You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.
Sometimes people on the inside are too involved to see the potential pitfalls outsiders might recognize ---this is why one typically has external auditors and third party companies do assessments.
immigrants are people who tend to stay and don’t have plans to return to their home countries. Expats are temporary immigrants typically paid by their company to move and intend to move back to their home countries once the assignment is over.
True, but I'm talking about native English speakers. Those people likely have their own terminology in their own language to describe themselves.
Also an ex-patriate is typically in the professional class. So those "English" teachers who teach in Japan, etc., may think of themselves as ex-pats or try to frequent "ex-pat" hangouts but they aren't necessarily because of two things: one, they have not been working at their home office and then transferred and typically they do not hold prelesional degrees -though they may hold "certificates" or whatever. They are in effect temporary workers on a limited stay visa, often needing annual renewal by hopping to a third country to have it renewed themselves. For ex-pats all this or arranged by their employers.
Looking at online dictionaries there is no hint of temporariness [0], [1]. Wikipedia refers to it as "a person who resides outside their native country" and often referring to "a professional, skilled worker or artist from a wealthy country" [2], which matches exactly the way I see it used. Similar to other commenters here, I also mostly encounter it being used by skilled, first world professionals to separate themselves "from the plebs" of poorer immigrants.
PS I do not disagree that some use cases could include temporariness (wikipedia mentions academic discourse and something about some british civil workers a few decades ago) but this is by far neither the unique nor the most common way it is used nowadays, nor how historically it has often been used long before.
Perhaps less visible but also more numerous are the guys from China who are too poor to afford the bridewealth who go to poor SEAsian countries to find their brides but also can frequent the hourly hotels that cater specifically to Japanese to Chinese clientele. Euros and N. Americans stand out due to their physical differences.
Maybe not, but let’s hope this gets the attention it deserves and these black programs get shut down and anyone who lied about them in their testimony to Congress get what they deserve, CEOs or otherwise.
When things were on NVRs only some personnel had access to them and they typically rotated fate out every 30 days by default. Importantly they were not interconnected. They were their own silos. Now they are all tied in to central services and people with the right access can pull up anything from any of the devices regardless how irrelevant they are to an investigation.
The main problem is the interconnectedness.
They are realizing Hayden’s wet dream of total surveillance.
It’s possible it’s a bit of an “arms” race, the police are more aggro but so are the public. At least in public perception back before the 70s its was perceived that by and large there was “respect for authority” but that’s eroded over the decades for various reasons among them court cases asserting more rights for individuals where cops can’t just up and arrest willy nilly. But also movements like “sovereign citizen” leaks in places enough to affect behavior elsewhere.
Also weapons are relatively cheaper today than decades ago.
There's an insane number of police shootings where it turns out the person was looking at an insanely large sentence and they "weren't going back to jail." From that perspective it's not even clear they're acting irrationally -- if the penalty for third-striking for stealing a TV and murder is the same then some criminals are going to make it worth their while.
Having slightly different versions would certainly be a help in identifying leakers of certain kinds of documents to increase the odds of identifying leakers. That would be of interest to some kinds of organizations or departments within organizations.
To be terse but generalizing a bit, technologists used to want to solve problems and make things easier. At some point, under the influence of MBAs it became how do we make loads of money leveraging technology’s network effects?
I think that technologists are doing themselves a disservice by blaming the problems within their industry on MBAs. Many of the problems we see in the tech industry, and the reason why public opinion is not exactly positive, are primarily due to ideological factors. Whether you call it Californian ideology or whatever, many people in the tech industry think only in terms of efficiency and value. And if something isn’t efficient or doesn’t add value, it should be streamlined away and made obsolete, whether it be systems, processes, markets - or humans.
The MBAs exploited and greatly exacerbated the ideology factor by making ever increasing demands for monetary performance. In the beginning it's usually just about the tech, but soon it becomes how to make more and more money in any way possible with the tech because "the more money you have, the more tech you can buy or make".
Who are the folks leading their finance organizations? Also who compose their boards of directors?
Also Google buying double click was an inflection point. Ads were kind of annoying up till then but they had not become the gross monstrosity that now exploits users and corrupts business.
Sandberg built the company that polluted everything with this cynical influencer economy. Schmidt built the company that turned users into the product.
Generally the MBAs and money have been in control since before the 1980s, maybe since 10 years ago in web tech. A difference in 2026 is the politicians allow them to do whatever they want.
At least in the US, most tech leaders and middle managers never did an MBA. Most are engineers who climbed the ladder into management.
Edit: Can't reply
> “Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough
Based on this I am guessing you are at least 10-15 years older than me and probably grew up in the 1980s and experienced the 1990s internet
> how do we make this company into an investment multiplier
> It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now
This is how startup funding has been since the beginning. You sure as hell weren't raising from Bessemer or Sequoia in the 2000s without also being able to answer whether you had a path to successful monetization.
Why would anyone give you their money if you cannot justify how you would make them more money?
Could be so but once their companies get on the path to getting listed they get advice from their banks or investors and either or both have one thing in mind: how do we make this company into an investment multiplier? Also often founders are paired with business types to make companies more viable.
“Making money off of shareware” is no longer enough (never mind that it’s a non-starter now that everything is needs to be saas these days.)
It’s a different mentality. It about unicorns or bust now.
I’m pretty certain they are not a moderating force. I think the lead-up dot-com bubble its subsequent burst and the following hunt for unicorns was begot by a different breed of people than those pursuing the technology sector before them. After the Netscape IPO more people started going into CS as a way to get a foot in the door to massive riches rather than the pursuit of technology as a way to solve human problems. The Woz vs Zuck, for example.
The Netscape IPO happened 31 years ago. Over half of all Americans alive today were either in elementary school or not around yet.
It's the equivalent of someone in the 2000s trying to enforce standards and norms from the 1950s-60s.
The reality is, the tech industry has essentially always been like this, and any period in the 1980s or early 90s that y'all look back to just isn't actionable in 2026 and fails to understand how different Americans are today versus when you started in the tech industry.
Sorry but wouldn’t space based DCs need radiation hardened parts which are typically a few generations behind SoTA? Do the centers deploy massive shields to protect the electronics?
I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working. The Orbital AI would be at a higher orbit but still within LEO which reduces the radiation. I wonder if occasional bit flips even matter for typical AI calculations. Quantization seems to suggest a lot of the lower bits aren't all that important. Either way SpaceX has already had success building systems with commercial-off-the-shelf products in space.
To me the biggest problem of the system is the dependence on launch cost. The more launch cost can be lowered the more viable the system is and the more options there are for solving every problem. But IMO the reason Musk is building this system is to lower launch cost. He needs a project that can fund a high volume of launches and create economies of scale to lower launch cost, the way that Starlink did for Falcon 9.
> I haven't heard of that being a problem for Starlink, whatever they've done there seems to be working.
Starlink doesn't need GPUs, they use hardened chips. The first question is, can whatever works as a 2nm GPU work where Starlink is?
The second question is even funnier: Starlink satellites have a limited lifespan and regularly burn up in the atmosphere when they fall back to Earth - that's due to the need to fly them at low altitudes where, coincidentally, the radiation is lower.
Where then will the flying data centers be - high with higher radiation or low with a higher fall rate? And I doubt those heavy birds are going to burn up fully before hitting somebody's head.
Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
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