That is utter stupidity.

What that proposes is to hold someone, anyone, guilty by default, with no proof.

Unless a lot as changed, they do care.

Every single laptop and any prebuilt computer I find in the market comes pre installed with a Windows.

A good friend approached me to install a Linux on a brand new machine and just to make sure we called the customer support line, informing there was interest to return the windows license, as the software would not be used.

The reply we got was that by removing the software the warranty of the equipment would be null and void. The option was to ship the computer to their maintenance provider and have it removed, with costs presented at end for labour.

How is that?

As it is, that same argument was used by Apple to try to dodge from complying with the demand for having an industry standard for data and charge port/cable - the USB-C.

Planned obsolescence is a thing. Having law put in place to curb it is a good thing.

If you know you can buy something and you know that something will be repairable at least for a decade, it passes confidence to the end user.

Competition is welcome. Innovation as well. Legislation like this just means companies need to share standards and cooperate more and not aim to skin the client in an endless cycle of replacing expensive items that get thrown out before they are worn out.

Considering the serious move EU as made regarding right to repair and imposing that any equipment must be repairable and have parts for it for at least 10 years, this ia going to be another serious pain for this brand.

I’ve also read an article recently where it was reported that all cell phones circulating in the EU must have replaceable batteries. And from what I took from the article it was meant replaceable by the end user.

Serious anti obsolescence legislation.

This will hurt Apple again.

The dog loved his bath but also loved to get everybody pissed off. It was a very stupid game of catch the dog played.

For the time, it wasn’t cheap.

In 2008, here, the minimum wage was €426, so about €2,42 an hour. So €100 for 4 hours of work was a very good pay.

I knew a person that had a Samoyed for which a simple bath was a two person, 4 hour endeavour, from start to finish, not including the initial chase and wrestle to get the dog in the bathtub.

The person had the groomers go to their house, where he had the bathtub already setup in the garage and all necessary towels and other assorted equipment.

The part of actually gettting the dog in the bathtub involved three person, with the dog’s guardian starting to chase the dog around the property from early in the morning, as the dog would do his best to hide, run and stay out of reach of human hands when the bathtub was set on the garage.

The grooming session would be anything between €80 to €100, in 2008, and still the person thought it was cheap.

Contrary to your expectations, I’m very open to have a dialogue.

Please, elaborate your point.

Contrary to your expectations, I’m very open to have a dialogue.

Please, elaborate your point.

What ever you may be trying to convey it’s completely lost on me, as I don’t have the faintest idea of what that is or means.

Just plain stupidity. Did not bother to look it up in the dictionary and fumble it.

Wherever you work, are you so powerful there that you can refuse to follow intructions or operational guidelines? Are you so financially secure you can just quit your job and leave if you are aware the company is involved in unethical practices? Don’t you those who depend or rely on you for security in their lives?

If so, congratularions.

But many, if not most, don’t have that power and security. They need to work in order to live and take care of others.

Going back to the tweeter/musk debacle: how many were purged from the company or left it for dissent, how many stayed, even though they knew the company was going to engage in behaviours and practices completely contrary to its history and how many have really signed up for the new boss’s “vision”?

Crude analogy but valid enough.

If the company was to be dissolved as punitive action, as you suggest, where would those who stayed because they had to find jobs, considering they would be condemned by association?

Wait, let me try to answer that on your behalf: it would be necessary to lead proper investigations, to determine who was voluntarily, willingly, involved and those who were stuck with no other option.

Or are you perhaps suggesting that no matter what, the moment you complied, regardless your personal agreement, you are as guilty as those who made the initial decision that turned the company on its head?

This isn’t a black and white world. Please stop to consider these downfall of your decisions onto others.

Could you be so kind and explain how would you ensure those who would be losing their livelyhoods survive? And their families?

We tend to peg a face to a company and demonize the whole from one person, like the tweeter debacle and that hair enhanced loon that bought it out of a whim, motivated by spite.

How many have lost their jobs already and how many more would lose them if the company was to be dissolved for punishment in their spread of false information (thus, aiding and abetting) that have led to the terrible losses and even worst for many?

Or perhaps Facebook, with their assistance with covering and gagging the genocide in Myanmar?

This doesn’t mean I disagree with severely punishing these entities. Fine them in millions and billions, force them to break into competing entities, severely regulate and control their actions. But kill a company because, and in this particular case for BMW, they could cooperate or cease to exist, perhaps in horrendous ways?

That would make the punishment as bad or worst than the crime.

Okay, so I am from a country where we got rid of a fascist government less than 50 years ago, thus ending 4 decades of dictatorship. The memory of those days are still quite fresh in our collective memory, regardless the new right wing zealots going to far lenghts to retell a very well and publicly documented history.

And that history is an history of repression, social stagnation and political persecussion. And denunciation.

KGB, the famous KGB, created a reputation for repression by brutality but here it was impossible to tell who you could trust. Your neighbour, your loved ones, that person you encountered every day on the bus, your coworkers… besides the very easy to spot and identify agents that could at random approach you on the street, question and drag you off to the nearest police station or detention center, with no expected time to return home, if ever.

It took, technically a military coup, an inside job, to take this repressive regime. Luckily, it was never their intention to instate a military junta and democracy was instead established.

People could either support, tolerate or endure the regime. There was no other options. Thousands conspired for decades and died in the process. The slightest suspicion and any one could end behind bars, deported to one of the colonies, where prison conditions were even worse, as if such thing could be possible or simply gone, occasionally dragged out of their house, in the middle of the night, in a very loud and public exibition of force for everyone to see and never to comment but by whispers.

That is how fascism, and by extension, any dictatorship enforces complacency.

Not many are willing to become heroes and even less survive to tell the tale. The notion that when dark times arise a great hero will come is an hollywood creation.

You mean like Nike in Bangladesh, but without the wire fences and just through the use of police enforced and government backed brutality, when the workers tried to rally for better work conditions?

I’d risk, with a good degree of comfort, that the negotiations would have been more along the lines of “serve your country and be paid for it or don’t serve your country and go to a concentration camp and die a miserable death”, the last part as subtext.

You do not negotiate with any sort of dictatorial regime. The regime holds all the cards, including the cards the other players think they have in hand.

BMW and, by extension, any company, be it small or large, cooperating with any regime is understandable. It’s that or risk a terrible, more or less public, demise. That is why dictatorial regimes go to great lenghts to ensure companies and business owners favor by putting large quantities of money and/or resources in their hands.

Self preservation is easy to turn into greed.

That’s devious.

Heerily similar, isn’t it?

I use a derivative of this browser for what I call “junk surfing” and I find it personally satisfying to feed it garbage searches, just for the fun of collecting an obscure crypto I know will never accrue any true value.

But if they are willing to give it to me, I’ll take it.

The important searches go through FF or the DuckDuckGo browser.

So lets stop to consider, regardless of that nazi memorabilia.

You live under a fascist dictatorial regime. There are very few options available for you to live a relatively uneventful life.

Either you’re an open, true, supporter, a passive one or a dissimulated dicident. Yes, there are more options available, but lets take these as the most broad categories.

Now let us consider that your regime an enacted several acts of domestic, unprovoked violence, internal purges and other assorted brutal and unpredictable actions against social peace and stability, in order to cement its unquestionable power over an entire nation.

Then, that same regime advances to a state of war, where all resources and infrastructure are comandeered to bolster the military.

At some point, companies are put a very simple option: either they cooperate and remain active or they refuse and suffer the consequences, that at best can be simple nationalization and purge of the heads.

Considering all of this, BMW supporting Germany’s war effort is understanble.

Do I agree with that decision? No. But do I understand it? Yes.

Cooperate and live or refuse and die? Not an hard choice, especially if a lot of money is put on the table.

“There are two kinds of people: those of have lost data and those who are about to lose data.”

Redundancy saves a lot of headaches.

I’m always for supporting new technologies, new companies, new ideas, but that does not mean I’m dropping everything to just get that brand new shiny stuff.

I see the concept and technology for SSDs as groubdbreaking and pretty awsome but I don’t trust those drives to store data I don’t want to lose. I still use good old fashioned HDDs: the tech is tried and tested, mature and reliable and very affordable.

I still use SSDs but I use them as not safe storage mediums, prone to break at any moment, without any warning.

And regardless of this I still keep several copies of important files and critical ones, if possible, are made physical.

And even then…

Read the opening sentence again.