The large renewal "uplift" is partly a strategy to get in front of the C levels and board of directors.
I heard of a one billion dollar renewal quote from Broadcom. The company didn't pay anything close to that. But it bypassed middle mgmt... Not exactly sure what the overall strategy is here, but this is not an isolated incident.
In terms of the RCMP and their aggressive behaviour. It makes perfect sense. First Nations people have not been treated well by the RCMP or LE for a very long time in Canada... This still persists to this day, systematic discrimination and all that stuff.
This doesn't change anything in terms of hospital capacities here. The surgery backlog is massive, the hospitals are overrun with covid patients. Taking additional precautions is an attempt to try to protect the larger populations access to healthcare.
In lots of countries any form of unwanted direct or indirect contact would be considered assault. So by trying to force the mic away, she could have been charged with assault! If the mic is someone else's property and he would not give it up, the police would have the right to make unwanted contact to get it back.
Ideas like this are always presented as a "common sense" solution like "let's reduce welfare fraud" and no one would disagree with that, and then in actual implementation it ends up being "let's target poor people, people of color, and immigrant families" even if that's not what was intended from the start.
I fail to see how fixing broken homes (which we don't have a ready-made solution for) is an easier solution than making school more helpful to kids (one solution to which is what this article is about), so I don't think the parent's argument is made in good faith.
But does the i9 version have performance issues (i.e. it under performs compared to the i7)? The XPS 15 with the i9 configuration comes with 32GB ram and it much cheaper than an equivalent macbook pro. I can deal with it getting hot!
The XPS 15 i9 does do a bit of throttling, but off the boost clock (it manages to mostly stick to 4GHz in the stress test that Lee shows) while the MBP i9 apparently can't even maintain the 2.9GHz base clock.
That, along with performance that's below the previous-gen i7 but charging $300 more is the real kicker - honestly, I'm not sure how anyone at Apple would be able to justify that as not just bilking their customers out of money.
It seems like these days, the mantra is "buyer beware" if you're looking to buy a Mac.
IMO the last good laptops Apple made were the pre-Touch Bar Retina MBPs. I've used three different ones, two for work and one that I purchased myself, and they were all solid performers with excellent screens, excellent keyboards, excellent performance, adequate ports, and adequate portability. The new MacBook, with its terrible everything-aside-from-thickness-and-weight, showed that Apple has lost interest in making a usable laptop in favor of any kind of differentiation they can get. Even if it's pointless or apparently even worse than nothing.
A couple of weeks into f/t use, mine (XPS 15" 9570, i9, 32GB RAM) doesn't get hot at all (fairly typical dev stuff - Docker, VMs, browsers, IntelliJ). It throttles intermittently, for short periods (perhaps 5% of the time) under a stress test.
