Among other reasons you’ve been given:

• The figured MN folks would be peaceable and lay down.
• No open carry of weapons.
• Didn’t think they’d show out in deep winter. (HAH!)

Yes. My last 3 were excellent businessmen and treated employees exceptionally well.

The one before that was a buffoon, but that was a tiny 13-person company. Our main vendor said, “He’s a man who has found great success despite himself.”

O365 is a little different because of the utility and backwards compatibility of Excel. My last shop was all Google, but I still had to buy Office for accounting and HR (for some reason).

One can quickly learn their way around other office programs, but Excel is the killer app in office productivity.

Back in the day, 100K was a piece of shit, no one would touch it. Powertrain warranties were 36K. Cars are amazing these days, but I loathe the maintenance.

You and I wouldn’t be able to use jargon or talk procedures. It would be immediately obvious we were faking. Come up on me and tell me you’re in IT, see how that goes. :)

ICE is the modern Brownshirts. Once they became too powerful, they were slaughtered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

OTOH, we don’t have anything like the SS to replace them with. Yet.

We still need people doing ICE’s former job. Bet there’s not a country on the planet that has zero internal immigration enforcement mechanisms.

You can buy everything they wear, even POLICE patches, on Amazon, eBay and Etsy. That’s where I get my outdoor and gun gear.

What do you get when your search “terminal”? My home rig defaults to PowerShell, but I likely changed something years ago.

I’m a Windows sysadmin, this is the exact explanation. The only other thing, and this is going way out on a limb, is that terminal was installed through the Windows Store and something related is busted. I’ve never even heard of a company utilizing the Store for installations.

Could not have written my exact take as closely as yours.

Only thing I’d add is using it to screw around with personal photos. ChatGPT is cleaning up some 80s pics of my wife that were atrocious. I have rudimentary PhotoShop skills, but we’d never have these clean pics without AI. OTOH, I’d gladly drop that ability to reclaim all the negatives.

Very few laymen have noticed or give a shit about RAM prices. My young friend across the street and I are likely the only people on the block who know what RAM does, let alone are able to build a PC.

Business purchasing is where we might see some backlash soon. I’ve bought all the IT goods, hardware and software, for my last two companies, and I’d be screaming.

Boss: What the hell? Weren’t we getting these laptops for $1,200 last year?!

Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you’ve made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.

I do. Got a free license from my last job and Excel blows the doors off Calc, or anything else. For business, Excel is moat of the reason they’re so tied into Office.

Wife and I got COVID last fall, despite being vaxxed. But god knows how bad it could have been without. I have mild emphysema, that shit can kill me.

And no, neither one of us kept up with the vax schedule. That’s on us.

That’s rather my point! What are we to replace a free market with? Everyone screams SOCIALISM, but no one seems to agree on what that actually means.

Shall we do the literal, textbook definition? State ownership of the means of production? That’s been a complete failure.

What we need is a capitalist economic system, reigned in by:

• Unions, to protect the workers
• Breaking and disallowing monopolies, so they never get so large as to control the government
• Democratic governments who protect us, voted in by an educated electorate

But I repeat myself. I guess the Nordic countries, and most of Europe, who act exactly as I outlined, are failures.

Spell it out then. I am willing to listen, willing to be wrong.

Same with evolution. “The eyeball is too complex to evolve as a whole unit!” Well, that’s absolutely correct. First, start with a patch of light sensitive cells, iterate.

For all the bitching about capitalism, which basically every country on Earth uses for an economic system, we’re missing 3 key things.

• We can have unions under capitalism.
• We can break, or prevent, monopolies under capitalism.
• Our governments can protect us under capitalism.

Everything works fucking great with those 3 ingredients. Imagine that.

Fevers always work out great for me. I’ll be all shivery and crash under a pile of blankets. Wake up a few hours later, soaking wet, I mean really, truly gross, and it’s over, all better.