Another thing is China kind of "herds" factory workers in a way the US cannot. For example, they limit housing options near factory towns so the space can be dedicated to factories, large-scale NIMBY-ism. If a company folds, workers' temporary mini-housing makes it logistically easier to move to a new town, but it's hard on families.

Thus, biz owners have a kind of de-facto slave class that's relatively easy to shift around as needed.

This is also a form of subsidizing industry. China has managed to combine capitalism and communism in ways that give it an advantage, or at least keep it a manufacturing superpower.

As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.

For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.

but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well.

Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable in the work-place. I knew cases where employees quit over frustration over replacement-ware, but management said "we are doing it anyhow, live or leave" (paraphrased).

And I'm surprised there are not products dedicated to big org financial analysis. There might be, but "we don't wanna learn something new" lobbying may be stopping it.

Excel probably has other scaling problems they didn't mention in the article but just learned work-arounds, yet they are likely stretching Excel to its limits risking more problems, familiarity or not. Oracle Essbase allegedly is a big-org financial modelling tool. I don't like Oracle the company, but Essbase & competitors may be a better tool for that particular job. See what other big orgs use.

news at 11

Palestine/Israel is 100% over water and other aspects of the lebensraum, like cleansing land to settle near water.

There's still an active export market for Canadian oil, and the whole point of this action is to address outrage in the Western provinces over stagnation being forced on them by Ottawa. Expanding oil production and exports has nothing to do with "ceding ground to other countries".

Soo, how would they "subsidize everything"? I mean, where would the money come from? Materializes out of thin air?

Joke is on him. Steam allows refunds. And they get used.

And buy the slop before they know! Great business idea!

I guess this asshole does not know that Steam does refunds and often does refunds far beyond the "2h played" official limit. I have used it several times, never an issue.

But it still means some diversification in the more general landscape. It also means they can now, for a while, move again with lower effort.

While Google is probably not the best choice, the move also causes increased flexibility. They will now, for a while, be able to move again with relatively low effort.

That the move is difficult just shows how direly needed it is.

which matches their brain-cell count

If you are an inventor or any kind of "creative", and you get AI to make something cool, take credit for it as a human, you don't have to tell anybody its from AI. If somebody spots AI artifacts, just say "I used AI to assist me".

Committees can convolutize anything. Some mamby pamby or non-IT manager won't say "no" and so every feature requests ends up in the spec, making a mess. Good managers know when to say "no".