Possibly, but life is full of risks.

What you really need is a carbon fiber shoehorn. If you do manage to deform it the thing will go right back to its original shape.

I understand the desire to get even, but it isn’t likely to happen and it isn’t likely to be satisfying, even if you succeed. You should focus on things that will make your life better and not things that will make someone else’s life worse, even if they richly deserve it.

You are going to have to make some compromises. You are currently putting up with a situation you don’t like, in exchange for the salary, side benefits, and location. That’s isn’t necessarily a bad tradeoff, but it is not likely to be a good long-term situation. Once management decides they have a problem with you, things are going to get worse sooner or later. It will be better for you if you leave rather than being forced out.

You need to make some decisions about which of the things you like about your situation you would be willing to give up for a better job. That will tell you what to do next. Maybe the answer is to hold out for a better position within your current organization, although the chances don’t sound good. You may need to take a salary cut to find a local position that’s better for you. You may need to move. You may even need to change careers entirely.

The key is to make your own decisions and not allow others to force them on you. There are a lot of factors you can’t control. Focus on the ones you can. And don’t stay in a bad situation with the hope that everything will work out the way you want it to.

It’s worth noting that my watch, and a friend, also have the Watch5 and get similar battery life with those settings.

I have a Watch5 Pro. Running with AOD, but with the gesture and touch activation features turned off, I get around 48 hours per charge. And I just tap a button to wake it instead of tapping the screen, which doesn’t take any longer.

Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

It is probably other things, but Apple has been caught intentionally reducing the performance of older iPhones to sell new ones. After a huge scandal, court cases, and an agreement with the feds, they waited a few years and did exactly the same thing again.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

There will never be enough upvotes for therapy llamas.

If these idiots actually try it, we should stick their mirror where the sun don’t shine.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.

The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.

The right wing has been actively working to undermine our educational system since the early 80’s. A poorly educated populace, particularly one without critical thinking skills, is much easier to manipulate. After four decades of underfunding, restrictive policies, and anti-intellectual propaganda, those efforts are really paying off.

Newt Gingrich and his co-conspirators have been waging war against the people of this country since Reagan was elected. And they are now dangerously close to winning that war.

I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.

The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.

There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.

I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.