More like 1930.

Meanwhile over here in the US the clowns we have in the supreme court ruled that anything the president does while in office is de facto not a crime.

You’re right, essentially all so called Christian holidays and traditions are just rebranded older traditions from other religions. People were far more amenable to converting to or at least tolerating Christianity if they could continue their existing holidays and traditions largely unchanged, so Christian churches came up with various explanations for why those holidays were now Christian. It’s why for instance Christmas is in December suspiciously close to the winter solstice despite all evidence pointing to Jesus being born at a different time of the year. Sometimes they don’t even bother with trying to pretend like with Christmas trees and the Easter bunny (also the name Easter).

Possible but it would be an incredibly risky move on Trump’s part as nukes are a very touchy subject and frankly Trump doesn’t have either the brains nor the charisma to pull it off. He’s as likely to make things worse and unite the rest of the world against Russia (including China who won’t want to see nukes deployed in essentially their backyard) as he is to help in a meaningful fashion. Putin knows how limited a tool Trump is and wouldn’t want to risk that. Trump is essentially useless for international purposes and limited to only domestic affairs.

Despite his claims he is not and never has been a negotiator, he only ever “wins” when his opponents are at an overwhelming disadvantage. It’s why he prefers working with companies on the verge of bankruptcy because they’re desperate and easier to push around.

As for deploying nuclear weapons, not only would that unit the entire world against the US, it would ignite the biggest shit storm within the US in its entire history, assuming the military even went along with it in the first place. If anything was going to convince the US military to stage a coup against Trump, giving the order to nuke a recent ally in a war the US is only tangentially connected to would.

Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.

Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.

That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.

Teams meetings aren’t really that much worse than Zoom, it’s mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that’s significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.

An organization , “team”, channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can’t I completely silence or ignore a “team”, channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren’t there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow “reply to” option? Why can’t anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic “teams” that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.

Every democracy in the world should be issuing travel warnings for the US.

Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 11 include a 1GHz or faster CPU with at least two cores, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage,

All of this is no problem and essentially any computer manufactured in the last couple decades can meet these requirements. They’re effectively irrelevant for this discussion.

Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0 compatibility.

This is the problem right here. Pretty much every last computer you hear about that isn’t compatible it’s one or both of these, almost always the TPM 2.0 module.

That of course is if the reason you aren’t “upgrading” is because the hardware isn’t supported. For a great many of us our hardware is supported, we just don’t want all the bullshit anti-features Microsoft has crammed into Windows 11. Windows 10 was already bad enough with it’s constant telemetry spyware, that annoying Cortana garbage shoehorned in anywhere they could manage, the absolute atrocity that they turned the start menu search function into, and the annoying Teams and OneDrive integrations that randomly reinstalled and re-enabled themselves after updates.

Then MS went and had to cram in even more spyware by way of their horrible copilot garbage. All for what? What are we getting with 11 that’s better than 10? What feature justifies that upgrade? Nothing, that’s the answer. There’s no reason at all that 11 needed to be made.

In other words it was the sales department doing what they always do, pulling complete bullshit out of their ass and then expecting the engineering team to deliver it.

Plus I actually want to support the authors. My issue is with Amazon not the authors, so I want to pay for the books I’m reading so they can keep making more of them. If I could buy the books directly from the authors in some cases I would, and in all cases if it was available from the Kobo store I’d be willing to buy it there. Unfortunately that damn exclusivity clause on Kindle Unlimited means my options for them are Amazon, Amazon, or Amazon (or roll the dice on piracy and not support the author, not to mention even when it is the book in question the quality is often poor).

Sort of? Kindle Unlimited itself is digital only, but the exclusivity clause only applies to ebooks I think, so in theory you could purchase a physical copy elsewhere.

I’ve pretty much entirely abandoned physical books. It’s just far more convenient using an e-reader which has a backlight for reading in the dark, fits thousands of books in a device that’s pocket sized, and let’s me instantly purchase, download, and start reading the next book in a series as soon as I finish the last one.

I do have physical books still, but I haven’t bought new ones in about a decade now.

I recently switched to Kobo as a Kindle alternative, but that also highlighted a problem. Kindle Unlimited includes a TOS for publishers that prevents them from selling their books on any other platform. A significant chunk of the Kindle catalogue is also included in Kindle Unlimited, which means a significant chunk of authors works are locked into the Amazon ecosystem.

It’s been very annoying to discover how many book series I’ve been reading that are simply unavailable elsewhere because they opted to take part in Kindle Unlimited.

That commissioner wouldn’t happen to be a member of AfD would he?

Also for his analogy to make sense the plan would have to include handing Gaza back to the Palestinians after it was rebuilt, not giving it to a bunch of Jewish settlers and rich foreigners.

I mean it’s probably a good idea to avoid traveling to the US for at least a few years for everyone, but I’m trying to work out what AI has to do with anything.

Is England living in a different century from the rest of us? Some kind of time warp to the 1800s going on over there or something?

Boomers are the core, but they’ve gotten some reinforcements from Gen X and Millenials. The good news if there is any is that not enough of Gen X and Millenials are MAGAts to carry an election without the Boomers, so in another couple decades if a bunch of Gen Alpha doesn’t turn real stupid we might have a chance.

More like Firefox users are surprised to find out some journalist thinks they’re unhappy with “privacy tweaks” they hadn’t even noticed.