I thought “on line” was an Eastern US thing; never heard it in the South, Midwest or West Coast.

Corporations don’t willingly give up money. In circumstances like 1 and 3 they’ll more likely just say “thanks for making line go up more” lol. COVID imposed some supply issues that I would assume are mostly mitigated by now, but I haven’t seen costs decrease, only increase–so now we have record profits in many contexts. Subsidies can sometimes help, but it seems to me that the most effective subsidies (in terms of lowering cost) are those with significant, more powerful corporate players downstream (e.g., corn in the US) rather than those purchased by individual consumers who have comparatively little power.

I don’t know that 2 is necessarily quick, but competition can indeed lower prices if a competitor can actually survive against the behemoths in their respective markets. In those instances, corporations can try to shape regulation to squash the upstarts while leaving the big players alone.

I’m not sure that government really has the ability to lower prices in a way that isn’t somehow perverted by large corporate entities given the power they have.

Overall, the big issues I have are that when it breaks it does so unpredictably so I can’t learn how to do things right.

1. It was unclear to me for a long time how to find files correctly (it still kind of is unclear). Our institution uses SharePoint for some things, Teams for other stuff, and some folks use OneDrive. It’s hard to know how these things talk to each other–sometimes this data is actually shared between those ecosystems and sometimes it isn’t. It’s probably how some people are settings things up, but I blame the software for making those relationships somewhat obtuse. My understanding is that everything on the backend is actually SharePoint and Teams and OneDrive are just different front ends with different permissions structures. That has helped somewhat but it’s an imperfect understanding.
2. Joining Teams meeting links from other institutions is fraught with problems. If I have a Zoom link from somewhere else, I click on the link and the meeting starts. That’s it. I click a Teams link on a not-work computer and it can be difficult to open (SSO something something probably). So instead I’ll open in browser, which may result in a “browser not supported error” on every browser (including Edge). Even if I can get in my webcam might not support backgrounds. Or the microphone/camera selection I made in browser permissions is ignored by Teams. Any one of these events occurring appears to be random, so I have to plan on a few extra minutes before Teams meetings to log in.
3. Notifications don’t go always go away when seen. I sometimes have to click out if the window and click back in.
4. Incomplete markdown support (let me copy/paste a table from pandas!)
5. This is dumb, but gif selection sucks. They must do some sort of aggressive filter for work or something, and maybe that’s an enterprise decision. But if I want to communicate exclusively via gifs that is my prerogative, thank you.

National Crab Rangoon Day, February 13.

Is it a made up holiday? Yes. But all holidays are made up. This one gives me crab rangoon. Your move, Flag Day.