Right now, with the political situation in this country, and with the situations around Big Tech and it's lack of ethics with regards to...well...everything, I'm not particularly fond of the industry that I am both a rampant hobbyist and even work in. I think a lot of rash, poor, greedy, and otherwise, misinformed, or deliberatley stupid decisions are being made. And it represents to me how it's high time that maybe, we rethink everything, including technology.

The root cause is CULTURE. A big problem we have starts with culture of long past. See, America thrives on this idea that if you make the most money, you win, and therefore, are the person to listen to. Well....how'd that work out for ya' with Donald J. Trump, hun? How'd that work out for ya' with Microsoft? Or how about how that worked out for ya' with the toxic nightmare that is social Media and Mark Fuckerberg? I think culture needs a tweak. An idiot can have money easily, they just have to be BORN into it. Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Zuckerberg, they were all born INTO money.

One of my biggest regrets was calling myself a nerd/geek and supporting the commercialization and popularity of Geek/Nerd culture. It's turned into the very thing it was AGAINST! And now we have fucking idiots out there picking their favorite corporations to align with because they think that they are the best based on popularity, instead of the REAL way a tech person does it: Logic and Reason.

Microsoft has been a thorn in my side since the very beginning. All those "customer service" issues ranging from being unable to afford a new O/S, being unable to download the old ones, being unable to find files or info ON the old ones restoring and using old 486 era hardware. All the problems introduced in 98 SE, 2000, XP, 7, and 10. Working for them for 7 years and they probably ripped out the "Experience Tool" because I was sending them bug reports ad nauseum as the I.T. guy because I wanted Windows 10 to succeed and not be a piece of crap. That whole time, I was a contractor subject to a stupid "Stats Farm" that made it impossible to move up at your job even if your performance didn't match the numbers, and the constant thinking I had to do to work around a system that told me to "push it back on the users" but knew if I did so I would risk being punished because I didn't cover some base they expected you to but they failed to address. How about working in my bandmates kitchen for 2 months trying to convince their in-house call center in Hyderabad to actually release the tickets to their Hallway Service Techs (HSTs) and TechLink Reps rather than sit on them for weeks at a fucking time. Microsoft was a big reason I moved out of Seattle, and started using Linux.

Apple didn't help much either. I've had 2 Macs, the fact that they stop holding onto old versions of software (yeah, I know, server space, yadda yadda, but that's not a problem on M$ platforms because we can save the Executables to a place like the Internet Archive instead of be at the mercy of some proprietary sanctioned "Apple Store" that makes us buy all but the smallest of utilities for inflated prices for functionality that once was a part of the O/S only a mere 5+ years ago or even less in some cases). It also is bothersome that replacing a HDD with an SSD in an Apple product leads to latency issues in GarageBand. Anyone whose listened to my original music on YouTube during the "GarageBand" era notices a lot of recordings have this "bleeep" everywhere in various tracks after the SSD upgrade in 2024. I'm not refusing Macs, but they're going full-time Linux eventually.

Google has been bothersome for a long time. I remember when my old room mate gave me an invite to G-mail years ago when it was "invite only". Now Google does a ton of evil. They have a complicated cloud-based website system (which drove me here) that's not very user intuitive, Gmail is a SPAM magnet - which is one of the reasons I moved away from Yahoo! after the fact. They bought out Android, which was once just a Linux distro, now it's a propietary O/S where the user has little control over it without risking losing access to their phone, or having problems with support from their carrier. I've had a few nightmares with customer service with Google. YouTube is nothing but ADs anymore - like an entire 60 seconds of Ads and greyed out skip buttons, even for a short video that's just too long for YouTube Shorts - which is mostly just a disease-bag of rage bait and clickbait, and algorithmic missteps.