I think you can replace excel completely with combinations of a basic spreadsheet program like Libreoffice with other more powerful tools including python, Matlab, maple, SQL databases, rust (🦀) etc, but only if you never intend on working with another human or organisation again. Because ultimately you’ll need to send something to someone, and starting any email with “right, the instructions on opening/running this file: so first you’re going to need to install rust…” is in immediate non starter, and even if you can get round that, in return they’ll still send you some hideous spreadsheet with 3000 different vba functions and powerqueries of multiple databases and you haven’t a hope in hell of making that work outside of excel in any viable timeframe.

Excel is sadly the standard and it’s really powerful and a lot of people use that power. This means until something fully emulates all the functionality of excel (a moving target in itself) you’re stuck with using excel. Even though I’m on Linux 80% of the time, I have a windows machine for work that’s purpose is to run excel.

I know you’ve had a load of replies to this, but maybe. The issue is excel. People say libre office or web based Office365 can replace it, and it can for most basic spreadsheets, but there is no support for excel macros, additionally excel tables are not supported, and there is no powerquery equivalent which is a massive problem for sharing complex spreadsheets with others. I could not go without desktop excel for work. Libre office or web based office 365 doesn’t cut it.

Good post. Wow.

I always assumed it was a play on “drunk tank” but for dunking on as in the basketball thing. Not being American myself, I’d never heard of the carnival ‘game’. Or it’s ghastly history. Yeah. I fully support changing the name.

Whenever you want to know just how bad it would be to drop on your hand some chemical that comes with a concerning number of warning stickers, like hydrazine, there is usually a 1950s paper likely in conjunction with the US Airforce that that can tell you, with receipts.

No, no olive oil. Just olive oil soap.

To make soap you take a fat and an alkaline and mix them (to put it simply) e.g. olive oil and sodium hydroxide. One of my friends hand makes bars of soap, and it’s really good for shaving with, though I can’t use it all the time for my hands as real my skin dry! Other soaps will work just as well, I just mentioned that soap specifically as it was vegan.

So I used just a bar of olive oil hand soap which our friend makes - which is odd because I can’t normally use proper soap on my hands regularly without drying them out. It lathers really thickly which gives all the lubrication you need.

I don’t think it’s much harder shaving with a safety razor than a cartridge one. I think it just comes with practice. Keep the skin taught if you can. It’s just a little more complex as you need to keep the angle correct over a complex surface rather than relying on the articulation of the head. The upside of this is a safety razor is better at getting a close shave in a tight spot.

I guess the alternative is wax for more intimate areas but I’m no expert there.

Seconding this. Much cheaper (the blades are dirt cheap and last well) and I used to get a closer shave too with less irritation. I have a beard these days, so I’m not shaving, but before for work I needed to shave daily for n99/ffp3 masks and the irritation (or lack of) mattered for my sensitive skin.

Buy a decent handle like an Edwin Jagger or a Merkur and it will be good for your lifetime and probably your grandkids life too, then buy a pack of decent DE safety razor blades, like Feather or something, and you’re good to go. No plastic waste from all the heads or handles. No bullshit marketing. No subscritions. No chemical lubricants that may or may not work (or contain animals). Just recyclable metal.

Re: what is it about left and liberal culture that’s so unappealing:

At risk of upsetting people, I suspect because the woke scold is a real thing. Frankly a lot of the people you meet who push DEI and other woke issues are some of the most joyless unfunny self righteous bores you could hope to meet. In my workplace they’re usually terminal libs pushing “Pride by Lockheed Martin” brand corporate inclusion whose method for affecting change is just pure idealism with zero steps to address the material reasons for inequality. Likewise if you read and religiously follow the lessons in Mao’s Combat Liberalism you will be completely unbearable to be around.

I think the problem is people have grown to associate leftist ideals and the ideals of actually progressive policy with this particular brand of nagging. And it’s just not cool or attractive. I don’t know the solution here. In the past I thought the ‘dirtbag’ left would be a good tool to warm people to leftism without being off putting. Personally I try to take the rough with the smooth. Like if someone is using some vaguely problematic language but their point is a progressive one, I’ll let the language slide. But If someone is just being shitty e.g. transphobic I’ll call them out, but if I’m calling someone out I try not to be sanctimonious about it. “Harry I’m not being funny but since when do you give a fuck about women’s sports? Name one female athlete… right, stop being a dick and repeating some shit you heard on tictok”

My only thoughts are:

In America currently life is bad for most people. The corporations are rat fucking society, poring pollutants into the water supply and laying off staff to save costs. Prices are rising and opportunities are falling. For many men they feel like DEI and wokeness are attacking their prior advantage to get those dwindling opportunities and the bad news is they’re right. Access to opportunity is a zero sum game. Extending opportunity to marginalised groups does indeed reduce your own current unfair access to opportunities. The good news is that opportunity itself is not zero sum. Progressive policy can make new opportunities and expand the pool.

Your political choices are as follows: Liberalism just wishes to stabilise the current misery. As Joe Biden said nothing will fundamentally change. No new opportunities or prosperity will be made for you under liberalism. Just continued extraction from the capitalist vultures.

Facism wants you to fight your fellow citizens for the scraps of a burning economy. No new opportunity for you here either, just the chance to tread on the backs of your fellow man to get the scraps from the cooperate table. And the pool of opportunity will continue to shrink as more wealth is extracted. Sure you may get the scraps today, but when those scraps run out? Perhaps it’s your turn to be trod on.

Only socialism actually wants to make life better for everyone. It wants to give everyone access to a better future. It wants to build and work towards wealth for all people not just the corporate class of vampires. End the capitalist rent seeking that sucks the life out of society. Build things for public good. Bring back jobs even if they’re not as competitive as foreign Labour. Capital cannot do that, that would be sub optimal behaviour for maximum profit. Socialism doesn’t care, it can do that if it benefits the people.

FIFA games at 0-0 because both sides keep rewinding every time the other player scores.

Those were trickle down votes

Right so given a c.25% each election rise they should surpass the republican 72million votes in the year 2144.

And then everyone clapped

In fairness it was her turn

Doming Joe Biden to avoid being punished for hubris.

We, the (slave owning) people.

They’re heal turning towards the right so they can join with Texas to give us the civil war that Alex Garland dared to dream of.

The kiss of death

I know that , I was joking. But no everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence. Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership. There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin. I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money. I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol. I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist. During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together. The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor. Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.