“. . . you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“Well what’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

They put quite a lot of fuel in them; there is a lot of energy in fuel.

driller killer

tyrannosaur

dallas buyers club

clerks, “I’m not even supposed to be here today” not really struggle just the mindless tedium.

Or just don’t comply with it ?

I mean no one uses fucking iso8601 and they never get brutally murderd anywhere near often enough.

Hmmn, maybe petardes would be a better choice.

My guillotines have DRM, non user serviceable parts and a mandatory service contract - cough - I mean you get free IoT and smartphone integration.

If you sharpen it youself, warranty is void.

mapreadingcompany - navigation plus funny wierd facts

explainingcomputers - explains computers

paulsellers - hand tool woodworking

robwords - english language

citynerd - deadpan humour and sarcasm about cities

astonishingglasgow - local hisory about places in Glasgow

Shove some electricity up the arse, works on mine.

They need a professor to tell them what Liz Lemon did in one lunchtime https://youtu.be/vyZkHjgzGRM?t=83

You’re talking about free and open competition in a perfect competition marketplace. This is an ideal (similarly far-fetched as communism/socialism*) where there are low barriers to entry, and consumers have good information to make well informed choices. In this world competition bid’s down excess profits in the long run - essentially to consumers benefit. not the benefit of producers. wages are low but it doesnt so much matter becauases competition keeps prices low.

Capitalism wants to increase the return to capital , so it works against competition to create market power (by many means including legal system power and regulatory capture as well tacit or explicit corruption) both over consumers and over their own supply chain (e.g. employees). It inherits its legacy from rentierism and landowners who also like to monopolize land, ration it and have tenants bid up rents.

‘objective sources’, on economics? Good luck. economists are so bi-assed that most of them can spew shit out of two holes simultaneously.

• both communism and perfect competition probably work fine in a small closed community, where everyone pretty much has repeated interactions with everyone - visibility - and there will be other examples where they each work fine-ish, but on a large enough scale, anomynity and human nature come into play. The reality is human trust is excellent, but some people will abuse it when they think they’ll get away with it and that destroys it.

Had me in stitches that one.

I’ve always liked the old anglo saxon names like:

• Aethelweard
• Aethelwulf
• Aelfwynn
• Aethelflaed

We just get stuck with plain ol Ethel and Alf.

I’ve heard a Welsh musician called Gwennifer.
I think Jennifer, Guinevere are all probably similar just different languages.

It makes scrumptious food.

I think in the according to The Stranglers it’s heroin.

Surely they have to use stuff like mathcad or equivalent to be an engineer? I’ve never really used it but it can’t be that far off just doing the calculations in python. I think there’s “sagemath” too availabe for linux - i’m sure that’s not as good as mathcad - but aimed at the same thing i think - and i’m sure it will interoperate with python libraries and R and stuff like that.

I know there are people who claim to be “good at excel” well i only used it for about 15-20 years but then i guess never got “good” at it - i just learned moreabout how bad it is. . Those that were genuinely good at it , as far as I think, did a lot of extra work to mitigate the limitations or create crutches for it. I just got pissed off by it, so i was quite desperate to stop using it as much as possible - it’s just only recently i’ve been allowed to use what i think are more appropriate tools- and i;m grateful for this small, but likely closing “window” f opportunity.

If they’re happy with it though, who am I to judge. But if I was doing gemoetry and engineering calculations and ultimately cad, I know i’d not want excel anywhere near my data or my calculation methods.

I wonder if age is really their issue, or if they just DGAF - again if that’s the case, good for them.

I on the other hand will probably be walking out when they force us on windows 11 however good or bad it is. /management has already fucked us with sharepoint and dynamics - so maybe i’m just as bad as them when it comes to new fangled shit like: clouds, data-lakes, fabrics and other MS shite. I just want our data on a proper fucking filesystem, that we own. And our data somewhere I can SQL it.

Best replacement for excel is: anything that doesn’t rape your data whilst pouring sugar in you gas tank. /s

TLDR - R, Python, mariaDB, for real data analysis stuff + minor role for whatever spreadsheet package.

For hobbies / analysis / data manipulation , storage , graphs and general stats fuckery here’s my advice; as someone who does this stuff - “badly I might add” - for a shitty public sector organisation that just can’t decide whether to bend over M$ barrel or Oracle’s barrel:

• use R (via R-studio if you need an “environment”) for more statsy stuff and easier graphs.

• Python for more general mathsy / programmy / web scrapy stuff - can do decent graphs with libraries like plotly and matplotlib stuff like that, scipy, numpy, and pandas are the other basic libraries for analysis and maths and large datasets. peopl like using ‘jupyter notebooks’ - I don’t get it personally - but 50 Phil Ochs fans cant be that wrong.

• Set up a mariadb or something if you need databasey stuff, I doubt you need to look at more hardcore stuff like postgresql for “hobbying” ; my personal (1 user) databases were built several years ago and mariadb is just fine for that. but some of the high vol transactional DB at work do use postgresql.

These are all good to learn in my experience, even if you think they’re harder than excel; ( are they tho’? array formlae!?). They’re sort of interoperable - subject to learning. They - naturally - have their open-source annoyances.: a million ways to do everything, and versioning issues. (Excel still has fucking vlookup() tho’ - talk abut legacy baggage - but no it’s not as bad as the open souce maelstroms).

You can still ouput data into a spreadsheet for viewing formatting and messing with stuff - but there are other ways.

Footnote: Yes I do still use excel, but normally mostly for final formatted report for customer who wants it. Having R/python directly write data into excel is so much better than letting excel open anything. Excel just can’t let an innocent SNOMED code go unmolested; you have to be on high alert if you let excel actually do anything.

Also spreadsheet for messy data cleansing - for looking at mess, to help refine the R/python cleansing script. I’d happily use libre/ods for any of these but I don’t fancy putting the request in to IT and . . . having to speak to IT about it.

         LEELA
                     Should we really be celebrating? I mean, 
                     what if the second garbage ball returns 
                     to Earth like the first one did?

           FRY
                     Who cares? That won't be for hundreds 
                     of years.

           FARNSWORTH
                     Exactly! It's none of our concern.
       
           FRY
                     That's the 20th century spirit!

“Completely” different, interesting way to put it. Diagnosis must be trivial.

Probably in their mind, but not that I’d care to pay attention; so not obvious to me.

Human beings are diverse. defining a human as “divergent” is meaningless and so fucking dumb. Psychologists seem to be really bad at statistical analysis; and/or data collection that is representative of the species. But they’re maybe good at conning mugs to pay them to denigrate people who don’t fit their world view, or confound their predictions.