The police are an income source since they can confiscate property and create legal slaves.

The fire department is pretty much a pure cost center.

Personally I would’ve gone with a Protection Racket metaphor.

Yeah.

Those of us paying attention have spotted long ago that the Ju$tice System is mainly a tool for violent enforcement of the power of the moneyed and well-connected elites on the majority of the population behind a charade of “rules are rules” and it being just an independent and a fair mechanism for equal application of the “rules defined by Society” to all (all of which is nowadays and in a painlfully obvious way, clearly a bundle of lies).

All it takes is comparing how the Ju$tice System reacts to merelly the peons breaching uneven contracts with big companies or to the occupation of the property of the very wealthy by the poor, compared to how it reacts to violent crime in poor neighbourhoods, to see how their Ju$tice is not in any way form or shape Fair or Just.

Maybe it’s less so in some countries and more so in others, but nowhere is it actually fair and independent.

Just force them to use open standards and for it to be easy for people to move platform whilst keeping all the connections to their profile: the power of such social media entities is that people are locked-in because if they move they lose the connections of both followers and those they follow, which often means family and friends.

Basically a solution similar to that adopted in Europe for phone numbers - that you can take your number with you when you move providers - would reduced social media companies down to “just a pipe for social media connectivity” which would ultimatelly kill those with the worst practices given that the barrier to entry to be a “social media provider” is way lower than to be a fixed line telephony provider.

When in practice Corruption is not investigated or prosecuted, nobody ever gets convicted of Corruption, the Media can’t talk about Corruption as it would otherwise be defamation, hence the country has no Corruption.

I haven’t lived in the US but I lived in the UK and this was exactly how Britain had “no Corruption”.

I’m sure buying them is generally easier, this being the United States Of America.

I’ve lived in The Netherlands and they’re “complicated” if you’re used to, for example, English-style of politeness or even Mediterranean-style exuberance.

They tend to be very direct, objective-oriented and seemingly cold/closed towards strangers (they open up more with friends and family), so for example if you’re in a work environment and one person’s trying to do things in broken Dutch is hindering the actual accomplishment of the work objectives (for example, in a work meeting), that will probably be pointed out to them, though I’ve never seen it done so rudelly.

They also tend to be pretty proud of their English-language speaking abilities and when you’re just learning Dutch and try to speak to them in it, often switch to English when they spot (from the accent) that somebody comes from an English-speaking country (so for me, who am Portuguese, they didn’t tend to do it and I could just silently ignore it when they did because they couldn’t be sure I actually knew English, but I had friends and colleagues over there from Britain, US and Australia who constantly got that and for whom it was a lot harder to learn the local language), though I don’t think that applies in your example.

It bet that happenned in a professional environment or some kind of professional situation.

That said, that specific telling off would be considered rude even in Dutch terms: if a person’s attempts at using Dutch are hindering doing the work, one is supposed to tell them that as the reason to switch to English (say, “other people are waiting behind you in the queue” or “we don’t have time to do this meeting in Dutch”, though one will probably not get a “I’m sorry but” or “I’m afraid that” or other such decorations to soften the blow which you would get in most other countries. In that quote of yours the other person making it about themselves “I’m not your Dutch teacher” and just bossing the other person “we will”(!), would be considered rude even by Dutch standards IMHO.

Personally (and note that I lived over 8 years in the Netherlands and do speak the language), had somebody told me off like that my reaction would probably be to not give a shit and carry on speaking Dutch since that person made it about themselves and I’m just as entitled to do it the way I see fit as they are to do it their way and I very much suspect (can’t be totally sure) this reaction comes from that part of me that are the elements of the Dutch mindset I’ve taken in from having lived there so long (certainly the whole “I’m just as entitled to my preferences as you to yours” feels very Dutch).

During the period when I was starting to learn Dutch on various occasions the other person switched to English (probably because my Dutch was really bad or I was having trouble following them) and I just kept on speaking Dutch, and I think I was once or twice told off for trying to say something complex with my really broken Dutch whilst buying something and I was holding the queue, but they simply pointed out I was holding the queue.

It’s funny that I’ve never had bad experiences with the French and most of my visits to France were to Paris.

Then again I do speak French and try and take advantage of being over there to exercise my language knowledge in it as much as I can.

In my experience people almost everywhere (well, not in English-speaking countries, probably because English is the present day lingua franca so it’s kinda expected that you can speak it) generally appreciate you trying to speak their language even if you’re pretty bad at it and just trying to learn the local “good day”, " goodbye" and “thank you” will get you a lot of goodwill.

What I find delicious is that he is implicitly stating that being on any Meta platform is not virtuous.

Just adding to it from the other side (ish) of it.

The point being that what you describe is a broader phenomenon and that, at least amongst Techies, taking in account the point of view of the people on the other side and chosing objective-oriented language with minimal or no social niceties if you figure out they’re constrained in the time they have for handling messages like the one you’re sending, is something one learns rather than coming naturally.

Same kind of thing applies, for example, when applying to certain jobs: in your cover letter of even CV you put all the stuff they care about for baseline selection upfront and the kind of stuff that matters “if they’re interested” comes afterwards so that if it’s clearly not a fit people’s time doesn’t get wasted. It’s nice for the people on the other side and, as somebody who has been on the other side, this is appreciated and shows professionalism which will help the candidate out if they do seem interesting from reading that baseline selection info.

Not the same thing as your specific situation but same pattern, IMHO.

At some point in my career I worked in Investment Banking making custom software directly for people like Traders (so in the are of IT in that industry that’s called the Front Office)

Traders have almost no free time, hence no time for social niceties, plus they’re “the business” which is the reason for Front Office IT to exist and for whom it works, so eventually you just have to figure out their point of view and that the only way you can do the part of your work that requires interacting with them (to figure out what they need or letting them know what’s now available for them to use) is to use straightforward objective-oriented talks like that.

It was actually quite a learning experience for me as a techie to learn how to interact with time constrained people who aren’t going to change to suit you, in a way that best does what’s needed for both.

… is it me you’re looking for?

If you look at the circuit diagram in their documentation linked from that article, that thing doesn’t even support USB-PD or even just the USB 1.0 device side of the negotiation to increase the current limit from the default (150mA in USB 3) to high (900mA in USB 3). It will look like it works fine if you connect it to a dumb USB power supply (because those thing don’t really do any USB protocol stuff, just dumbly supply power over USB connectors up to the power source’s limit) but if you connect it to, say, a PC USB port (which does implement the USB host side of the USB protocol), your circuit on the breadboard that worked fine when using a dumb USB power supply with that breadboard adaptor might not work because the current it needs exceeds that default 150mA limit for devices that haven’t done USB negotiation (worse if it’s a USB 2.0 port, as the limit is lower for those)

This thing is basically the same as the chinese power breadboard adaptors you can get in places like Aliexpress, but with a USB-C connector instead of a Type-A, micro-USB or mini-USB one, plus its better designed (it has a proper Buck Converter instead of a cheap Votage Regulator, plus better power supply filtering and a polyfuse to protect it and the host from current overdraws).

The headline and the article seriously exagerate this “achievement”.

TL;DR - It’s a nice and pretty run of the mill breadboard power adaptor which happens to support USB-C connectors, but the article and its title insanely oversell the thing.

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This is not exact as amazing an achievement as the headline implies since the necessary stuff to talk the to the USB PD host upstream is already integrated so you just need to get a chip that does it (and even without it, you’ll get 150mA @ 5V by default out of the USB 3 host upstream and up to 900mA with some pretty basic USB negotiation in a protocol that dates from USB 1.0 and for which there have long been integrated solutions for both the device and the host sides).

Further, the converting of those 5V to 3.3V just requires a buck converter or even just a voltage regulator (though this latter option is less efficient), for which there are already lots of integrated solutions available for peanuts and where the entire circuit block needed to support them is detailed in the datasheet for that converter.

Looking at the circuit diagram for this (linked to from the article), they’re not even doing the USB PD negotiation or any kind of USB 1.0 negotiation, so this thing will be limited to 150mA for a USB 3 host or whatever current your traditional USB power source can supply (as those power sources really just do power supply of whatever amperage they support over a cable which happen to have USB connectors, rather than including a genuine implementation of an USB host with current limiting depending on negotiation with the USB device, so such power sources don’t require the device to do any USB negotiation to increase the current limit above 150mA).

This is really “yet another run of the mill USB power breadboard adaptor” only the USB plug is USB-C rather than mini-USB or micro-USB (so, a different plug plus a handfull of minor components as per the standard of the circuitry to properly support it), so pretty much the same as the cheap chinese ones you can get from Aliexpress, though this one uses a Buck Converter rather than the $0.1 Voltage Regulator in most of the chinese boards, and actually does proper filtering of power supply noise and proper protection against over current, so it is a quality design for such things, though it’s not really a major advancement.

Without the USB PD stuff I wouldn’t really say that it brings USB-C Power to the breadboard (in the sense of, as many would expect, being able to draw a proper amount of power from a modern USB 3.0 power brick that supports USB-C), more something with a USB-C connector that brings power to the motherboard, as that connector is really the total sum of what it supports from the modern USB spec.

What would really be nice would be something that does talk USB-PD to the upstream host AND can convert down from the 20V at which it supplies peak power, so that you can take advantage of the juicy, juicy (oh so juicy!) capability of USB-PD to supply power (up to 100W right now, which will be up to 250W with USB 4), though if you’re pulling 100W (which at 5V means 20A, which is a stupidly high current that will melt most components in a typical digital circuit) from you breadboard power adaptor, then I’m pretty sure magic smoke is being released from at least one of the components on that breadboard and, by the way, you’re probably damaging the power rail of that breadboard (aah, the sweet smell of burnt plastic when you turn the power on for your half-arsed experimental circuit!!!)