learned the game playing against itself

So did Joshua/WOPR and that was over 40 years ago. Stephen Falken was a fucking visionary and a genius!

This is pretty standard when someone leaves Microsoft.

The management above the person leaving sends a nice message about them and their work and NEVER tells the truth about _why_ they are leaving.

At the upper levels I don't think there's really any sincerity about anything said, one way or another. This is just how corporate America operates.

Nextcloud has done great work in terms of EU-Soverignty and offering credible replacements for all the pieces of the the Microsoft stack.

Nextcloud Talk works well for video conference meetings.

MS Teams is a pretty terrible piece of software. The design of it is bad, and the implementation is bad.

Any software that tries to copy it will also be bad.

If you haven't spun up a nextcloud AIO instance yet for your organization(s), you should try it out.

rsilvergun's really not getting his $ worth out of this account. Do better.

Well yeah. And? We framed the summary to fit what we wanted people to believe, regardless of what the reference that nobody's going to check says.

Propaganda 101.

This is just self-indulgent doomerism.

Your narcissism requires that you see The End Times(tm) in everything so I get it, you can't just shrug and move on. Our g'g'g'etc parents back several thousand years:
1) watched significant numbers of their children die before adolescence; women would get pregnant and recognize that every single birth was a 1-1.5% chance she dies, often in agony.
2) were born to an average life expectancy of 20-35 years.
3) unless they were 0.1%ers likely couldn't read nor ever hope to be educated, or go more than 10km from home (unless they were captured/enslaved/relocated at the whim of whoever owned them)
4) mostly were serfs, slaves, other menial drudge classes, bound to work like slaves through all the daylight hours of their lives just to (hope to) survive...maybe?
5) lived in constant fear imminent infection, disease, pestilence, and/or war.

And yet they still had families, loved each other, struggled together, and kept on keeping on.

Now?
1) the biggest danger to a conceived child is a liberal woman who sees it as an inconvenience. Of course, even more recently we discover that a terrifying % of 'modern women' feel they can justify disposing of kids themselves even after birth if they're inconvenient or "sad".
2) the developed west children born today live rather more than DOUBLE that, a goodly chunk of those years basically at leisure given ample social networks (& even in the US despite constant weeping that US SS would be gone for the last 50ish years...).
3) in the developed world are what, 99% literate, have (through easy internet) access to all the knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, can live pretty nearly wherever they want, travel where they want
4) are largely free people who get to choose their lives, their partners, their lifestyle at their whim
5) have essentially no fear of imminent infection, disease, pestilence, and/or war.

The latter group have managed to generate abject, paralyzing levels of terror ("I can't bring a child into this world!") over "the sea might rise a handful of inches over the next century" or "I might have to go work in an office instead of sitting at home in my jammies" or "all this cheap food is making me fat" or if that's not enough invented crap to be afraid of, projecting anxiety on behalf of people you have never met, never will meet, nor will ever in your life have anything to do with. (Tell me honestly how many Americans could have pointed to the Donbas on a map in 2008, or even identified what a Rohingya was in 2015?)

I understand your panty-wetting terror and anxiety is very en courant. It's also not very rational, so... on-brand for the times, I guess.

Congratulations, you have created an exact MS Teams exact replacement.

I'm been using chat/messaging apps since BBSing and AIM and I'm not sure I could deliberately design a less useful piece of junk than Team if I tried.

Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.

1) yeah probably but I wouldn't pretend that I'm presenting objective facts, either.
2) the facts don't back me up?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenation.com%2Farti...
"USAID Is Not Worth Blindly Defending
Trump and Muskâ(TM)s war against the agency should be opposed on principle. But we canâ(TM)t overlook that USAID has been a destructive arm of American imperialism for decades."
See also: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heritage.org%2Fprogr...
The Biden admin (treated) "...U.S. foreign aid apparatus as a global platform from which to implement overseas a rigidly ideological and domestically divisive agenda to promote abortion, climate action,
âoegender equity,â and âoeracial justice,â"
(https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.congress.gov%2F118%2Fmeeting%2Fhouse%2F116508%2Fdocuments%2FHHRG-118-GO06-20231025-SD004.pdf)
I *fully* agree that Congress SHOULD have destroyed it. This congress has spent most of its time politically wanking and getting little actually done. And yes, I agree that DOGE was largely a failure. Its only successes were killing USAID and driving 250,000 gov't employees off the books. Only about a million more to go.
3) personally, I think the shitheel Republicans in Washington are only slightly less toxic than the Dems. Both their houses are deeply corrupt and have little or nothing to do with their nominal constituencies outside the beltway. I'm convinced that NEITHER party insiders will allow any 3rd party candidate to survive, and will cheerfully collude with their "opposition" to prevent anyone else from stepping up.

Trump is a COLOSSAL narcissist asshole. Then again, he is despised by the insiders of BOTH parties, and I expect at this point only a wealthy narcissist asshole could possibly make it through their gatekeeping to actually be president anymore. I believe that's a large portion of why every demographic (save white women, lol) shifted rightward in 2026.
But like the Jesse Ventura experiment in MN, it turns out that 'outsider colossal narcissist' doesn't magically turn into a competent leader either if he finally does win. He just stays a narcissist and legislates for himself.

In the end, I'd rather have an incompetent boob in charge that the 4th estate actually scrutinizes, than a Biden/Clinton/Obama figure that is just as deeply corrupt, vastly smarter, and has a servile media cheefully licking his balls.

IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.

Something fishy is going on.

I live in the upper midwest.
I have now seen projections for
- a milder winter than usual
- less snowy winter than usual
- a shorter winter than usual
as well as
- a more severe winter than usual
- more snow than usual
- a longer winter than usual

I think that means you guys have all your bases covered. No matter what the result, now we can confidently say we predicted "how bad it will be"(1, TBD April 2027)

(1) or "how uneventful it was"

Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?

This is mostly fearmongering and rage-baiting. Probably not 100%, I'd concede that yes, there's almost certainly some asshole with that plan.

But the fact is that repricing is a MAJOR way for a low margin business to squeeze out some tenths of a percent, but not if they have to do it manually.

Large grocery stores (one of the consistently lowest-margin businesses) in the 1990s would - I am not kidding - have a dozen or more laser printers in the back running full-out printing new price tags for everything. Do you have any idea how much manual labor it took to have stock clerks flipping those to drop the price by 3 cents or raise it by a dime?

Digital tags let grocery stores do these changes enmasse, and look it up:
- they have NOT increased average prices above inflation over 25 years of data
- they have made temporary discounts much more available, allowing groceries to likely reduce food waste by selling things nearly expired with lower prices instead of tossing them out because nobody wanted them.

LOL Elon Musk's politics put him below a LITERAL NAZI?

Sure, this is a completely rational take.

1) he picked a side you didn't like, full stop.
2) he disbanded a gov't agency that had been designed to destabilize foreign governments outside of congressional oversight and was used for at least the last 20 years as a naked leftist slush fund world wide.
3) yes, he put his foot on the scales. Remember why? Because Twitter was a leftist echo chamber.

He's not "doing the wrong things" he's doing things you politically dislike. Sane people understand their opinions don't define reality.

Score 0?

Glad facts matter, /.