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I had a terrible experience today. I do some work for a company and just recently decided I have to use company-provided laptop, so they sent me a very nice Lenovo IdeaPad Gamer laptop. I was happy about it because a lot of the work is in the field and my personal gear was getting banged up.

I was really irritated because I have to use Windows and this particular piece of shit demands that I have a Microsoft account to even begin configuring the laptop, so I created a throw-away account to get past that but that wasn’t enough, it wants a phone number too! I gave it a landline, see how they like that!

Then I switched off everything to do with location, ads and whatever else I could find but upon starting to browse the Internet I noticed that the browser (Edge) knows about my location and login credentials, so I decided to create another local account without any MS account, phone number or anything else and logged into that account.

Same shit, the freaking browser (and probably every other application) has too much information about location and login credentials. Funny, I went to download Chrome and the first result in the search was “Microsoft recommends Edge!” followed by a smallish window in the taskbar saying “Edge is here!”.

Anyway, does anyone know how to really nuke all the siphoning of data from Windows 10? Don’t tell me to use Linux, I already explained this equipment is not mine and it has to use Windows, and while I probably will not do anything personal in the laptop it bothers me no end that I have no say on what information is transmitted or to whom.

And to top it off, now Lenovo comes with its very own crapware demanding registration and showing what I call ads, even if it is for Lenovo services, I don’t want my computer (ok, not quite mine) used as a vehicle for free adverts. Even the screen background has (had) I big LENOVO label on it. I used to like Lenovo because their products came without all this crapware but I guess it is a race to get as much information as you can get from anyone using your products.

First, let’s define a tariff: A tax imposed by one country on the goods and services imported from another country. (If you want some examples, see here) Generally, the importer pays the tariff and passes its cost to the consumer, making the imported product more expensive.

Suppose you make widgets in Iowa, which you sell for a dollar each. After a while some competitor builds a factory in Bangladesh and starts competing with you by selling widgets for only 75 cents. Your business is tanking and so you cry to the government to slap a tariff on Bangladesh widgets of 30 cents to keep you manufacturing widgets in Iowa. It works, the imported widgets are more expensive, the jobs in Iowa are kept and you keep making a profit on your business.

What happens when no one in the country is making widgets? Tariffs don’t work, they just make widgets more expensive for consumers without keeping jobs or sustaining businesses.

That is what is happening now. Almost no electronic devices are manufactured in the U.S., slapping tariffs on such devices doesn’t help Americans, it hurts them. We are told that such tariffs will create new jobs when businessmen realize they would have a greater profit making them in the U.S. but clearly it isn’t working: production is moving to Vietnam, to bypass the tariffs.

Those jobs are not coming back. If tariffs are placed against Vietnam, the jobs will move to Cambodia o Myanmar or somewhere else. They will come back to the U.S. only when manufacturing is so automated that factories need only a handful of technicians to attend the robots doing the work.

I have heard recently people saying that the “leftists” are moving jobs out the U.S. and that is so ass-backwards that it isn’t even wrong: it is way off the mark. It is capitalists who in pursuit of profits moved those jobs outside the U.S. and then lobbied for “free trade” to allow them to sell those goods in the U.S. without incurring tariffs or quotas.

So if you want to blame someone for shipping jobs to other countries, blame the businessmen and the “free trade” they conjured to increase their profits.