And the Russian people continue to endure despite their quality of life falling through the floor, runaway inflation, an inability to buy foreign goods and services, an inability to travel freely, and having to deal with an infinite number of flight delays for those who can still afford to travel to other countries.

I'm struggling to understand who still supports any of this. It's not enough to be a vatnik anymore; you have to be a literally insane vatnik.

Perhaps because it's not as bad as some media commentators think? The BBC's Steve Rosenberg has some of the best reports I've seen from Russia. They've had high inflation for all the years I've had teams there (2014). Hardware isn't really a problem to acquire. In fact, I got a decent and current MacBook Pro for one of me team members whose price include Russian VAT was less than the US list price sans sales tax. It didn't come with the standard Apple warranty, but the devices are pretty reliable these days anyway. Russian supply chains have realigned through China. Cars? Maybe a different story. Services also tend to be an issue, for example Visual Studio online activation doesn't work anymore and CLion can only be updated with a private VPN connected. Some websites also actively block Russian connections, on top of filtering by the Russian government.

As for travel, my colleagues have been on holiday in Japan and other countries in SE Asia and non-EU Europe. We sent one team member to Brazil - she got a Visa card from a former Soviet republic so she could use Uber while there. We're bringing some others over for team meetings in EU in a few months. So I'm not sure why you think travel is impossible.

It's a really interesting question why people tolerate the situation. It's bit like boiling a frog I guess. And fighting the system can have major life ending repercussions.

Cynical, but also incorrect. The team members ask to switch to Teams, which they were surprised to discover has better audio quality (but we agree, the rest of the app is shitter). We also don't do much with video, just audio and screen sharing. Slack is better for collaborative screen sharing.

Slack Huddles have also been taken out for most of the past month too. Slack in general still works, but huddles see people unable to join or continuously losing their connection. It also might be ISP specific (some users can use huddles, while the majority cannot). The general consensus amongst my Russian team members is that it's mostly about Telegram and broad blocking or filtering of AWS IP address ranges. Maybe it's something else, it's hard to say.

The UK has reliable rainfall data from the 1860's (165 years), and less reliable records going back further. But compared with 1,200 years, you have the right magnitude.

After an invite I got the firstname of my daughter in ~2005, she was 2yo! Let's say her email is something like emilie@gmail.com it's pretty neat.

Right. Ultimately the only way to fix this is strengthen privacy laws and enforcement. The tech bros have a lot of influence; their brown nosing and corruption was really on display when the orange manbaby came back to power.

The enemy are companies making money of your data; business models championed by the likes of Google and Facebook. You could argue that they're just exploiting weak privacy laws and enforcement. The FBI aren't at fault for accessing publicly/commercially available data, unless there's some American law that forbids even this. Stop giving your data to companies. Stop supporting these businesses that don't respect you, your data or your privacy.

The printing on the keyboard is minor. The UK and US English keyboards are physically different:: e.g. just look at the enter key, which are orientated completely differently.

It was already building for Arm platforms. Iâ(TM)m sure they have NEON optimisations somewhere in there.

France also does it because it benefits their military nuclear programme.

Trump doesnâ(TM)t want Europe to lose its dependency on foreign fossil fuels because he wants American companies owned by his buddies to profit from this, not Russian and Middle Eastern ones. Why do you think heâ(TM)s so against renewable power? Itâ(TM)s not just about the view from his Scottish golf course.

So many forms of communication available, no wonder we struggle to communicate.

Thanks for rubbing it in that you're retired ;). Hope I wasn't too full-on before.

To be fair they haven't got anything there they didn't have a better offering for 10 or 15 years ago.

There, FTFY.

Jira and Confluence were seriously better in the past, then enshittification set in and they started forcing the subscription model. Now their updates fix things they've enshittified, but they enshittify something else. Just like Microsoft Office, there's been no improvement (quite the opposite in fact) for years, yet it costs more.

Iâ(TM)m using the term North American incorrectly; Iâ(TM)m really referring to people north of Mexico ;)

Example: Iâ(TM)m trying to organise tours in Tunisia right now. I donâ(TM)t want to be making international phone calls and texts. They all use WhatsApp. Itâ(TM)s enough work as it is without making my life harder.

Signal is missing features for businesses. It doesnâ(TM)t have a way to group a bunch of channels you can easily discover. Thereâ(TM)s more. As a replacement for simple texting with friends and family it might suffice, but you still have to convince them all to both install and use it in addition to continue using WhatsApp everywhere else. You just get left out of stuff. North Americans who donâ(TM)t travel out of N. America much donâ(TM)t get this. I travel a lot and tours, hotels, activities, restaurants, etc all use WhatsApp and assume you have it too. Itâ(TM)s the only form of communication in a lot of countries.