Luigi will always be in our hearts.

Yes. They need to move quickly. Public opinion is already shifting against Trump and Musk, and right now they are vulnerable.

No no, we should be praising him. Clearly he needs a designated driver.

I don’t think they are trying to sabotage their own products. It really is that they’re not smart enough to see where is the value is. And this is kind of understandable, right? The underlying software has been copied already. It’s out there. If that company has value it’s only the user base. But that puts management in the strange situation where everything they are doing to make money is making their own product worse. And they kind of know it, right? But they can’t admit it. They can’t think about it clear. Their own mental stability relies on ignoring the obvious truths that they see and read every day.

“risking”? No no no. “promising”

Well now they are not getting the money. So their loophole did not work so well.

And risk losing the money? No, my friend. Safer to assume it’s fraud.

What the fuck headline is that. No, we haven’t done that, because we’re careful about that shit.

My friend, FOSS has been readily available for more than a decade. Whether it’s LibreOffice or the GIMP or VLC or whatever, these are very old pieces of software.

It’s not taking off now. It already did. But now you personally are noticing. :-)

Zotero is the tool you want. It works perfectly.

The formatting… The formatting that you can easily modify. Sigh. It takes two minutes, my friend.

Anyway, you do you.

If that’s his best he needs a new career and a new brain

You see a bug, he sees a feature. What kind of government does he want? Just listen to him. Believe him the first time, as they say.

No, it can’t. Passports take months to get and cost money, for example. Disenfranchisement of the poor.

Also, why would Trump stop here? Wannabe dictators never let opponents compete fairly. If you overcome this hurdle, he’ll just make another ruling designed to undercut your vote. That’s why we need to fight against all of his changes. The power grab itself is the existential threat, not the individual action.

I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.

Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.

But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.

Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.

So then all of those people who did it and acted on it were kidnapping. Great, lock them up.

Because you have to pay taxes including the very incredibly expensive purchase tax and annual property tax. And you lack a visa.

I agree with your conclusion. It was the statement in the middle, where you said you would be hard-pressed to find people who wanted the government to be efficient and without waste, that’s the statement where I’m telling you that here I am saying I don’t need a government that’s efficient and I don’t mind a government that has some waste. I really don’t.

What I do mind is a government that’s inefficient and wasteful in ways that are throwing money at the rich. That’s something I mind a lot. Certainly we both agree that we shouldn’t be trying to crack down so hard that we’re depriving people of support that they clearly ought to be receiving based on the law and morality.

Let me go an obvious step farther. Suppose there’s some office somewhere that has 100 employees and they might be able to get by with 95 if they streamlined their process. And maybe those employees are making $40K or $60K whatever. I’m just not hugely worried about that 5% inefficiency. I’m happy enough knowing that they’re probably supporting themselves and pushing that money right back into the local community. I’m also happy knowing that if you tried to replace them with a private company, it would cost twice as much and you would get a fraction of the service. People love to talk about the magic number, efficiency, but most of us are not living to be efficient. We have other goals in life. The actually important things. That’s what our governments should be pushing for. When efficiency is a reasonable step towards making life better for the people who live in that country, then we can focus on efficiency, but we should never ever think that efficiency is the goal when so often it’s the opposite of the goal.