I don’t understand your disbelief here, the 2 major players in online email and account mgmt (for education) are Google and Microsoft and both are 0 cost, but the bait and switch is the limit lowering mid cycle, not even on the academic calendar. Now that exchange on-prem is essentially dead and Google and MS control email via blacklist politics, it’s a captive market.

We had been a university with office365 for several years, and the price change came well after the product comparison and decision was made. Once you are in an ecosystem like that the cost of changing is astronomical when you include migration labor, training, and loss of productivity during the transition. When you are a university with thousands of student, staff, and alumni accounts, and the office, mail, and authentication environments are integrated, it’s realistically functionally impossible to migrate.

The student A1 licenses are 0 cost without upgrades, which is why it was chosen, but the storage change was a blindside. We had hundreds of accounts using over the 100GB of data (which was within TOS) and had tons of data in onedrive which had to be moved or we had to fork out per account. This was a bait and switch, plain and simple, and that is the issue with “cloud for everything” is you are at their mercy.

Completely disagree. This last March, Microsoft changed the storage limit per user on OneDrive for education from 1TB to 100GB, and users either had to delete a ton of files or pay for increased license/space. We ended up standing an on-prem file server back up shortly thereafter because we could not get our users and faculty to delete research data and could not afford to nearly double our cost expenditure. In my experience doing IT budget for years, cloud has meant that you cannot predict your yearly expenditures, Especially if you use your services that are funded in part by venture capital. Let’s say you start using some cool research presentation project and suddenly the economy dips and they lose funding, the cost goes way up. Life cycle management has gone completely out the toilets in my experience with cloud products.

Cloud. Businesses went all in on cloud under this illusion of stable costs, but costs go up and contol/support have gone down, and I’m seeing businesses spin on-prem back up.

Yes she, happily cleaning herself wrapped in garbage, as one does.

But the alternative is a gamble on fascism, in a 2 party system you have to pick the establishment you dislike least.

If it wasn’t clear I don’t want it to happen…but over the years I have felt pretty disenfranchised by the actions of the party vs the will of the voters, and I am still going to vote for them.

It would be the most Democratic Party move ever to push Joe out and announce Hillary again.

I mean this is the world he wants, you can’t dog whistle people to take up arms against tyranny without a comfortable acceptance of the irony pool you are filling. Everyone will try to spin this to their political advantage but the truth is this is the level of political discourse the right has been driving towards.

His denial of climate change evidenced by his holding of a snowball on the congressional floor in winter was the moment I realized that memes are now more important than facts.

My mom had Crohn’s so she was on the toilet a lot, and my dad got her a toto washlet, the fanciest one possible. It uses the seat as a warm water reservoir (never a cold toilet seat), has a light, and has a heated air dryer. When I grew up and we redid a bathroom, that was my single ask…and outlet next to the toilet and that device. It’s absolutely key, we put an unpowered bidet in the other bathroom and no one will use it.

Part of the free-market attitude though is that you should be allowed to buy policy, so in that regard it’s consistent, you just have to account for corruption in the cost of doing business.

I don’t want to speculate as to the fate of the baby, the corrugated sheet metal had to be moved and it was only a few minutes after I had removed it that we heard the squeaking. Nature is gonna nature, either the squirrel will survive, or a predator will get an easy meal. The thing is, within the family, we will probably ask “is that the squirrel all grown up?” every time we see a squirrel up there for the next few years. I think that’s the best outcome we can hope for.

El Dorado county in California, just north of Placerville, on a hill above the banks of the South fork of the American River.

It had a long worm-like tail. If it was smaller I would have thought mouse, but the leading theories are squirrel or mole.

If people are ok with that then I guess it will stand, but it’s insane and anti-consumer in my book. A product costs what it costs, based on supply and demand, and if you can’t afford it you don’t buy it. This flimsy premise of “It lowers the bar to entry so users can upgrade later without having to replace!” will never come to fruition, and it’s too slippery of a slope to “put in a quarter to turn on your A/C”.

That is insane. If it costs the same to make, then lower range isn’t a reasonable area to pitch a lower cost vehicle. Wanting to lower the cost is fine. Putting in cheaper/smaller components to get there is fine. If you are using the same components and just software locking them to nickle and dime the users later, that’s anti-consumer and should not be tolerated. I can’t believe how people look at micro-transactions in games and think “wouldn’t this be cool with IRL stuff?”

Universities have huge endowments and investment portfolios. These are generally broad and in support of keeping the financial backing of the school stable; this is extremely prevalent in the large older universities like Harvard or Columbia (but almost all universities have one in some form or another). They support both students and ongoing academic research.

While many of these portfolios consist of wider funds, many have specific investments in specific companies and industries. That means that the university is invested in, and taking benefit from, areas of industry. The main request is to divest the investment portfolios from companies owned by or supporting entities connected with Israel’s war on Gaza. In some cases this may be possible (move a ton of stock from a defense contractor making weapons sold to Israel to an energy company) and in some cases it may not (they’re invested in a wide market fund that itself invests in specific funds, but you can’t easily cherry-pick which stocks are actually in it). It’s also possible that there are research grants funded through companies who the students want to apply negative pressure to; cancelling a grant sends a message to the company, but also leaves entire teams and time-dependent science without funding, potentially ending it outright unless alternate funding can be found. There also may be contracts involved for specific research and engagements, and breaking a contract is more complicated than just ripping it up (especially if there are early termination policies outlined).

Realistically, the best students can hope for is a commitment to investigate and divest where possible, which is frustrating but also makes sense. I’ve worked in higher education for 20 years and have seen this on a smaller scale around defense contractors during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The endowment is a slow moving leviathan, but I think it’s a good place for the students to apply pressure.

To be clear, this is a subset of the lunchables brand specifically manufactured and sent to schools for lunches, which has a higher sodium content than the retail variety you can buy. They don’t want to ban all lunchables

No joke can you share those results? I’m holding out for matter cast