> AMD had 2020 revenues of $9.76bln to Intel's $77.87bln.

Ever heard of a solar eclipse? ;)

I wouldn’t judge ravens too harshly. Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan were notorious for booby-trapping bodies in order to take out first responders - so humans are clearly not impervious to making the same mistake.

> If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?

The contention was definitely whether it has been a welfare state ever since its founding. No judgement though - the English language is terribly poorly designed, so I can totally understand how you read it that way.

The former sounds like a makefile, and the latter sounds like a Terraform plan (perhaps combined with something like Kubernetes manifests, but that’s getting more architecture-specific). These days I don’t think there’s any excuse to use the point-and-click approach for setting up infrastructure: it’s effortful, bug-prone, a security hazard, means everyone has to be trained in yet another area, and risks accidentally spending far more money than you intend (either by using surprisingly expensive services like Spanner, or by inadvertently leaving unused infrastructure running).

That said, I do agree that platforms like AWS are unnecessarily complex for the vast majority of CRUD web developers. The complexity makes sense for the small percentage of people who are genuinely setting up a very idiosyncratic and unique architecture, but the 98% of CRUD developers really need an opinionated platform, perhaps built on top of AWS/GCP/Azure and modelled on v1 platforms like Heroku, which would set up the infrastructure you need for the average web backend.

I have huge sympathy for human beings who are unable to work, and a humane society should provide for them, but I don’t see why it falls to Apple. This kind of populism (“person X or company Y should be arbitrarily forced to pay for thing Z, ultra vires, because they can”) feels like a lazy way to avoid solving a deeper societal problem which goes well beyond this one person.

The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.

And then, as I should have foreseen, they demanded all communications within the company relating to their lawsuit. I’m not a lawyer, but, for whatever reason, our lawyers considered it to be within their rights; I’m sure it wouldn’t have applied to privileged legal discussions, but we were just code monkeys so I suppose our chat logs were fair game. I’m never doing that again. I don’t think their lawsuit went anywhere, but it was mortifying all the same, especially considering our brand was quite a friendly and liberal one.

For what it’s worth, you almost certainly mean ‘tenets’. I don’t know why, but this malapropism has become increasingly common. Tenants are people who rent a property.

Your reply talks about other families who lie and state a false cause of death, which would be morally wrong but in this case is completely irrelevant because that's not what's happened.

The one bit of your comment which is relevant, I think, is wrong: namely "the prevalence needs to made public so we treat these things like the crisis they are". We have anonymised statistics on suicide and overdose deaths. That is not the same as demanding a specific person's cause of death - and the sense of generalised academic interest you're alluding to is plainly not the reason for which people are curious about how he died. I wish we would get a grip on ourselves here, because it must be upsetting for anyone who knew him and is reading these comments, as surely some of those people are.

Edit: I died of a heroin overdose, briefly, before I was resuscitated. If I'd died permanently, my family may well have wanted to keep that information off the record permanently (easier in my case of course because I'm not a public figure). It's easy to think in the age of Wikipedia that all information is in the public domain and belongs to everyone. It's not, and it doesn't.