Depends on how much of their money is liquid or in non-tech assets. It doesn’t matter that the tech sector gets hit the hardest if they’re certain that they can get it to bounce back by the time they’ve bought out companies in other sectors.

Crashing the economy lets them buy companies for cheap so they’ll concentrate even more wealth onto themselves when the economy rebounds.

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.

Travel back in time and make our economy less export-oriented. The one-two punch of China losing interest in German cars and Trump getting elected and intending to impose harsh tariffs ('cause that worked out so well last time) is definitely hurting business. The export-oriented economy worked out really well so far but right now there’s no sufficiently wealthy market to pivot to so a downturn is very likely.

This goes beyond cars and car-related companies. Hidden champions also tend to make a lot of money from exports although they’re also exactly the reason why those tariffs are going to hurt the USA. A bad export situation in both the USA and China is going to be painful for a lot of companies.

It’s not all doom and gloom but we’re definitely going to have a few lean years in the near future.

Other people might also bring up our long-time energy dependency on Russia but I think that’s only a relatively minor contributing factor.

True. Just this weekend I spent far too much time trying to get a printer to work again on Windows after its IP address got changed. In the end Windows refused to talk to the printer unless I removed and then readded the device from the Settings app, which prompted a reinstallation of the device driver. No, just changing the IP address in the device settings wasn’t enough; Windows insisted on the driver being reinstalled.

Linux didn’t need reconfiguration; it just autodetected that the printer had moved.

I’m not saying that Linux is without issues, not by far. But Windows has never been terribly “it just works” for me either. The closest to “it just works” was (aptly) OS X somewhere around Snow Leopard.