As I said below, the killer app isn't the office applications, it's the Onedrive. Online backup, transfer of your files from machine to machine without thinking very much about it. You end up with a ton of crap stored in there and cleaning it out is not something my mother can do. The office apps are pretty worthless in comparison, you're right, I use Libre for everything myself.

It's not about the office, it's about the Onedrive. There are alternatives, but none that are so easy to work with.

I used to manually sftp my stuff from machine to machine before we had it. The alternatives aren't competitive on price.

It was still something around $20 a year if you have either an employee, alumni or a store pass from either of the above.

I get 10 of them a year and hand them out to interested people.

As in an alumnus or current employee, you can buy forward for years and have your sub running for at least 5 years in advance. I would advise this. Just keep buying family 365 subs and putting the codes into your existing account. I mean yes, think of transitioning, but you can put it off quite a while this way.

Yes, I realize this is for business, but they'll be coming for Family soon too.

Militantly anti-systemd. I run Artix, which is based on Arch.

Previously I had run Funtoo, Gentoo and Ubuntu. All were fine. Funtoo was great, but drobbins finally gave up last year.

Minimal breakage over time.

My decision to move off Windows for my daily driver (last year) was motivated by this. So, this change is very expected. The hard W11 deadline is Venn overlapping.

There's a selling unit that would have played ball with you. You'd have to have quantities that they were interested in. They're all over the world - I used to do meetings with the sellers from various locations, Americas, EMEA, etc. I happened to work Federal, specifically DoD, but there were people working just straight commercial sector.

No partner is going to help you reach them, you have to do it yourself.

People do get better, but the manner in which they do so - on their own time, at their own pace and not absolutely - makes that information mostly useless.

Microsoft will be happy to negotiate with a sufficiently large buyer. If you have several hundred licenses to work with, you could find a seller who was willing to cut you a deal on that. They are interested in total revenue, not extracting maximum profit from a SKU. This applies _regardless_ of the product in question, whether it's Azure time or an on-prem license. You'd be amazed at the freebies that get thrown to the customer. I know of one that pays much less than you'd pay for a commercial SKU for Windows Server basic edition for a copy of Datacenter. Whole classes of software will get thrown at you for free as long as you give them the required level of spend.

Raw sewage is the fertilizer of choice in Korea. Apparently there is a Korean farmer's almanac that says the right day, and they all go out and burn the rice paddies, toss the shit on them and then fill with water.

The smell is like nothing else I have ever experienced. I kept being over there for that day in the early spring, year after year.

One of the harvesting methodologies is via porta-potties. In the US they'd fill them with that blue chemical substance to kill the smell. But in Korea, the feces and urine are kept fresh for extraction. Also, sewage treatment is more or less not a thing there. In Seoul, open sewers are common. I presume it must get collected at some point for the fertilization.

The onset of the internet as essentially a DoD entity had a lot to do with the ground rules at first. A lot of people don't remember the IBM consent decree and the rollicking regulatory and court battles that were the industry before the onset of the PC era. The belief by AT&T that their monopoly power would permit them to press a thumb to the entire tech world was very real in the 1980s.

So i'm not sure there ever really was a 'golden age'.

I knew a guy who lived to almost 94 who smoked virtually his whole life. Used to remember buying cigarettes in big round packages of 200 with paper tape around them. Born in 1897. Had a picture of him in WWI uniform. He died of bladder cancer. It was attributed to smoking. I don't know whether that is objectively true or not, but on the one hand living to 94 is just fine and him living another 10 or 15 years would have been less than appealing to me due to quality of life issues. He had bad cataracts, needed cornea transplants, no teeth and had a peptic ulcer that might have been curable in another 5-10 years, but highly constrained his diet and left him in pain a lot. But on the other hand he was a working carpenter until he was 6 months from death and went on hospice, and could do hand stands on barstools at 90+. Used to drive in 10 penny nails with a tiny tap to set and then whack, one shot into the wood. Weighed about 130 soaking wet.

On the other hand I had a grandfather who died at 69 as a result of lung cancer. It was awful, wasted away from 180 to under 90 pounds in a relatively short time. Ironically he had quit smoking for about 20 years - from WWII through to the early 70s, but the heavy smoking during the war and later in life got him.

His wife was a nonsmoker who died of lung cancer herself. But, she was a cocktail waitress who was around a lot of smoke, and lived next to a Maxwell House coffee plant. There's some kind of cancer cluster in that area, apparently breathing in coal dust and grounds isn't great for you.

My stepfather had severe COPD and when associated with his leukemia, that helped take him out at 84. He had quit smoking about 20 years before his death, but it didn't save him from the symptoms.

I quit in my 40s and had been off and on since my 20s. Hopefully I make out better than they did. I'm 56.

Price increases = inflation. Reducing the value of your currency.

The wealthy aren't the problem with inflation. Giving money to them (or not taxing it away from them, same thing) isn't inflationary, they'll more or less invest the money to increase their wealth. Rich people always want more money.

Cutting checks to people on the street, that's inflationary because they spend the money on goods. Improving people's standard of living has little to do with giving them money. You need more goods, which then become relatively cheaper within the existing money supply because of the lack of scarcity. That means producing said goods, whether we're talking about consumer stuff or housing.

Tolerating scarcity is the main issue with standard of living, at least in the US.

The power of propaganda is strong in this one.

You should read alternative sources and compare.