentation specialist and the algorithms lead who was more of an idea guy than any hands-on code work.

We got bought out. Buyers “needed it in native Win32 because of the depth of the talent pool.” Whatever, I’m here to help if they want it during porting. Buyers estimated 2 developers could port it in about 2-3 months. Yeah, o.k. Never asked for help, but at 6 months in they had expanded the dev team to 6 guys and were still struggling and looking to hire more. Ultimately they reduced scope a little and called it “ready to use” in Win32 after about 15 months. Glad they got it “maintainable” by switching to that Win32 dev environment with such a deep talent pool to hire from, they easily spent more man hours on the port than we spent developing it in the first place.

you can also solve your examole choice by gun grabbing ans shooting the guy if he lets you take it.

Ah, but that wouldn’t be mutually beneficial, would it?

Also, this didn’t take long:

Some federal employees who accepted Trump’s buyout offer are now being notified that their buyout has been denied, and they are being terminated instead.

There are some offsetting factors that also prevent the “best and brightest” from rising to power: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit

He moves up the corporate ladder, without a single original idea that might make his boss feel threatened by his potential.

Eventually, he gets to be the #2 guy at the company. He’s a little dumber than the C.E.O., but the board likes him, so he eventually gets to be C.E.O.

Of course, he assigns a #2 who is a little dumber than he is. “And eventually, we’re going to have all morons running our companies,” Icahn concluded. “We might not be that far off from that right now.”

Here’s a gun to your head, now, it would be beneficial to you to hand over your wallet m’kay?

No bullet in your brain, more cash in my hand, both parties benefit! See how that works?

Oh, you have a lump growing in your thyroid, mmmm… that is bad. We can cut that out for you and most people we do that to live a lot longer, but first we need you to mortgage your home and give us the proceeds. See how that works?

spez has too much money to care.

What’s the point of being Uberwealthy if you can’t just do whatever you want, whenever you want?

People keep quoting that Musk gave DT $250million to support his campaign, like hell… Musk bought Twitter and ran it into the ground to support DT’s campaign, that was far more significant, and far more costly than a mere $250M.

Oh, hell yeah. My parents got 4 and 6 year college degrees based off the income of a teacher, hairdresser, mechanic, and night watchman. 100% debt free. Then their parents, who had $0 to their name at the start of WWII, helped my parents again by buying them a starter house. My parents were both school teachers, on that salary they built a new house in a golf course subdivision, new cars every couple of years including a brand new 6 cylinder BMW… Then the 80s came.

I could see myself wanting to own multiple private islands, getting Larry Ellison to sell me Lanai is going to take a lot of money.

Current U.S. leadership: Our billionaires are gonna be bigger than all the other billionaires in the world put together. (I honestly believe there’s an insecurity motive there: if US billionaires don’t amass significantly more wealth, they won’t be competitive in the billionaire world against outside billionaires.)

U.S. Democracy: If one dollar = one vote, I guess we should save all that money we have been wasting on elections.

The real reason for the surge in prosperity of the middle and lower classes after WWII: decimation of the ultra-wealthy throughout the developed world. Remember: the post WWII US income tax on the wealthy was 91% - literal decimation, for those who paid.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/whole-ball-of-tax-historical-income-tax-rates

One way a global index can respect local authority would be for the index to acknowledge that within that territory, there is an official name for things.

They can also be pragmatic and acknowledge a common local name, the global consensus name, etc.

In many ways, it’s just a further fragmentation like language.

That was a company of 1000 employees, over 500 of them in the traveling global sales force. There were about seven guys at the top taking home millions a year in those bonuses, and their whole priority was to maximize their personal incomes as much and as soon as possible.

In the shiny promotional videos, we were all about helping our customers, improving their lives, but in reality we weren’t very good at that, only about 1/3 customers saw any benefits and maybe 3/100 would get anything close to what they were really hoping for, but… they didn’t have any alternatives, so they were willing to let their health insurance pay for a $30K surgical procedure on the chance that they might be one of the lucky ones.

Research around methods of testing to determine who might and who might not benefit from the product? Actively undermined by the company.

Research around ways to improve product performance? Squashed as I described, it was more likely to “disrupt” the short term income streams they leaders were all enjoying than to make any significant improvements in income for them on any time schedule they care about.

I have spent 30 years developing computerization of traditional medical tasks. Anytime a project gets anywhere near M.D. territory they villify it mercilessly, it’s a threat to their cash cow, a threat to their status as the exalted font of all knowledge, a threat to their $600K/yr practice income - they think.

Doesn’t even have to be about that. Einstein was a disruptor. He scribbled some theories on paper and it dramatically reshaped the global power and wealth dynamic.

The extremely rich have a singular top priority: to stay that way. Unpredictable change, regardless of the net change for good or bad, is not their friend.

This works at all levels. I was hired into the mid level of a company to “lead research to improve the product” - but I quickly found out: that was just a carrot to get me and others like me in the door to fill roles required by regulatory bodies: so many degreed this and thats to oversee implementation of the quality procedures, etc. Everyone above Director level in that company was making fat bonuses every quarter and they didn’t want ANYTHING to change, not even an improvement in the product, it was making plenty of money with no signs of competition on the horizon. To announce a potential future improvement would be to derail current sales volumes, and there were new mansions under construction that still needed more quarters of bonuses to complete.

This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:

https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up

The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.

I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now… the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but… as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about “that Linux thing” when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows “Oh, you mean I’d have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?” “Uh, yeah.” “Oh, that’s more trouble than I think I want, I’ll just stick with what I know.”

In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: [email protected]. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.

Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.