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.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

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.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.