The version, with the ox is from Portugal. Specifically the Portuguese saying literally translates as “put the cart in front of the oxen” (so we use plural oxen rather than horse).

Propely done Agile is more to solve the “We have the general idea of what we need but will only know for sure the details of how it will work once the users see it and start playing around with it”.

You still need to upfront know that a wedding is actually needed, but have a process for figuring out and trying out the details of the various elements of it (say, as part of deciding what kind of food will there be for the reception, actually preparing and trying various options) before the whole things actually gets “delivered”.

Agile also works well for environments were software is developed to serve the kind of business which is are constantly changing (for example, certain areas of Finance) or is something totally new being created from the ground up (i.e. many if not most Startups) because the business itself is a sort of a neverending “we’ll figure out what we need and if it works well when we get there and try it out” which matches almost perfectly the fast and scope-limited definition->implementation->feedback cycles of the Agile software development process.

I once had a customly designed project for an external client of a web-development company were I was technical lead and the sales guy who sold it to the customer without ever consulting us about it had the project management responsability.

On the very first day the guy got me, the junior developer and the designer together for the project launch meeting and started saying how we would have to work extra to make it fit his (ridiculously short) deadlines and I just said “No, it’s not at all possible to fullfill those deadlines so that’s not going to happen” and when he tried to argue with “what about the client” I replied that “You came up with those estimates and gave them to the client without even talking to us, the experts in that domain, so managing the fallout with the client from that is your problem not ours”.

I fondly remember all that because of the transition from downtrodden and unhappy to absolute happiness visible on the face of the junior developer when, after the sales guy / project manager gave us the “work extra hard” spiel I (as the tech lead) replied with “No, that’s not going to happen”.

(Ultimatelly the project took twice as long as the sales guy’s estimates)

The whole “putting the cart in front of the oxen” (as we say in my country) of this meme reminded me of that one (and that memory invariably puts a smile on my face).

I use MullvadVPN and I almost always encounter this issue.

It probably depends on which server(s) you’re using.

When I was finishing of my degree at Uni I actually spent a couple of months as an auxiliary teacher giving professional training in Unix, which included teaching people shell script.

Nowadays (granted, almost 3 decades later), I remember almost nothing of shell scripting, even though I’ve stayed on the Technical Career Track doing mostly Programming since.

So that joke is very much me irl.

Good luck getting the Trumpettes to understand that…

It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.

In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.

(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)

I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.

I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.

I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.

I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.

I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.

This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.

They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.

I’ve been a “digital packrat” for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).

Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.

Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I’ve had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)

I’ve been doing exactly this and for even longer than this guy.

Then again almost 3 decades in the Tech industry (which amongst other things means seeing several comes and goes of “providers”) have long taught me to be suspicious of being dependent on 3r party providers, and even more so of having my stuff hostage to their wills (either hosted in their machines or wrapped in encrypted envelopes which I cannot remove).

There is no actual good consumer reason for a seller of digital goods to keep it in their systems or in your own storage but encrypted, without letting the buyer have free access to what they bought.

Back when those things started a lot of people went for the convenience of encrypted Apple music on their iPods, encrypted books on their Kindles and buying videos that they could only stream never get and, inevitably, they got screwed and here we are.

I, for one, didn’t got screwed with that stuff.

In the big picture I expect collisions and debris in LEO are less of a problem because things at that level tend to naturally deorbit without regular use of propulsion to make up for the effects of atmospheric friction (which is tiny, but still there and adding up over time).

So, only criminals will have them?

Those specific propaganda elements are widespread in the West and widelly repeated in the mass media even outside the US, so it’s useful to deconstruct all that for others when I am in a position to do so since that deconstruction of it will also alter their perception of other instances they saw which at the time they did not really spotted for what it really is.

Hopefully the pointing out the mechanisms used here to construct a highly biased image will even make the readers of the deconstructions of it such as mine be more resilient to other instances of the same techniques being used.

Further, how can we be sure that this poster is a propagandist sock-puppet and not just a normal person who got deceived by the modern (that relies on framing, qualifying and implying) style of propaganda and hence repeated it?

I think that all in all, it’s better to have these things and then just deconstructing them for all to see, than silencing them. Also on principle I’m very wary of Censorship.

I went to all the trouble of pointing out the obvious hypocrisy and propaganda not for “these people” but for everybody else.

EDIT: Wow, the previous poster totally changed their post that pretty much just outright repeated the traditional points of Zionist Propaganda on this as seen in most of the the Western Media (I should’ve kept a screenshot) into a response to my own post which just outright repeats traditional points of Zionist Propaganda (at least he’s consistent) but without the slick framing.

(Interesting technique to avoid that others are notified of a response and come back to counter it).

My original benefit of the doubt (that maybe he’s not a sock-puppet) seems to have been incorrect. My bad.

–

My original post below:

That shit starts by straight out quoting Zionist propaganda.

First the double standard:

Either they’re both Terrorist organisations for “attacking and murdering civilians” or one is a Resistance Movement and the other a Nation State. Claiming that the murdering of civilians to terrify the rest into complying with one’s political and economical goals is only Terrorism if some do it but not if others do it is absolutely taking a side and doing it quite extremely since “Terrorist” is a heavily loaded word.

Second:

The ever repeated Zionist propaganda that being against Israel is being against Jews hence it’s antisemitism. Is Hamas anti-semite (I.e. against Jews for being Jews) or is it against an occupier oppressor nation that takes their land and murders their children and is controlled by a subset of Jews? So far all indications are that it’s mainly the latter.

Also the double standard raises its face once again here as the Israelis aren’t being said to be anti-Islamic, which is funny give that even the Israeli press is extremely racist nowadays - curious that the alleged Racism of one side just had to be mentioned but not of the other side.

Third point:

That Israel responded as if there had been nothing else before. This is pure Zionist framing of this stage of a long ongoing conflict between a colonialist occupier and the native resistance. Israel started this shit, way back when the Zionist colonialists started stealing the land of Palestinians and expelling them or murdering the (the first peak of it being the Nakba).

If Israel was given the exact same treatment as Hamas in that text, it would have been described as “the Terrorist anti-Islamic colonialist invader”

Now, I’d like to think you’re just naively repeating the Zionist framing and propaganda that they so carefully spread in the West, in which case you might want to actually think about what you read before repeating it, as you’re parroting outright propaganda.

True.

That said, British days as an Empire were almost a century ago whilst the US has been entering that phase for a decade or two at most.

IMHO, the closer a country’s past as top dog is, the more wealth is still floating around from the old days and the less the local elites tend to squeeze the local peons to maintain their status, and the riches from the gold old days are a lot more depleted in Britain than in the US, whose currency is still the main reserve currency of the World (though less and less so since maybe 2 decades ago), which would explain why impoverishment of the average person was faster and deeper in Britain.

More likely it will lose superpower status and just become a run-of-the-mill large size developed country like Britain or Germany.

Living in a run-of-the-mill developed country isn’t actually bad - in fact the best places to live in the World in terms of median quality of life are all pretty run-of-the-mill places.

Granted, judging by what I saw living in Britain, the whole post-Imperial hangover does screw things up significantly for a century or two compared to similar countries that were never top dog.

Yeah, that stuff it’s pretty hard to learn and it’s worse when you’ve never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of things you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time, avoid wasted work (i.e. time wasted) and avoid problems later (which in turn, also means time when you’re the one who has to fix them), but only after you’ve seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify spending time doing them to others because you’ve seen them actually work).

I was lucky that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and what resulted of working that way gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which I until then though were “the way everybody works in this area”.

No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.

Let’s just say she was a lousy manager.