DandomRude

The US is a failed state. There's no other way to put it.

This article was just one not pay walled piece I found right away - I figured I'd at least mention some kind of source. I'm sure there's much more information on this to be found elsewhere.

It is also interesting to note that there is speculation among historians that Da Vinci may have deliberately included errors in the designs of his war machines, as he was probably more of a pacifist.

This is mentioned, for example, in this article on the design of the Da Vinci tank:

Some scholars argue that Leonardo, a known pacifist, may have deliberately included this flaw to prevent his design from being used for warfare. Others, however, believe it could have been an oversight.

Source

Ja und beim lieben Herrn Merz klingt es zudem ohnehin immer nach: Eigentlich sollte ich ja die Interessen der deutschen Bevölkerung vertreten, aber tatsächlich bin ich als Ex-Blackrock-Deutschland-Aufsichtsratchef und aufgrund meiner zahlreichen Verstrickungen etwa mit der Atlantik-Brücke vielmehr Berufslobbyist im Dienste von US-Konzernen, weshalb mir die deutsche Bevölkerung komplett egal ist ¯_(ツ)_/¯

One might assume so, but I believe they are simply malicious and have no qualms about lying through their teeth.

In my experience, teams has performance issues, consumes a lot of system resources, and has a confusing, unintuitive interface. I also find it outrageous that the teams app adds itself back to autostart every time you use it.

I also have concerns about where my data is stored and how it is processed.

Yeah, I've been there too – it's really sad that people are so incredibly incompetent – I had this happen to me even with an advertising agency that makes millions in sales, where we were the client. It's really unbelievable. These are all highly paid people and they have no idea what they're doing. Really just empty talk and not the slightest bit of substance behind it.

Yes, I've also experienced this several times. However, I still don't understand what the problem is with contacting customers who use Teams via some other solution. I can only explain it with ignorance that borders on incompetence.

Yes, that's clear, but I think Teams is still terrible even in this situation. I really can't imagine a use case where this app would be a good choice - even if everyone uses Office. What are the advantages? What are people doing that couldn't be done with any other solution? I realize that it's probably mainly because employees are set in their ways, but is there really an objective reason why it has to be Teams? And as I said, I mean that even if you ignore the data protection nightmare that this application is.

Edit: Sorry, I probably misread that. I assume you use Teams because every employee has an MS365 subscription anyway. That seems like a waste of money to me tho, because every Office app can be replaced with a free open source app – except perhaps in the few cases of Excel power users. But that's just my opinion – in corporate practice, things look very different.

Apart from all the absurd stuff MS does with user data, I simply cannot understand why people use Teams - it's a terrible app for video calls.

Sad but true. I see it the same way: .ml seems to me to cause a lot of harm. The arbitrary censorship there - imo there's no other way to describe it - is damaging the reputation of the Fediverse as an open approach to social media, which is why I think it's indeed time for decent instances to defederate.

I mean, especially for new users who are unfamiliar with the decentralized nature of the Fediverse, it's an unpleasant experience when they post something completely legitimate in one of the (seemingly) large .ml comms and then get censored by one of their deluded mods.

This can easily give the completely wrong impression that Lemmy would be something like Truth Social just on the other side of the political spectrum, which .ml actually is – and in my opinion, this needs to be prevented at all costs.

Yes, unfortunately, some of the largest communities are still there because .ml is the home instance of the Lemmy developers. That's a real problem.

Recently, one of the mods there deleted two comments I made out of the blue – I had simply said that, in my opinion, there can be no justification for terrorism against civilians (I don't see what's wrong with that). I already knew this, but it made it clear to me how absurdly intolerant these people are – at .ml, open discourse is actively prevented and that is unacceptable to me.

As a result, I have stopped my financial support for Lemmy development – despite FOSS, I simply cannot support people whose stated goal is apparently to replace one propaganda machine with another. That is the opposite of what is important to me.

My financial contribution will now go to other projects. I'm very sorry as support for the software development is of course important, but I simply can't trust people who approve of such a restrictive approach to social media.