I’m tacking on this opinion article from 2020 with a few good examples/explanations of how bad stock buybacks are in the long term.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2020/05/13/stock-buybacks-are-banned-let-it-be-a-trend/
Boeing and general electric are of course mentioned. The line goes up, until it doesn’t. The key to being a successful CEO, seems to be, to be the one making the line go up and then gtfo before it comes crashing down.
History is written by the victors.
14 to 16h is too short for a default. Not everyone will (or even has) the ability to take out their smartphone multiple times per day every day to catch up with the news. Someone who will only read it during the evening, would need posts to stay up 24 to 26h. So that to me is the minimum. Personally I don’t mind if they stay up longer, there might be new interesting top comments if the post itself stays on top longer.
This pier has got to be one of the most expensive examples of virtue signaling ever. Since Israel controls the land that the pier connects to, aid that comes off this pier would always get the exact same treatment as aid that hits an Israeli overland checkpoint, the pier is a pointless + very costly edifice.
Imo the only reason that it exists is so that the USA government can claim to be helping by throwing money at the problem, without actually doing anything about the problem.
Not ibm. You might be thinking of Bell: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Episode 3 of season 6 is such an outlier. Too much romance for the Simpsons audience apparently.
I think we really underestimate the amount of trolling that professional trolls do, I don’t think the amount of useful idiots online is that big. While the Russian IRA was knocked offline during the 2018 usa elections, I found that the discourse on reddit was radically different. Subreddits like walkaway or the Donald were suddenly absent from my front page and discussions seemed more civil.
A professional working a 9-5 job of making troll posts, who is using professional tools, who has scores of accounts and spreadsheets with prepared talking points that are based on data analysis, who is working to hit kpi, … That single professional is able to make a lot more posts and have a much bigger impact than a large group of geezers shitposting on their smartphones.
A recurring theme with hard brexiteers was that making “short term” sacrifices was worth it for “reclaiming sovereignty”, which would magically lead to more prosperity in the “long term”. To some, (others) being worse off than before, is a price they’d gladly (let others) pay if it would allow “their team” to score a victory.
In the Usa there’s people cheering for Russia, for the downfall of USA democracy and for Trump to be king. These are such extreme standpoints that it’s hard to believe that they would be serious, but when you see them on camera, then it’s obvious that they are true believers and that they’re not being sarcastic. If those people are real, then I can easily imagine some spiteful british person saying unironically that being worse off now, is a sacrifice that they’re willing to make for “reclaiming sovereignty”. Especially if it’s online and they actually live and work in Sint-Petersburg.
In a world where The Onion cannot make up news that is crazier than the actual news, irony is always going to have hard time.
There are people who actually believe what you had posted, so without additional cues that it’s intended as sarcasm (like starting with Hur Dur or ending with /s), it’s anyone’s guess what you actually meant. In person sarcasm works better because we can easily add physical cues, but on the internet it’s best made very obvious imo.
By blindly supporting Israel, Germany is making themselves complicit in all crimes committed by Israel. Because of how blindly and willfully Germany is walking into helping with the in progress ethnic cleansing, the slogan “never again” has never sounded so empty to me before.
I’m going to second this: a few pairs of Crocs, each placed at a strategic exit and going outside for a few minutes is no inconvenience at all anymore. For anything that takes longer than that, I put on suitable footwear for whatever I’ll be doing.
I’m not using it anymore, I just tested it to see if I could propose it as a substitute. In my testing I tried both open and ms formats: I started with old excel files which didn’t work well, so then I tried open format files that were build up from a clean slate state, with the data imported from CSV files. After that didn’t perform satisfactory either, I turned to the internet. After searching for the major issue that I encountered (slow in a large sheet), I came to the conclusion that calc could not be a full substitute for excell, so I never proposed it and we’re still using ms office to this day.
I’m just going to copypaste some other people’s thoughts with which I agree, saving me a bit of time:
*"If you work at a large company for a while you’ll encounter a class of user that Calc doesn’t really address. They’re like super-specialists. They often have a deep knowledge of Excel, but are otherwise completely computer illiterate. They also work with large datasets and specific models. Calc isn’t a replacement for them. Not just on a feature level, but on an accessibility level.
Look for Excel resources. Classes, books, articles, howtos, everywhere. Do the same for Calc and you’ll struggle a lot more. There is stuff there, but it just isn’t nearly as professional and rich. There is no great way to transition Excel users to Calc users and have them still be as productive.
In the Linux world, when we get those style of work-loads we generally put aside Calc / Excel as a tool and begin looking at programming languages (e.g., Python, Matlab). I feel like this somewhat handicaps our ability to reach those users.
for basic use though, it’s perfectly acceptable. I just wouldn’t consider it a poweruser tool, and those power users are what make Office a multibillion dollar product for MS."*
*"Sadly, it’s just not there in book.
The only time I try to use LOCALC is when I have a few hundreds/thousands of rows of formatted values to sort into a simple graph and performance is just abysmal.
I just tried again earlier this day and though most daily features are there for your regular user, all my “casual” uses of it ended up underlining the severe performance problems.
Maybe my uses are far more corner case than I believe…"*
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9yjwyf/is_libreoffice_calc_truly_a_worthy_replacement/
Those are ideological reasons though and me calling them idealogical does not mean that I dismiss them as valid reasons. Idealogy in itself is not a bad thing and it should certainly have a part in decision making.
Where we differ in opinion is in which should take priority: I’m of the opinion that practicality should trump ideology (in this case), while you find the idealogical reasons more important.
The money that will be saved is peanuts compared to the cost of the workers. Loss of productivity through the implementation of bad tools can be very costly. The various Microsoft Office programs also offer the possibility to add bespoke features. Microsoft Office does not leak data unless you chose to let it do so, at least in the eu.
Optimizations that might happen once a program with unacceptable performance is in a production environment, are generally optimizations that never happen. I’ve never seen a program make such a turnaround, it’s wishful thinking without a basis in reality.
This thing really is set up for failure. I’m not against organisations moving away from products from large monopolistic companies, rather the opposite, I’m very much in favor. But if the move is done in such a way that it’s bound to fail and then cement itself into people’s mind as a bad thing, then it has accomplished the opposite of what it has set out to do. Right now Linux is ready for widespread adoption in environments where productivity matters, but in my experience libre office is not.
The last time I tried it, which is now a few years ago, LibreOffice Calc was substantially slower than Excell for larger spreadsheets. Like a difference between night and day, it was no acceptable substitute if productivity was a concern, which it usually is.
Imo a big swoop change like this, which is done for ideological reasons, but without practical considerations, is doomed to fail and leave a lasting bad impression in peoples’ minds. Imo it would have been far better to only drop windows 10/11 for a familiar looking Linux distro, while continuing to use Microsoft Office.
Looks pretty clean, and with a proper search in the app drawer. If I wasn’t so lazy and set in my ways, I’d switch :)
Sorry about making a repeat post earlier, I hadn’t seen the other posts that suggested using launchers. I think my sync might be a bit slow with syncing posts.
There’s a few android launchers that emulate the metro ui. I use the Square Home one and I have no complaints.
USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.
Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.