DuckWrangler9000

I've looked at several data points and statistics for the past like two decades, and the problem is not that technology is not advancing, or that it is somehow getting worse. No, in fact, it's slowly progressing at a snail's pace but it's definitely advancing. The problem though is that leaders in tech are squandering the opportunities available to them, and hindering those that once made technology great.

The biggest threat is definitely outsourcing. You have an entire country of 50 huge ass states. What do you do with that, exactly? You strip the jobs from those states and transfer them to another country overseas, Philippines, Malaysia Thailand, India probably gets the most of them. Any way to cheapen the product that you're providing in the USA, while simultaneously stealing from those who live in the USA by removing their jobs from them. Long-term, this is not sustainable. Because if you look at layoffs and job shrinkage in the USA and where jobs are actually going, they are not meaningful places. Jobs are being created in lower paying industries, outsourced from higher paying industry is, and the highest paying industries like managerial positions, are not moving at all. It's embarrassing to say the least.

People think that they are doing a good thing by raising the stock price and jacking it up as high as they can go. Sure, your investments are increasing slowly over time. But the pool of investors becomes smaller because less people can afford to invest, and now you don't have an educated group of investors, you have a smaller and smaller list of elites that keeps growing, and isn't wholly owned by everyone in society because the majority of stock owners for big companies are the rich. People who can throw any amount of money they want into a company. So you don't have good decision making for tech companies.

Bad decision making is what we have come to today, big companies making horrible decisions because they are poorly led by elites who don't know what they're doing. Just look at Microsoft if you need any example of this, which of their products is actually well built today? Every one of them functions like crap, their gaming division is collapsing, computers are moving towards copilot which is the worst AI model and platform I have ever seen in my life which is crazy because they I just came out and they are already the worst. But still, they are ruining computing with that, windows 11 is terrible in every single way I can imagine. It is bad decision making every single step of the way.

Then, we have the collapse of industry, the final stage which we are approaching soon. As you can see, big tech in the USA has started to fold in on itself in a way that has never happened before. Microsoft bought out Activision Blizzard and is basically for all intents and purposes, now a monopoly in the tech industry for gaming. Activision Blizzard barely has any competitors, other than maybe EA games which owns so many different smaller gaming companies that it has swallowed up and basically deleted to own the IP for. So tech industry is basically collapsing in on itself, we haven't seen the worst of it yet but soon, there will be very few tech companies left, only big ones, no choices available and if you want to play games or enjoy any sort of technology you'll have very few options.

Bonus: alternative market is growing rapidly which is really concerning. The alternative market is what I call Amazon's scam products. They don't have any logical name to them, each of them has a different name entirely, they're mostly just Chinese gibberish, but you can find watches, tablets, any sort of technology on there, there is an off-brand made in Asia or elsewhere cheaply, that has no reviews other than bot generated reviews to make it seem like a real product, and these are not actually tested for anything, I would assume. Not tested for safety, not tested for dangerous materials chemicals or any of that. This is a symptom of widespread poverty, especially among the middle class. People simply can't afford to buy name brand products anymore. It's not possible to buy a Samsung or Apple watch every 2 years, so what do they do? Go on Amazon and find 'Ufolgewits' brand.

I live in the USA, and our future seems more bleak than it ever has. Is not about politics, although politicians do have an impact on it. It's really about our quality of life, and cost of living, which has not changed for the better, it seems, in a really long time. The cost of living keeps going up higher and higher, and much of our country still believes that even with increased cost of living, there is never any reason whatsoever to pay people more. So for instance, a job that paid 10 bucks an hour in the year 2002, that same job might still pay $10 an hour now. But I think we all know that the cost of living has dramatically gone up from 2002 to now.

Even White collar jobs though seem to be threatened to now, which is not something I've ever seen before. Positions like analyst, engineer, business intelligence, revenue management, whatever you want to think of. Any corporate office job, people are suffering. The cost of living is absurd, buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income and it better be nearly six figure dual income....

I just don't see how Americans at large are going to survive the next 30 years?

Back in the medieval ages when a woman was married to a man, they were basically considered property for my understanding and treated like an extension of the man's person and family. So it was customary for women to take the man's last name since they were being joined to his family. But now here in the 21st century women are fully independent and last names don't really seem to mean much of anything. I mean what is Smith or McGregor or any last name really mean anymore? Especially in the digital age, lots of people have digital usernames like SarahSmith1727373. So the last name clearly doesn't mean much anymore.... Which leads me to wonder, why do the majority of women still take the man's last name? Especially when some of them have a horrible last name? I have seen some butt ass ugly last names recently, like Fink, Weimer, Slotsky/Slotsky, Hiscock (no joke this is a last name), Hardman.... And then you hear the woman's name and it's like something way more reasonable and less stupid sounding like Kingman, or Harrison, Walls, etc.

One thing I have struggled with lately is finding good games to play. I bounce around from game to game trying to enjoy it but it just doesn't scratch the itch like it used to. For example, one of my favorites was old school RuneScape, but it hasn't really been giving me the same enjoyment that it used to. So then I would open up World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, just playing a little bit of each game. Think maybe I need some new games to play but it's tough to find them these days.

So what are your favorite 1000+ hour games?

I have been really tempted to jump into VR for a little while now, I tried it when the quest first came out, the very first one but it was too blurry and made me dizzy. I've considered getting back into it again, but the thing that has made me really hesitant is I've heard that VR is not in the greatest place and that it's really tough to find good VR games to play. For example, there's Fallout and Skyrim VR but they're not really in good shape, and it takes a lot of modding and tweaking to get them to actually work properly. But I'm curious what other people think. Do you think VR is in a good enough place to be able to play it and enjoy it long-term? Or is it some sort of short-term hype thing?