Lots of reasons to dislike Google. That is not one of them.

I think I also had to do some secured email thing to send/get my university transcripts. Like they would send the grad schools I applied to a direct link over secured email, to prevent students from forging or editing them before sending them to grad schools

I think the far left (if they’re going to vote) aren’t likely to be pushed away by more moderation from Harris. They’re already far more politically engaged than the vast majority of people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of apolitical people who dislike Trump, but just don’t want to vote and feel like they don’t know enough about Kamala to feel comfortable voting for her (my Catholic Republican mother, for example). I think that group probably has more people in it than the far left does, and more exposure to Kamala’s normalcy relative to Trump is a good thing for swaying them, given the shift in the polls following the last debate. I’ll always be disappointed when the Dems pivot right instead of left, but I think the logic is sound in this case.

That is not accurate, and doomerism only helps those who want us too demoralized to put up a fight. If you want to be part of the solution to climate change, I recommend doing some reading on what the range of projections and outcomes actually look like.

Is it fair? Probably, yeah. But I don’t think it’s an effective way of framing or addressing the problem.

The challenge is always getting enough people to do enough of an action that it makes an impact. It is certainly more effective, in terms of reducing emissions, to target policy interventions at leverage points - like forcing energy companies to adopt renewables by law and banning further fossil fuel extraction.

Personal action can be useful to live in alignment with your values and to provide examples to others for ways to get involved in the climate movement, but we can’t consume our way out of this.

I do a lot of data analysis and visualization in my job, and you are correct. I use Excel when I need to share data with co-workers, but I prefer to use Python for just about everything else. I see no reason to embed Python in Excel.

Yes, and that should be changed, imo

Billionaire wants a totalitarian state, who’s surprised?

No, I just never feel good after using it

Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s the algorithms, but I do notice a difference in how I feel after spending time on the Lemmy or Mastodon vs Instagram or LinkedIn

I use Proton and really like it, but I don’t know how to go about using my own domain (though I am interested in it). How difficult is it for someone without webdev and self hosting experience to get set up?

It’s not so much that I can’t make phone calls, as much as I don’t want to. 75% of the time you just end up playing phone tag, and I’d rather just email so they can reply at their convenience and there’s no question about who said what

Still a commendable act

Why am I not surprised? In the words of the Wu Tang Clan - “cash rules everything around me”

That is not all that different from how I’ve heard professors talk about other people in their field. In grad school, I was talking to an Econ professor and mentioned that I had been reading a paper from another economist. He said that he’d edited a book chapter the other guy had written and found it so incomprehensibly wrong that he didn’t know where to start lol

All totally true! It’s definitely not great, but I try to find the silver linings rather than beat myself up about the hard parts. Good point about my ADHD being different than others’

What do you typically use your computer for? That’s going to have a major impact. If it’s pretty basic stuff (web browsing, text editing, etc) you shouldn’t have any issue. If it’s something that’s more complicated or unusual, then sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes not, depending on what you want to do. In general, a little bit of comfort searching the web and working in the command line helps a lot with troubleshooting Linux