That is a problem, but not an intractable one. The first easy win would be to just stop wasting so much water. CA could be a lot more careful with water than it is by just leaning on industry and ag to cut wasteful water use harder than it leans on the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, green lawns in our Mediterranean climate are a stupid waste too, but it pencils out to less than a percent of all water use, where ag and industry are both in the double digits.

cia.world gave me a giggle

Now I know she was an even bigger piece of shit than I thought.

Just wanted to say that I took your advice, and posted an update to this thread. It turns out that moving to LibreOffice would have virtually no benefit in any regard whatever according to the city IT manager. Thanks for the advice!

Follow up: I called the IT dept and spoke with them. Apparently they already get the “low cost” licenses with Microsoft for users who don’t need access to office (which is the overwhelming majority of them) and just basically get them an email address. The cost increase is really down to the city having added more staff, which means more licenses, since they’ve got a fixed rate contract locked in with MS. It sounds like moving non-power-users into LibreOffice would have negligible benefit and cause more disruption than not. Ah, well, swing and a miss. Thanks for the support, everyone!

Oh, yikes, that’s problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn’t feel good to look at that and say “and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel”, but I guess I get it.

Nah, the cops are losing some positions too. Our council is pretty good compared to some others, (and, honestly, our PD is pretty good too. They’ve worked really hard to keep a good working relationship with the community) but they’re definitely hitting a bunch of stuff that nobody wants to see cut either. It’s pain across the board. I guess if we have to make cuts, that’s how to make them, but I’d like it if Microsoft took one for the team too, here.

Again, I specifically want to leave the power users alone, but my experience in business/industry is that 90% of folks with Excel on their machine don’t even know how to write a function. There’s no sense paying lavish amounts of cash for those particular people to have Excel when LibreOffice will likely suit their needs.

Those are great points, it’s almost always better to walk in the light. I think I got too attached to the validity of my idea. I’ll reach out to them and see if someone can have that discussion.

Is LibreOffice calc much worse? And, again, I feel that most users of office suite software are fairly basic users. I want to specifically leave MS Office power users alone, let them keep their licenses, but if people are just using the basic features, there’s no reason for us to be paying outrageous amounts for MS Office licenses for them. Yeah, I’m aware that this is going to increase the load on the IT dept, but I’m hoping that the targeted user base are basic enough users that they can be onboard with an orientation video for most cases.

At first, I came here to talk shit, but it turns out that the music companies are one of the few sectors more evil than telecoms. I’m pulling for Cox.

About the only thing keeping me off Sony is that they’ve got a really bad star eater problem in their DSLRs, and even still somewhat in their mirrorless.

Well, shit. I was planning on getting a Canon for my first camera because it’s hard to beat them for astrophotography, but I’m less sure now.

We think it’s probably PCOS, but the death panel insurance won’t pay for the test, so we’re treating empirically. It improved some of her symptoms, but not that one, and I’m cool with it. I’ve accepted that this is our relationship.

Well, the biggest change in our case was that she basically did not want to be touched for the whole pregnancy plus a full year afterwards. To provide some context and what I mean, she’d get annoyed with holding hands, and really frustrated with hugging. Physical contact is big for me, so that was really rough. Then, she convinced me that every pregnancy is different and that probably wouldn’t happen the next time (it did). It’s been over a decade, and I’ve basically just come to terms with the fact that sex really isn’t a part of our relationship anymore. That was a really, really difficult thing to adjust to, but I did adjust to it. I eventually saw that it had to be a choice, and had to ask myself what was more important. I decided that I liked my relationship with my wife and my kids better than I liked sex. I’m not going to try and convince you that it’s better; it’s not, it’s just different, and I’m good with that. Definitely not everyone would be, YMMV.

I don’t want to frighten you, OP, I’m just telling you my lived experience. It really is different for every person, and having kids is not an easy thing, so it’s going to change you. You can’t say how your partner may change any more than you can know how much you’ll change in five years. Only you and your partner can decide what you’re both willing to put up with. If you want to stay with them, do it. If not, don’t.

FTA: The user considered it was the unpaid volunteer coders’ “job” to take his AI submissions seriously. He even filed a code of conduct complaint with the project against the developers. This was not upheld. So he proclaimed the project corrupt. [GitHub; Seylaw, archive]

This is an actual comment that this user left on another project: [GitLab]

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).

I think this is it, tbh. I have to constantly remind my kids that math isn’t memorizing the answer, it’s knowing how to look at a problem, follow the rules, and figure it out. And it always seems so very arbitrary to them, as it used to for me as well.

Better now than going mask off immediately after 2027 primary. Can’t wait for this homeless dozering bozo to launch his campaign right into the dust bin of history

Wake me up when literally anybody in this administration gets anything besides a stern lecture.