The biggest three issues I've experienced in years are:

1) different formulas and way of doing them than Excel, so there's compatibility issues.
2) The UI is hideous on Mac (and Windows, presumably) at this point.
3) It's very slow to start (on Mac and Linux, haven't used Windows in years).

It's my go-to when I need to do things that I can't do in google sheets/docs, at this point.

I sympathize with your situation - this used to be a hard scenario to deal with, and there are a couple things you can do to make an upgrade break... but I don't understand how, frankly. I've not had an install break that wasn't my own fault in years (eg. specifying an arbitrarily small /boot partition).

apt update && apt upgrade, update the sources.list to the next major release; apt update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y and.... wait. Accept all defaults (unless you know better).

This has been foolproof for years for me.

The pay is fantastic, and as most of the Amazon employees working in an office are AWS employees working in "Sales", it's great for people who can babble and bullshit but with no real skills - particularly as their sales people don't work on quota and can do a very large number of things that contribute to looking busy but accomplish nothing. Even skilled people struggle to get anything done there due to their "gotta follow the rules" formulaic "success criteria" culture. This is partially why you end up with a lot of Indians working there.

Think of the worst parts of writing reports or doing homework in school - that's working at Amazon.

Let's not conflate things here.

It's trivial to click the "I've got a disability" box when applying for a job, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're disabled or have a disability, except per the definition of law.

Eg. things like alcoholism, prior or current, ADHD/autism, prior cancer, anxiety disorders, and/or being morbidly obese.

Also covered under the ADA, would be something like ripping a tendon or breaking a knee in a sporting activity and needing to (temporarily, albeit for more than several weeks) walk with a cane or need other special considerations.

I don't NOT have sympathy for a lot of these, but they're hardly a basis on which a person shouldn't be able to come to the office.

(That also doesn't change the fact that these RTO efforts are draconian and stupid, and 100% aren't being used for honest purposes by Amazon.)

I've started leaving off the prepositions, pronouns and such from sentences, and my 'pro' writing is starting to look more like casual writing - more terse. "You've got to lean into it." becomes "Lean into it."

Or I'll just resort to what an idiotic feminist college English lit prof used to call "antiquated 19th century writing style": writing long, syntactically complex but linguistically communicative sentences which convey a complex yet nuanced thought, something AI will absently and superfluously munge.

Often these are interspersed.

In the long run, we'll lose out on more people being able to do the "hard" things. Sort of like when schools start hiring on non-excellence criteria, you end up with students who can't do the coursework and the field suffers as a result. That's what's happening here.

In 5, 10 years when people are like "we fucked up, quick, hire good developers again" - or good voice actors, or good whatever - there won't be anyone in line to take those jobs. They'll have moved on - either finding different things to pay their way, and are no longer looking, or they'll have fully checked out. Either way, they won't be looking for the jobs. You'll probably have a mess of H1B types take their role instead.

It's going to be a huge mess.

Is this software company, by coincidence, trying to be purchased or IPO? Because that's the kind of behavior that you see before a company's founders bank out...

Every single one of Amazon's hardware products is used to siphon your data and bilge pump ads and product placements to you.

You can argue that's true for all of Amazon's properties at this point.

They've become a behemoth of a company like Microsoft did in the 90s - starting in earnest about 2 years ago, based on what I've seen from those who work there. Their culture has changed and the leadership has all but abandoned the leadership principles.

It's so strange no charges were brought on any of this.

creating a national sales tax so that he can shift his personal tax burden on to you.

Do you realize how crazy that sounds?

Have blind hatred for the man and the mission all you want, but none of that even remotely reflects either reality, or anything that's come out of this administration. There's more than enough reason to justify frustration and anger without making things up out of whole cloth and it just makes you look mental when you do it.

Most automakers use an automated assembly line for the body/frame construction, now. It's a long conveyor of pre-bent parts getting bolted on. There are humans involved through some of it, but the bulk of the work is a machine.

Ever notice how there's never anyone with an IQ under 120 in Star Trek?

A Star Trek economy requires a significant culling of the, primarily, unintelligent people in society. You need people to be productive and useful before they can become more productive or useful.

I'd not be surprised if they're utilizing the same "loopholes" created by the Biden admin that brought a huge number of illegals to the US and gave them IDs/exemptions to proper immigration procedure. They were giving out IDs to literally everyone they brought without any proof... it'd have been easy enough to buy those IDs from people, or simply intercept the procedure for some cash - it's not like they were scrupulous, moral actors.

I'd bet anything that's one of the approaches they used, since getting financial aid does require an ID.

Most of these "limitations" to perpetual licenses are 100% due to changes Microsoft is making themselves to retroactively limit the software: patches making it difficult to use it, making it less stable, adding dependencies. And then, intentionally making data portability difficult by altering file formats.

"Your money constantly being worth less... so that saving is impossible... that's good actually"

Very bad take. You're also wrong.

Countries got rid of the gold standard because gold isn't flexible, and prevented governments from manipulating money supply.

BTC is more flexible but also is resistant to economic manipulations. It's a good thing for stability. Stability, of course, helps dissuade warfare.

The easy money that's been made available by banks for the purposes of war, to plunder? That wouldn't be available with BTC as a standard.