Excel is the fucking backbone of Microsoft Office. It’s solid and backwards compatible for a couple of decades. Excel is the one reason business sticks with Office. It never fails, everyone knows it, nothing can replace it. You cannot trust any other spreadsheet to perfectly translate if you move away from Excel. The world runs on Excel.

I never imagined Microsoft would fuck with Excel. Ever. There’s a fairy tale about killing the golden goose, can’t remember how it goes.

I can never tell if politicians honestly believe the National Socialism of the Nazis was actually socialist, of if they’re taking advantage of dumb voters. If it’s the opinion of a “man on the street”, then yes, he’s that dumb.

Reading these comments and people seem to think his money works like their money. It’s so naive it’s disheartening.

With what money? The vast majority of his “wealth” is imaginary. When Tesla investors, who know damned well they’re riding a bubble, finally decide they’ve made enough money, risked it long enough and it’s time to bail, the bubble pops.

Not saying that because the man is a raging douche nozzle, it’s simply reality.

People are buying only because it’s a growth stock. Eventually enough people will get nervous and cause a stampede. Lots of owners are going to left holding the bag, an empty bag.

Thank you! Someone around here gets it. Look at these comments. People seem to think he’s actually holding that much cash.

People are only buying Tesla stock because it keeps going up, nothing to do with their perceived value of future earnings. It’s fucking insane, reminds me of Wall Street, 1929. Fittingly enough, the world is making the same mistakes of 100 years ago because all the people who learned from those mistakes are dead.

Almost all of that money is imaginary. Look at Tesla’s $1.5T “worth”. If you liquidated the company down to the staplers and pens, you’re probably only going to get a few billion.

If we’re saying that $1.5T represents current assets and future growth, yikes. Tesla ain’t doing so hot and I hardly expect them to turn it around with this genius at the top. The stock price merely reflects people buying because people are buying. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd! Someday that stock is going to crater.

Anyway, same goes for Musk. He can turn but a fraction of that net worth into cash. Imagine if he started selling Tesla stock. First off, the market would panic seeing the CEO dumping his own stock, the price would plummet, instantly. Even if word didn’t get out, the market would still be flooded, driving the price into the ground.

CAVEAT: None of this considers the value of SpaceX. 🤷🏻

Japan will be the test case for declining populations. They will be the first to show us the consequences and the right and wrong ways to deal with the issue.

Short of Malthusian disasters, I don’t think any sort of economy in human history has had to deal with this.

One would think we’d all have a clue after COVID. The supply chain shocks reverberated for years.

As the population ages out of the work force, and fewer replacements are coming in, where’s your tax base to support UBI? And if you say tax the rich, they won’t be rich long with no workers to leech off of.

Less than a billion I think, but several hundred million? Anyway, you’re right, they ate it all paying off investors in the form of stock buybacks. Rural folk got nada.

Yeah, very weird expansion. We don’t even have much in the way of utilities at camp. We can get water, but certainly no sewer. Hell, you can’t even build “permanent structures” on my land. And I assume the surrounding land is even worse for flooding and being protected wetlands.

Sounds like I can get a power pole for free! Still working on that.

The roads are private, anyone can travel them, no problem, but they’re on us to maintain. Couple of dudes use tractors to level them and someone dropped loads of gravel and red clay to fix the slippery bits. (Shit like this is why country people think they don’t need no goddamned gubermint. You’d have to live it to understand.)

This is a Cox Cable endeavour. Used to contract for them, finest ISP I ever heard of. Apparently the Cox family took it public, then bought it back, said fuck you to the stock market and ran it themselves again. Hard to describe to those not in the business, but their cable plant is head and shoulders above anything I’ve ever touched. I assume they’re rich as hell and I wish them well, well deserved for once.

Had not thought of that! Been 20-years since I’ve been at an ISP, times change.

Can’t post here?

Israel has zero interest in ending this war until every Palestinian is emigrated or dead. October 7th gave them every excuse they need for this genocide and annexation. Embarrassing that any world leaders are talking peace when they know damned well what’s going on.

The West either allows this to continue or bombs Tel Aviv into glass and ruble. There is no magical “in between” state where this levels out to an ante bellum status quo.

Easy for me to say, they should have kept rolling and forced the Israelis to get violent. I’m American, with a few reasons to fear these our fascists, made my choice. If it comes to it, I fight. Neither my government nor Israel has shown any quarter, no reason not to die with our boots on.

tl;dr: They’re going to kill you anyway.

Anyone still using dial up as a back-channel solution? Never implemented that myself, but seemed a cheap and easy way to get into your remote network in case of fuck up or outage. Banks used to do it. Anyone know?

Weirdly, I’m seeing fiber in the most unlikely places. They’re running it in my hood, which is on the bleeding edge of a small redneck town, nowhere downstream from here to feed for more money.

What really blew my mind, they’re running fiber in the hood where my camp lies, 900 souls altogether, and that includes a fair-sized surrounding area. Can’t be 50 homes anywhere near. And again, nothing downstream of that hood, it’s just for us. And both places already had cable internet.

No idea how those two ISPs will ever earn their money back from so few customers, with maintenance stacked on top. Maybe running fiber is stupid cheap now? Haven’t worked for an ISP for 20 years, who knows.

You’re really discounting that fossil fuels have hella bang for the buck, loads of power per gallon. tl;dr: Energy dense

I can run my little generator at camp all night long if there’s as little as 3 gallons in there. Space heater or AC unit, lights, all that. I’d have to have many panels and batteries to compare to that output. My best battery is a huge LIPO4, trolling motor can’t kill it, not even close. But leaving the LED lights on for a little over a day drained it dry.

We need way more solar infrastructure to get where we’re going, and I’m all about it. But since since the GOP has decided to go back in time, China is going to smoke America, both in renewables and the associated economic benefits.

Did not know about the patent thing! Know any examples?

I just can’t FaceBook. My wife and I use Marketplace, damned useful, but the main page gives me the heebie jeebies. No idea why, put I have this weird revulsion when I land there. Twitter doesn’t do that to me, and I hate Musk even more than Zuckerberg.

I did both yesterday. Biden returns no result at all.