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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Interesting headline - its disconnected from the content of the article. Most of it is about how broken the US electoral system is.

    The important point is that an electoral and political system that was designed to protect from the “tyranny of the majority” has instead created a system perpetuating the tyranny of the minority.

    Americans are indoctrinated to think theirs in the greatest country on earth from a very young age. But the political system is an absolute mess - the electoral college, the senate (which is totally skewed in favour of small states), the supreme court and politicised legal system, and the embedded 2 party system.

    Trump isn’t a threat to democracy. Democracy in the US has been dead for a long while now. It vaguely worked when there was a post war consensus but now it’s completely log jammed. And nobody has a plan to fix it because they can’t.


  • I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

    The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

    Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

    I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

    At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?


  • Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

    The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

    The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

    So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

    There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

    Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.


  • And there is the problem laid bare - there are too many people associated with the campaign who have a vested interest in it continuing, and are unable or unwilling to step back and listen.

    Its been blindingly obvious for the last 18 months that Biden is a very bad choice for the democratic nomination. But the entire discourse has been dominated by an attitude that if you don’t support biden, you’re basically support trump.

    It is the Biden supporters who are going to hand the presidency on a silver platter to Trump.

    They need to step back and look at the bigger picture. This is not just some Republican talking point to reflexively ignore and fight against. Biden IS too old, and he DOES come across as confused. And he is making trump look better by comparison - he is lowering the bar of expectation and scrutiny of trump because the focus is on Bidens age and mental capacity.

    The democrats have to ditch biden right now and begin the urgebt search for a better, younger candidate to unite behind. Its already very late in the day but every day they continue with Biden is another wasted.


  • In this situation I’d save a copy of the sheet to my phone in a standard format and use a non google app. The file itself can be backed up to on line storage and remain accessible from multiple devices but you remove it from googles walled garden.

    On android if you want open source then Collabra is a full office suite based on LibreOffice. Alternatively LibreOffice Viewer is the official libre app - ok for viewing files but with an experimental mode for editing (not really ready for editing yet).

    WPS Office is a free office suite with add or paid version which has a good reputation.

    Microsoft Office is also an option.

    If you want to stay with google sheets and just view the file offline then try saving a copy to your phone in a different format and view that with the Google spreadsheet app (if it can still do that). But I’d take the pop up as a sign that its time to move on from googles shitty products.




  • AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

    Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

    AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.



  • No one seems to have actually read the article, just the headline. This is the ultimate click bait title - kudos to the headline writer in 1939.

    The tl/dr: It’s saying Hitler’s authoritarian actions were galvanising other countries to step up and protect democracy after the failures after WW1.

    In the final paragraph:

    It is one of the most interesting phenomena of Hitler’s political activity that it has resulted in bringing about so soon such an overwhelming and unprecedented manifestation of defensive solidarity amongst the democratic peoples.

    And the final line of the article:

    It would be the height of paradox if Hitler, of all persons, were destined by his statesmanship finally “to make the world safe for Democracy.”

    The article is surprisingly prescient.



  • Well all we have in the article are claims from the perpetrators family and vague innuendo about what was on the victims phone.

    The only facts outlined in the article were that the victim was shot 7 times in his own home, and managed to call from help from the street before dying. The purpetrator was on the run for 2 weeks, and allegedly on drugs during that time.

    Its trash journalism and a shit article. The allegations may be substantiated or they may not, but at the moment the story as written is the family’s opinion spliced into a few details about the crime.




  • English Heritage was set up by the government to protect historic sites, and then spun out as an independent charity to continue that role.

    Protecting sites includes limiting the numbers who can visit, hence enclosing them. That allows visitor numbers to be capped and managed (which reduces damage from over tourism) and also prevents illicit access and vandalisn.

    In the case of seahenge it was literally rotting away - the decision was made to excavate and preserve what was left. That was in response to press campaigns to do something to save seahenge; it was a controversial at the time and remains so now. They did this while still part of the UK government in 1999.

    Stonehenge was gifted to the nation in 1915 and had been on private land up to that ppint. A lot of expensive work has been done to preserve the site including demolishing other structures to preserve the skyline, and even recently burying a section of road.

    Visitor charges and subscriptions pay for English Heritage to continue their work and preserve our history. They’re not “robbing bastards”, they’re a non profit with an expensive role.



  • Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

    Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

    So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.