I don’t use it for personal gain.

I give away infinite free bread, and get arrested and jailed forever.

Maybe this is a cynical take, but someone in power would almost immediately have the magic infinite food person assassinated.

Best they’ll do is tweet about it and send a fundraising text.

In a home, 10 days because ComEd is bad at what they do.

Personally, a 30 day hiking trip. Those are very different circumstances though.

American PhD here.

I’ve m only half-joking when I say I’m considering driving a cab somewhere in South America.

Individuals can do that, and they should if they feel like keeping MS.

Organizations are, unfortunately, probably going to remain stagnant and keep paying millions to for things that have free alternatives.

It’s actually really infuriating. When I was in grad school I filed an information request with the college to see how much they paid for access to Office 365 each year. This was in 2021 and they were paying 4 million a year. Meanwhile their grad student employees were all living deeply below the poverty line.

Individual users can make use of free alternatives pretty easily, but I’m not sure they’re actually the target for the price increase here.

Schools, governments, businesses, and other institutions pay wild amounts to MS every year.

Formed a union, charmed one of the most beautiful women in the quadrant, saved that quadrant with a mix of intelligence and courage, raised his son to be a war hero, and eventually became the Grand Nagus.

We Stan Rom in this house.

Same here.

I can’t say I like the music, but them clowns is good people.

Lower Decks is straight up delightful.

I’m honestly just deeply interested in this guy every time I hear about him.

Not because I think he’s smart, on to something, or at all worthwhile though.

It’s just…. Kind of morbidly entertaining to watch a man spend so much time and money to deal with an obvious and incredible fear of death.

He’s going to die some day, and probably from one of these things he’s paying for to avoid dying. It’s Qin Shi Huang shit.

And, ya know what? There are some truly wonderful and interesting works of philosophy dealing with his exact problem, but our boy is too much of a tech bro to even consider that someone may have found a way to deal with the fear of death a few thousand years ago.

So, fuck it, burn that cash bud.

It depends.

I’m one of the few people still teaching on Zoom. Turns out it’s a good delivery method for some students at community colleges (like if you have young children at home, etc.)

If I’m teaching, I show up 15 minutes early.

If I’m just a participant, I show up pretty much right on time, then I quietly judge whoever is running the meeting because most calls are run poorly.

Housemates left a door open; we lived in the woods.

A squirrel got into the house. Housemates, because young men are idiots, chased the squirrel further into the house… right into my bedroom.

They then tossed literally all of my possessions around the room in an attempt to remove or kill the squirrel.

Friends, they were not successful. The squirrel escaped the room and ran further into the house.

Absolutely.

Buy things used, repair and jailbreak what you can, and learn to make things for yourself.

We can’t, at least as individuals, divest from every exploitative system. But, we can remove ourselves from more than we think.

Often enough, you get a better experience out of the homemade and secondary market than whatever the new thing you’re being pushed can give.

I’ve been using Mint and Pop!_OS on two different machines for a few years.

Neither has really required much from me as the user, although I have needed to use the terminal once on each of them.

Personally, I really like the way Pop does window tiling and workspaces.

You mean ecards?

I feel old. Where are my pills?

Someone for whom the normal and inevitable experiences of suffering (illness, death in the family, natural disaster, etc) have no real economic consequences.

I think it depends on the sport. Then again, I only watch 2 real sports and 1 fake one (wrestling).

Football: absolutely better without audio commentary.

Baseball: it depends. The local broadcast guys can be pretty good for a lot of regular season games.

Wrestling: commentary is part of the TV experience, but not every commentator can be Taz.

Deep Space Nine: “The Visitor”

My head went to the exact same place.