Europe is still dependent on Russian oil and gas especially during winter. This was by design it was supposed to create an interdependency that would moderate Russia's extremism and eventually lead to them becoming a proper Democratic state. It didn't work because dictators go really fucking crazy especially in their old age. Dictators are often extremely incompetent at everything except violence and holding power.

And they implicate Trump in pedophilia and child rape. We learned that from the Epstein file leaks we already have.

We all had a good laugh about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Donald Trump giving Clinton a blowjob but that was obviously just an exaggeration for a fact. The real takeaway is that Jeffrey Epstein knew that Trump had compromat in the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

It's painfully obvious that Epstein didn't kill himself. He had a ton of leverage against the president of the United States and would have been expecting to get a pardon out of that.

I don't think the details are relevant the takeaway here is that the ruling elites fuck kids a lot and we have to decide whether or not that's a problem or not.

Because there's a whole shitload of people who take the attitude of "if there's grass on the field play ball" which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds. And some of those people are probably family members of ours.

The only reason anyone would even think about adding "Russia" to that list is because the current elderly resident of the White House has a hard-on for Putin.

Militarily, Russia has demonstrated it has a hard time defeating a country 1/10 of its size.

Technologically, Russia is so far behind, it's had to rely on equipment being manufactured by Iran and North Korea (neither of which is "first world").

Economically, yeah I'm not even gonna bother with that one, even their sycophants know Russia is a basket case.

Looks like cheeto is siding with Russia now https://www.telegraph.co.uk/wo...

So, fans of MAGA, do you remember when Reagan gave his Evil Empire speech?

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.

Because there is no Central authority for open source software it's basically impossible to get good administrative tools for it.

So for example it becomes really really hard to enforce document labeling for different classes of document at different security levels for your company.

This is before we talk about the mess that is active directory equivalence under linux.

I don't really see any solution. Maybe if Microsoft wasn't able to do all the antitrust violations so that a company could come along and build up Linux into something but every time anyone tries to that all gets shut down by buyouts and mergers and other nasty little tricks.

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.

Because it would get swamped out with the sheer amount of foreign content. Canada has had a similar law for decades and it works rather well.

You would really benefit from some self reflection.

My wife and I just finished watching the Australian version of Ghosts and it was great.

When a cop asks you what time it is, simply respond: "I do not answer questions and I invoke my to remain silent."

Oh dear, I might find myself in a bit of trouble then.

Xi is absolute dictator of China now. So they can easily quell any social unrest with violence.

That's why you're seeing this now. It's because the elites of China have control of the situation whereas before they didn't

Stepped in and prevented companies from automating factory jobs in order to prevent social unrest. Now that Xi is an absolute dictator they're not as concerned as they used to be and they are moving to automate.

I've said it before but if you Google you will find an article about how 70% of middle class jobs in America got taken by automation since 1980.

Automation has devoured the middle class. We can't do anything about it because there really isn't a solution.

Nobody is going to redistribute wealth because that feels bad. If you take money from me to give it to somebody else that just feels awful and if you do it to somebody who's rich most people think you're going to do it to them next. It doesn't help that there is a shitload of propaganda reinforcing these ideas.

How many people here are chomping at the bit to had more means testing to government programs? It's basically lizard brain. It doesn't feel fair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn't.

That's another major problem we are going to have a huge disparity where you have people we need to do work and people who we just don't have any work for. We are going to have tens of millions of basically useless people.

Traditionally when this happens it's accompanied by food shortages but technology has solved that. So now the work itself is the limited resource.

I really don't know any solution and I think we're just going to have a giant world war eventually going nuclear possibly or even probably wiping out our species. Happy to be proven wrong though.

The number of violent conflicts is only going to increase from now on. Climate change is only causing things to shift and our water management practices are not very good to start with.