I've been doing my part; cracked open the N64 and booted up GoldenEye so I could reconnect with Surface and Surface2 levels in prep for whiteout disorientation and parkas.
Oracle exists solely on inertia and big, dumb, uninformed customers. They were an early mover in the space for erp, and then they tried to develop everything else. I work in HR and filter out jobs where "PeopleSoft" is their product as it's so monumentally unfit for human and operational use and eats up all technical, financial and employee resources to try to make it do simple, common things. Companies spend far more training, hiring consultants (because the product is unintuitive and limited in functionality) to operate the system and "customizations" that take years to build and a cadre of expensive folks to keep running is not the exception but the standard. If you see "Oracle" or "PeopleSoft" in the URL for a job application, run far, far away.
20 years ago only big companies had a need for the scale of an erp, and unfortunately many of them went with Oracle. SAP was the other dog and while similarly unintuitive at least worked well at what it did, bless the Germans. There are soooo many better, more flexible more intuitive, modern products that users can learn and use to choose from, only the truly hopeless are still using Oracle products for ERP and HRIS.
The most insidious part of Oracle is that because of how difficult it is to use, change, modify and learn, the people responsible for changing these systems experience Stockholm syndrome where they don't want to change to a better system. All they know is failure, pain, lack of comprehension and lack of understanding of products and the thought of starting over in another system mortifies them, and so they become the barrier to telling Oracle to piss off.
No, then you allow employers to export their job risk cost to others. Employers should pay for injuries and illness caused by work (if care was required it would be great if universal existed).
That said, yes lots of WC is shitty insurers trying toinimize care/cost and get the person back to work.
The article refers to "credit card balance", which aligns to the standard industry statistic of whether a consumer carries a balance (doesn't pay off their card in full each month, pays interest, gets hosed, is incredibly profitable for banks) or doesn't (what the credit card companies refer to as a "deadbeat" as they don't generate much profit and some even are a loss.
That said, who cares about a selection bias volunteer survey with the sample size of an Elememtary school? 1,000 people, seriously? The hell is this 1925? Bullshit non-data and article.
It's a slippery, accelerative slope. Companies never would have price gouged the way they did during and after COVID 30 years ago; they didn't have the technology, data and also lack of fear of antitrust. Each new cohort gets worse in company practices and voila!
Everyone always also sees themselves on the lifeboat, not being the one who pays the piper. Just like the 70% of lottery players who think they will win.
You will see relative pittance for lower tax brackets, millions and billions for the wealthy. What's worse, critical services that will be cut to find these tax cuts, and then what will come next. They will cut Medicare, raise the social security age which is a benefit cut all to give just that much more to the ultra wealthy.
No. You pay a lower percentage in lower brackets. Most people don't make it to the higher ones. A 1% difference in a normal tax bracket might mean a difference of a few thousand dollars in taxes. At high levels of wealth, 1% of millions is a shitload of savings, which is why it's always pointed out that the wealthy disproportionately receive most of the benefits of tax cuts. There is no reason it has to be like this, their benefit could be capped at a hard dollar amount.
Tax brackets are also not connected. A common misconception is that when you go over a bracket limit into the next one suddenly all your income is taxed at that rate. This is incorrect. Your tax rate changed for each amount in that bracket and nothing above or below it, referred to as "marginal". If the first tax bracket has a 0% tax rate and 2nd tax bracket has a rate of 5% starts at $10,000 and your income is $12,000, you don't pay taxes of 5% of $12,000, you pay 0% for $10k and 5% of $2k.
One of the other major problems is that in the last 40 years the fusion of corporate power and political party purchase by lobby and corruption has us currently with some of the lowest maximum tax rates in history. Just 5 or 6 decades ago, normal tax rates were 50+% on the ultra wealthy. They're now 37 and will be cut further. The super wealthy don't even have regular "income" but earn from investments and may only pay 15% tax rate as they've lobbied for this exception. Their rate of 15% is of course before all the loopholes and lack of IRS staffing to enforce tax law, which disproportionately benefits the very wealthy.
Yeah, it's all just creepy, anxiety inducing design to force interaction. Ask most people and they feel pressured to respond to texts--and that was even before rcs.
I was indeed auto-ed. Which is why, when anyone says trust our future to AI, I point out LLMs can't even get simple things like that correct but they want to fly nuke plane missions unmanned.
National security priorities definitely in order.