If your employer wants to spend its money on certification, by all means go for it

For real, if you haven’t already try to find every bit of employer-paid training that’s available, it’s worth looking into. My workplace has a corp Microsoft learning account that will pay for one certification test a year, and other deals with online training platforms for free classes that don’t result in “certificates” exactly, but do provided verifiable proof of completion you can post to your LinkedIn or socials. (The real benefit is the knowledge you gain of course, but it’s nice to have some acknowledgment of what you’ve learned.)

Time spent in pleasure is never wasted.

showing people ads is not anti-competitive

Sure. Sort of. But this isn’t about competition per se, it’s about abuse of an already dominant market position.

The ultimate purpose of ensuring competitive markets wherever possible is to protect and benefit consumers. Since firms that dominate their markets tend abuse that position to price-gouge or reduce the quality of their products without fear that their customers will go elsewhere – because they can’t – foiling anti-competitive practices is part of that consumer protection mandate – but only part. Preventing harm being done to consumers by market-dominating firms once they’ve attained that position is another part.

The fact that Microsoft has so many of their users captive (because their job makes them use Windows, or because it runs software they can’t get elsewhere, etc.) and is now forcing exposure to advertising upon them should run afoul of the consumer protection goals of anti-trust law.

The fact that they were once brought to heel just for bundling a browser that you could completely ignore with Windows, and yet face no regulatory blowback from literally forcing their captive audience to view advertising is what irritates me to no end.

Live Forever, by Oasis.

I dunno, but it might have something to do with external factors. Like, once upon a time Microsoft was sued by the US government under anti-trust laws for bundling a web browser in their operating system. Now MS force their users to experience unavoidable advertising when they try to use their own computers, and there’s not a peep from regulators.

“Guess what?”

“What?”

“CHICKEN BUTT!”