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> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

Modern politics by a different name. The parallels are obvious, along with the Peter Principle and so on.

Lots of people on here saying 'that's not me', but probably say 'ping me back' or 'learnings' which is very much one end of the spectrum of corporate bullshit that infects everyone. Some of it is stupidity (the English language has a word: 'lessons'), some of it is natural language evolution, and some of it is 'global' English: 'please revert', and some of it is very intentional management waffle. As the (unviersity) saying goes, 'if you can't blind 'em with science, baffle them with bullshit'.


And when we've somehow stopped using fossil fuels for electricity, what next?

Guess what a lot of plastic is made from? And how planes fly, and boats move?

And there's lots of countries that aren't at 'Western' living standards. So we have decades of those countries building and emissions to come.

Plus of course there's a lag in CO2 emissions to climate change. The next couple of decades are going to get a lot worse, before they get better, if at all.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...


I'm old enough to remember when 640k ought to be enough for anybody.

> I think Greenpeace did as much as anybody to turn the world against nuclear power in the late 20th century. And this clearly set us in the wrong direction as far as reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I don't have much time for Greenpeace. Much of their activism has never been science based, and usually involves criminal acts against property. History will not be kind to them.

Their only highlight is 'saving' the whales. For a while.


won't someone think of the property??!?

Yes I will think of the property because private property rights are critical and I 100% support private property owners using violence to defend their property from vandals and thieves.

prosperity comes from property, just add sí /s

The claims were for defamation and incitement:

> A Morton County jury on Wednesday ordered Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline, finding that the environmental group incited illegal behavior by anti-pipeline protesters and defamed the company.

> The nine-person jury delivered a verdict in favor of Energy Transfer on most counts, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer and Dakota Access LLC.

It seems like the jury did its job on the evidence presented.


Rough jury pool. 75.36% for Trump in the latest election, and one presumes a lot of energy sector employment.

Maybe? The judge, and the lawyers involved have the right to reject jurors that might prejudice a trail.

Yes, but that's a lot easier to manage in a county that doesn't have only 30k people in it.

They applied for change of venue 3 times, lost all 3 times, and appealed it to the north dakota supreme court, and lost there too.

Overall, they could not make the showing necessary.

I read the motions and responses, and was not particularly impressed with their arguments for change of venue.


Lawyers don't have unlimited removals though.

Not peremptory strikes, but you have unlimited removals for cause (and admittedly a steep appellate hill to climb if they’re unfairly denied)

You're gonna have a hell of a time construing a quality (energy sector or few steps removed employment) as "cause" when it's applicable to a large minority if not majority of the jury pool.

The judge might allow it, but the odds are long and the next judge will certainly allow an appeal on those grounds so you probably don't even gain much except time.


It’s actually not that uncommon to lose a ton of people for cause in cases that are a good fit for a transfer of venue motion. But of course it does come down to the trial judge. I don’t understand who this “next judge” is that you’re referring to.

>I don’t understand who this “next judge” is that you’re referring to.

If you do something slimy like dismiss a huge fraction of the juror pool because you don't like their demographics (vs for example having to dismiss the half of the population that had their opinion biased by the news or some other non-slimy reason to cause the same outcome) there will be an appeal and that appeal will be presided over by a judge.


That's not how jury selection works. You never have enough peremptory strikes to "dismiss a huge fraction of the jury pool."

North Dakota voted 67% overall for Trump, this is not too far from being representative of the general population. Considering that anyone who is openly hostile against energy companies is going to be removed during selection I don’t see the jury as the issue.

Edit: and considering this was the Southwest district, looking at results by county, 75% seems about right. This isn’t necessarily a biased jury in the sense that selection was unfair, this is probably the makeup you’d get with a fair selection. https://apnews.com/projects/election-results-2024/north-dako...


People can hide their biases (or claim they can set them aside, which will often be acceptable during jury selection), and in a county with 30k people you're gonna run into people who recognize you at the grocery store a lot. This certainly wouldn't have been a pressure-free scenario.

It can be quite hard to get a jury to go against a locally powerful large employer in a small town.


Did you feel that the jury in New York City (76% voted for Biden in 2020) that convicted Trump of falsifying business records similarly corrupt?

lol, nothing to do with Biden - Trump soiled his brand in NYC over 4+ decades of screwing people over, not paying bills around town, "strategic bankruptcies" etc.

It's telling that "trump" buildings rebranded in NYC...


NYC has a… slightly larger population to pull from, which makes the chances of being recognized at the store quite a bit lower.

Convicting Trump doesn't throw half of NYC onto the dole, either.


My comment was flagged. But, basic assumption should not be that Trump voters and Biden ones are symmetrical.

One group finds candidate who defrauds more then any other politician before appealing and right kind manly. They see him sexually harassing women appealing. Moreover all fascists vote for Trump. Both sides have bad people in ... but Trump side is defined by them.

There is no symetry here. This particular choice is literally showing that yes, you are more likely to be unfair kind of juror.


Any argument that attempts to sound serious but includes "Moreover all fascists vote for Trump" has disqualified itself.

Because it comes 'free' with an Office365 subscription. Embrace (<<you are here), extend, extinguish.

It's usually 'management'. The same management that won't pay for developer tools (including Slack) because 'why do you need that when you can do 95% of your work in VSCode?' It's also usually the same sort of management that can do 95% of their documents in... VSCode and markdown. Or LibreOffice.


Microsoft products are only free if your time has no value.

Having been in the position, on a corporate Active Directory network it very much easier to roll out Teams than anything else. It works fine at the kind of internal video calls that companies spend their days on.

Yeah or 80% even so they can sound cool and quote the pateto principle. Which isn't meant as an excuse to not bother to do the 20% at all but they use it as such.

We usually hear about the US and Canada losing power mostly due to freezing rain across a continent sized area as most of the power cables are on poles.

How does that compare to Norway?


It took several decades for the language server protocol and debugger server protocol (or whatever it's called). Is there a common 'agent' protocol yet? Or are these companies still in the walled-garden phase?



It's just missing the inevitable 'desire paths' that are the routes that people really want to walk, not some wibbly wobbly path that a junior planner drew.


You're supposed to look at an architectural render and recognize it as such. Much like a fashion sketch, the goal is to show the designer's intent rather than a real-world application. If I were a client and an architect handed me these literal Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots, I'd be confused about what exactly he actually designed.


> Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

There's a guy that has written their own version of explorer that's so fast in comparison to the built-in, that you'd think they were cheating somehow because of everyone's experience with explorer.

And someone has written an IDE for C++ that opens while Visual Studio is on its splash screen.

And another that has written a debugger with the same performance.

And a video doing the rounds of Word ('97?) on spinning rust opening in just under 2 seconds.

Basically, everything MS is doing is degrading performance. Opportunities for regular devs to go back to performant software, and MS is unlikely to fix theirs in the foreseeable future.


> version of explorer that's so fast

https://filepilot.tech/


$250 for a version with updates past a year? yikes


For a lifetime license incl updates forever that seems quite reasonable to me. It's a bit over a year of Netflix.

In fact, given that it includes perpetual priority support (within a business day!) I expect the author's gonna change that soon, once he gets one of those infinitely demanding customers and realizes what a terrible mistake he made (inf support for a one-time payment, oops!). So better bite while it's hot!

The €40 option for one year of updates is a lot more economical and is still a perpetual license for the software itself.


Now I'm shocked by the cost of Netflix.


The monthly subscriptions always sound cheaper than they are


Don't forget the old sales technique, £3.99 < £4.00. What a bargain!!!


Imagine paying for a file browser. This is why windows will always win. They have the most docile userbase ever. They'd rather pay 250 bucks for a file picker than to change OS.


If you use software that is $10k/year and Windows only, a few bucks here and there to improve your quality of life is a rounding error


I wonder if a lot of Windows users are also BMW drivers. If they're willing to shrug off $250 a year to be able to copy files efficiently on their computers, they are likely also to applaud the wonders of $50 a month for heated seats.


> BMW drivers

£50 for a heated seat, perhaps, but you also get by far one of the best turbocharged inline-6 engines ever put in a 4-door saloon, the S58. Analogous to Windows NT, a well-engineered kernel.


$250 (currently $200) is a single perpetual license. Annually it's $40/yr.

It's easy to lose a few minutes each day to Explorer shenanigans. For people making real money that adds up fast.


Hey Total Commander is free/shareware (if you can live with the nag screen) and superior to anything on any OS


My solution to the nag screen was that I never turned off my computer, just put it to sleep, so Total Commander was always running.

Interestingly, TC was one of the few software that I considered paying for, but in the end I didn't because they asked for too much information at the time. Not long later I switched to Linux, and I couldn't use TC there.


This is more of a macOS thing.

Windows users just don't pay and keep using Explorer.


Double Commander is open source and no cost.


some folks about to make a decent amount of money if the trend wrt win11 continues


> $250 for a version with updates past a year? yikes It cannot handle CJK encodings too. what a joke


I've tried this a few times. Windows 10. Downloaded the 2MB file, double-clicked on it, and nothing happens. Same thing when I tried it a few months again. Put it in a command prompt and no output of an error.

I'm starting to worry I just launched something malicious.


The latter is normal on windows. Executables have a header flag which specifies they either use the terminal or not. If a terminal program is opened from outside a terminal, it opens a terminal window. If a nonterminal program is opened from a terminal, it instantly detaches.


After downloading, did you open its properties and "unblock" it?


woa!!


The problem is on windows you're competing directly against the guys who own the operating system. So even when there is a gap for a better file manager the one that microsoft makes is so entrenched and microsoft can make sure they always win. It sucks.


That was the argument used for IE/Edge. But eventually it got so terrible that the first thing everyone does now is install Chrome/Firefox/Brave.

They obviously have an advantage, but it’s not insurmountable to being garbage.


hilariously, the last time I had a new windows machine and opened up edge to download firefox I got some sort of message about giving edge a proper try first.


I found chrome was putting itself into "eco mode" on my Lenovo (work) laptop all of a sudden. Meant that waking up took FOREVER, and accessing a web page (required as part of a daily login) took 15+ seconds to load when first logging in, as opposed to a few seconds, which caused our password app to timeout at times, etc. Who the heck comes up with these ideas? "Eco mode" by default? And no way to disable it easily? I had to add an obscure switch to the chrome startup to make it run normally again.


On newer laptops, and I’ve seen this specifically on thinkpads) if the power supply you are using is not the correct wattage, the system will throttle down significantly. I started noticing this by looking at windows task manager and noticing the CPU would not scale above 0.8 GHz. Not sure if Chrome responds in the same way, but it’s worth looking into. Fix was easy, just get a proper wattage power supply (i went with oem)


A similar example: Microsoft's Windows Search function is so pathetic and slow, yet there's another little company who gives a blazing fast file search tool, that's available as (portable) freeware since 15+ years.

Everything Search: https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything Search uses the NTFS indexes to do blazing fast file or folder searches. It has a neat and clean interface, and no nagging ads (unlike.. cough, cough.. Windows 11). Everything Search is one of the first tools I install on any new Windows PC.


Amazing, perfect app! I use it frequently, and I love the response I get from customers or friends whom I turn onto it (or install it for). I also encourage others to donate to this developer. The sad thing is casual users would not even think of donating as they assume this type of feature should be (properly) built into the OS; so I’ve made sure to donate on behalf of users I’ve turned on to Everything. Great app!


I was overjoyed when I saw that Microsoft had bought out the small Winternals team (Winternals Software LP, founded by Cogswell and Russinovich, who exposed the 2005 Sony BMG CD copy-protection DRM) that gave awesome freeware "power tools" to tweak and monitor MS-Windows. Microsoft renamed it as SysInternals, and Microsoft has since maintained it well and still kept it all free.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

Fun trivia: Mark Russinovich went on to greater heights, and he's CTO of Microsoft Azure.

I wish Microsoft would do the same for another amazing freeware "power tools" suite: Nirsoft Utilities. https://www.nirsoft.net/

I really don't know how Voidtools has survived all these years, by giving away their primary product (Everything Search) for free.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Everything Search is free, powerful and fast, and thankfully, unlike some other famous tools (CCleaner), it is not adware, spyware or malware. The only caveat, is that Everything Search's background indexing of drives requires administrative access, but user can run it without admin access, it's just that it would need to manually reindex (to add latest files/folders to its index database) on every run then.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/

For years, I have wished that Microsoft would acquire Voidtools (give them a good chunk of money for all the years of service they gave to the world in the form of this awesome freeware Everything Search), and integrated it into Microsoft Windows Search (to make it a rival to MacOS's Spotlight search) to make it blazing fast and finally useful.

(Remember, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated its capabilities into MS Teams, which is available free for personal use, with some limitations (60mins session limit, 100 participants).)


It was VERY common in the spinning rust era to already open (office, etc) applications in the background. I think the launch operation only allocated window resources and finished the job; all the hit the disk work was already precached in memory while the OS was doing the slow computer starting up / logging into the network steps and the user was off getting a coffee or something.


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