Notices by Ian Betteridge (ianb@mastodon.well.com)

As @pluralistic rightly notes, "’voting with your wallet’" (is) a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet.”

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/

I don’t want to freak anyone out but Talking Heads “Remain in Light” is forty five years old this year.

Free speech
https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

@quinn Yes. Yes he did. I believe the word you may be looking for is “wanker”.

FFS people

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/10/24340524/drone-collision-grounds-super-scooper-aircraft-la-wildfires

Bit harsh Apple

@mekkaokereke When my old boss died, he left pretty-much the whole of his fortune to the charity he founded which had been planting a new forest.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10921261/Felix-Dennis-leaves-500-million-fortune-to-his-forest.html

This week, much wending in the swamp of Zuck, we capture the castle and shout at tractors, and why the secret ingredient for AI... is crime.

https://www.ianbetteridge.com/ten-blue-links-marky-mark-special-edition/

@aral @FediThing I think this might be my favourite of all the comments on that piece

@FediThing There is very definitely a disjunct between the average rich capitalist (ordinary FT readers) and the absolute insanity of the US techbro rich. The former really just care about getting rich. The latter care about getting rich *and* ruling the world.

@aral To be fair, I suspect the average British FT reader is likely to be thinking the same.

Good lord, Peter Thiel really does have the brains of a 14 year old Reddit poster.

https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583105

Tesco increased profits last year by 15%. Sainsbury’s also increased profit, and they expect it to go up again this year. Yet they’re claiming if they don’t pay less tax, they will be “forced” to raise prices.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/09/retailers-warn-of-higher-prices-in-2025-and-urge-ministers-to-ease-tax-burden

@slothrop @lproven @larsmb mmm love me some pivot tables

@larsmb @lproven Also: doesn't do tables. The single biggest use of Excel for ordinary spreadsheet users.

(And I have had LibreOffice fans claim this is perfectly fine and people should use a database if they want this. Sigh).

@larsmb @lproven unless it’s changed in the past year, yeah, no tables in the same way you have them in Excel. If it’s been added then 🙏🙏🙏

@lproven @larsmb No, tables, not pivot tables. Excel allows you to mark a data set as a table. This then allows you to sort the data while keeping it coherent, so each line remains the same. (There’s more to it, such as filtering, etc) Make sense? It’s the most commonly used feature in Excel for most people using excel - basically it’s using Excel as a simple database with each line as a “record”.

This, from Lewis Goodall, is very good: the UK and EU can't afford to ignore this.

https://goodallandgoodluck.substack.com/p/zuck-goes-musk

To be fair to Zuckerberg, he did once say he wanted the world to be united by Facebook. He just left off the bit about it being at gunpoint.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/02/17/153948/mark-zuckerberg-has-laid-out-his-vision-of-a-world-united-by-facebook/

It's *really fucking hilarious* when a bunch of little shitposters come at you in a group, thus making it so easy to server block them. They can't even do shitposting right.