At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

I think for some people it’s more about killing multiple birds with one stone. One guy I know went to see a Dolphins game, bought a car and got some warmer weather during the coldest part of the year. Another bought a car while visiting family (and learned the hard way that radiators are sometimes refilled with water and therefore will freeze in the winter if brought north) and another had their 20 year old truck die while hauling their RV and bought a new truck from the nearest dealership. So maybe it’s not widespread, but every one has talked about the benefits of a car that’s never seen salted roads

In the north there’s even people who will specifically head south to buy a car that’s never spent a winter driving on salted roads. Road salt corrodes so badly it’s nasty

I feel similarly. I work in an office that’s heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

On the subject of Matrix parodies, I just want to throw this classic out there

If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

Manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well. Like I said, it’s hard to beat the pay and benefits of working in manufacturing if you don’t have a degree.

The reason they struggle to fill these roles is because most people don’t want to work in industrial facilities working physically taxing jobs, often at odd hours filling second or third shifts and risking that the facility doesn’t sufficiently value safety leading to a serious injury or death

A large percentage of US manufacturing is food processing. Manufacturing has been struggling to fill open roles for years,¹ and as a low-skilled job with tons of openings lots of migrants, both citizens and not work in manufacturing since the pay & benefits are hard to beat for not requiring any degrees. Its a similar situation with farm work. If the Trump administration actually performs significant deportations and cancellations of visas like he promised, food availability will be affected as farms and food producers struggle to keep up with demand

¹ Here’s the JOLTS data showing as much as 200k unfilled manufacturing jobs. I can’t easily directly link my query, but here’s a screenshot of the data with enough info to replicate my query

Makes me wonder what would happen if a government funded and operated pension fund were setup. Basically like social security but ramped up to fully cover the cost of retirement for all Americans.

I also wonder how that would realistically impact macroeconomics if the money were simply printed instead of budgeted to avoid the problems of expecting infinite growth and a growing retirement population as people live longer and populations shrink. There seems to be some growing economic questions as to if measured money printing can be beneficial to an economy, and doing so for social good, even social security if you will, might theoretically stave off deflation. It would probably become a useful dial for the Federal Reserve to adjust in persuit of its dual mandate as well, increasing or decreasing how much of the fund is printed vs budgeted as needed. Maybe that could even become a third mandate of managing the social pension fund to ensure comfortable retirements

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.

In a similar vein, I absolutely love John Candy’s last film, Canadian Bacon. Every time I rewatch it I go “man I forgot how funny that film is!”

Checking rotten tomatos its not quite as badly panned as Wagons East! (0% critics / 33% audience vs 17% critics / 52% audience) but seems like a good candidate for this thread nonetheless

Brief synopsis:

The president of the United States has successfully ended every war the country is involved in and is facing abysmal odds of re-election, so his team decides to start a second cold war, this time against Canada. John Candy plays a former weapons factory employee now sheriffs deputy in Niagara Falls NY, laid off with his friends due to the plant closure, and seeing the propaganda, they decide sneak across the border to stir trouble in Canada, losing one of their team who’s caught and taken for a free mental health evaluation in Ottawa, so now they must take a trans-canadian road trip to “save” her

I like that this director thinks that there are some people wired different to just never fart

As a fabled never farter I can confirm, I simply do not fart outside of during bowel movements.

I’m trying to convince my kids that “dads don’t fart” because that will be hilarious when they learn the truth

Back when Netflix had everything I watched that one thinking it would be a cool scifi film, but turns out its a kong fu movie and I was not in the mood for a that so I was disappointed. The sound track slapped though!

At first I went “what easter egg?”

Also, kudos for the AI Overview for getting it entirely wrong while the easter egg at least knows what’s up

Honestly I loved both the direction that Rian Johnson clearly wanted to take the sequels and I loved the direction that JJ Abrams clearly wanted to take the sequels and I honestly wish Disney had just stuck with one of them for the entire trilogy and let the other do a trilogy as well. We all know how badly Disney wanted to pump out a Star Wars film every year during that timeframe so that way they could’ve had their cake and eaten it too

I just loved the pacing of Don’t Look Up so much. Just constant subversion of expectations that I really enjoyed

Somewhere in the In-between by Streetlight Manifesto

I’ve been slowly digging into their discography recently and holy crap Ska is so funny because it’ll be a bopping tune but then you catch the lyrics and find it’s a song about war, death, collapse, etc.

This music video definitely embodies that same disconnect. Cute animal animation with bopping music except wait what are those people doing? What are those animals doing? Oh my is that how this ends?!

You see, it’s not communism, but communism with Chinese ideals (therefore whatever the heck the CCP wants it to be)

I was a kid the first year after that went into effect, my computer automatically changed for the time change 2 weeks too early, so I had to have my parents fix it for me…twice. that was my first gripe with Dubya. Then his VP caused my luggage to get lost by seizing up all plane movement at Minneapolis St Paul because Dick Cheney had to take off but then stopped on the tarmac for 20 minutes for some reason while the whole airport was at a standstill for him, making every flight 30+ minutes late. So yeah I’ve got some personal gripes with Dubya’s administration