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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

    No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

    In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.





  • I started thinking about when Emma Goldman’s partner Alexander Berkman tried to kill a 19th century robber baron who had sent in Pinkerton to murder workers into ending a strike.

    One can make an argument about the economic conditions creating the condition’s for what the anarchists back then called “the propaganda of the deed”. But that isn’t where I am going. Instead let’s look at the aftermath.

    From an assassination perspective, the quality of the assassination was lacking. Also, Wikipedia (my bold):

    Frick was back at work within a week; Berkman was charged and found guilty of attempted murder. Berkman’s actions in planning the assassination clearly indicated a premeditated intent to kill, and he was sentenced to 22 years in prison.[5] Negative publicity from the attempted assassination resulted in the collapse of the strike.[19]

    In other words, today’s robber barons gets less sympathy than the O.G. kind. That’s a bit interesting.







  • At work, I’ve been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that’s why it’s called work.

    The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

    The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

    Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save… (drumroll)… Approximately nothing!

    But if we hadn’t done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

    We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.