A Canadian Cat

It is possible that a restore point might save your bacon here. Could go back to one before the job installed their ****e and then just fix up anything that you wanted to keep. I forget how long you said you installed this.
I was burned by this carp once years ago. When cell phones were really taking off. I took a work provided phone and let my daughter have my old one. Fast forward a couple of years and I was laid off and they took the phone back on the spot. I couldn't even call my wife to tell her what happened. ****ers.
Never doing that again.
Next job "we'd like everyone to try out our new mobile phone app" OK I read the TOS which included a line that they would disable the phone if you left the company. Not the app the phone. I pointed this out and said nope. They said "oh we would never do that". OK then remove that from the TOS. They never did and I never installed it.
Do not install work ****e on your personal devices. If they have something they want you to use and they plan to control the device it's installed on then they buy the hardware. Period.

Yeah, I don't think so. You are mistaking time scale for unity. Just because the modern Russian state was a construction by an imperial monarchy hundreds of years ago instead of something created after WW1 or WW2 does not mean there is magically unity instead of significant grievances driven by cultural differences and inequality of treatment.

Well I am glad you approve - no index is perfect, but if you have a better one, other than your own personal opinion, let's hear it.
Russia did implode...twice.  1917 was the big one.  Hand waving on the Soviet Union in the 90s, is disingenuous. We have a Russian-centric macro-social construct that failed...again...in less than 100 years.  Hand waving and whataboutism on other examples is reaching (and twisting a little bit). Russia has many of the same socio-economic issues that any of those failed state examples had before they failed - that was the point of the entire index thingy.
I could give two figs what the "WH calculus" is on the subject...I have an internet account and can read - Russia was not in fantastic shape before all this, centralized fake democracy held together by elite oligarchs and a strongman.  It economy outside Moscow was flat or sliding (all the talk of no toilets), rampant social issues such as alcoholism and crime.  Its economy was built on a single commodity - energy, which is risky in itself.  Take into account a pretty diverse social structure - 25 official languages! ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Russia) and I do not need a WH briefing to tell me the place has got issues in its tissues. Russia's fragility index is next door to winners like Iran and North Korea (go look it up).
Now add to this a very high cost losing war and it does not take a freakin genius to see how that can go sideways pretty quickly.  There is no domestic-US-plot here (the cry of every European...ever) and you are talking to a Canadian who has to duck every time the US twitches. Russia was a brittle state before this war. Putin was holding it together with bribes, threats and populism. The whole thing would be schadenfreude laughable if not for the fact that the dump has nukes.
 

Yep, that's the bottom line and there is plenty of help on the internet for anything you might need to learn.

oops...
Putin’s pipeline project from Russia to China falls through (msn.com)
Mongolia, through which the 2,500-kilometer pipeline was supposed to pass, has not included Gazprom’s pipeline in its national development plan through 2028, The South China Morning Post reports.
According to the report, Russia offered Mongolia not only transit revenue but also the opportunity to receive gas from the pipeline with a projected capacity of 50 billion cubic meters per year. Moscow failed to reach an agreement with Beijing, said former Mongolian Security Council member Munkhnaar Bayarlkhaag.
“We are entering a long pause, as Moscow no longer believes it can get the deal it wants from Beijing, and the project is likely postponed until better times,” he said.
In 2022, Putin proposed to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to increase Russian gas purchases to 100 billion cubic meters per year to replace the European market lost by Gazprom. However, the Chinese leader did not give the green light for construction. The sticking point was the price of the gas: China demanded it be lowered to the domestic Russian level, around $60 per thousand cubic meters. This is four times cheaper than the Russian gas currently costs China: $260 per thousand cubic meters through the Power of Siberia-1 pipeline.
By late 2023, Russian authorities claimed that the Power of Siberia-2 project was in a high state of readiness and that project documentation would be approved in the first quarter of 2024. “After that, construction could begin,” said Victoria Abramchenko, who was then serving as deputy prime minister.
Mongolia had hoped for an influx of investments from the pipeline, estimated to cost between $8 billion and $15 billion. However, “Russia has no money, and China is in no hurry to build,” notes Li Lifang, an expert from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Additionally, Beijing may fear increased Russian influence in Mongolia, he suggests.
The new Chinese contract is desperately needed by Gazprom, which has lost two-thirds of its exports since the start of the war with Ukraine and last year sold the lowest volume of gas abroad since 1985.
This resulted in the first annual loss in a quarter-century, amounting to 629 billion rubles. Without the ability to sell gas, Gazprom was forced to cut production to its lowest level in history. In the first half of 2024, according to RAS reporting, the company’s gas business loss could amount to another 480.6 billion rubles.

Is this what they are teaching in liberal IR these days?  Why don't we pull some facts into this discussion as we are long on opinion here:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/states-of-fragility-2022_c7fedf5e-en/full-report.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_States_Index
https://fragilestatesindex.org/country-data/
Factors used by the FFP (but are pretty well aligned with the OECD) are:
Security Apparatus
Factionalized Elites
Group Grievance
Economic Decline and Poverty
Uneven Economic Development
Human Flight and Brain Drain
State Legitimacy
Public Services
Human Rights and Rule of Law
Demographic Pressures
Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
External Intervention
So you wanna tell us that Russia is not undergoing intense pressures in just about every one of these areas - some of which we are deliberately projecting upon them?  Strikes into Russia and a UA invasion sure sounds like "External Intervention" to me.
Russia is currently riding 81 on that index (out of 120), they have been higher in the past (see 2006) but not when it was losing the largest conventional war since WW2.  Their numbers are getting worse, and could get very worse very quickly...hence "brittle".
It really does not take "a lot" and we have plenty of evidence of this worldwide. Post-Katrina in New Orleans showed just who fast things can fall apart in the richest nation on the planet.  Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Soviet Union, 90s Russia itself came damned close. Iraq is a masterclass in how to unravel a society held together by a single strong arm dictator node.
Now, I do not accuse you here, but I detest starting with an assumption dressed as a conclusion - "Russia will not collapse...therefore we should push it harder."  Russia can definitely collapse and might not take much more. I agree that simply having Putin and a few elites take a dirt nap may not do it, but another year or two of grinding war, plus regime collapse, no judiciary backstop, unreliable security integration, plus an asymmetrically disenfranchised populace, economic equivalent of throwing up all over themselves, plus the fact that Priggy came within inches of freakin coup - FFS there is a "Russia Free Legion" that has been doing raids over the border for over a year now...?  States have fallen for less.
Finally, the major problem here is that humans are non-linear at scale. The Arab Spring (another classic) endured pressure for decades (centuries in some cases) and then shrugged for basically no reason.  Russia is not even close to homogeneous. How many times have we heard reports that the canon fodder are coming from everywhere but Moscow? So we really do not know what it will take for it to fail. This is why western powers are being so cautious.
 
 

I think the why they didn't tell the US officially is that they didn't want to be discouraged from doing it. There is clearly tension between US concerns about escalation and Ukrainian efforts to change the nature of the war. Both sides have a point and given the history of other military alliances during war (see WWI, WWII, etc), I would argue it's a pretty pedestrian problem. 

A nation state that has had two revolutions in less than a century, and came dangerously close to a coup last year.
The an answer to your “what would it take?” question is very simple…for the lights to go out.  An economic collapse leading to infrastructure failure and shortages is about all 150 million slightly evolved primates need to go feral.  Macro-social structures are an illusion - “imagined community” Hararri called them. That illusion fractures and micro-social reality takes over.  We have seen this in enough places to understand it does not take much.  Russia can barely hold itself together on a good day - those eagles are pointing two heads in opposite directions for a reason.  Under the pressure of war, economic creaking and a tightly gripping autocracy we have all the factors of a brittle state.
My question is not “how could Russia ever fail?”  It is “how has it held it together so far?”

Fair enough. I just know I can do everything in Writer that I can do in Word. And I've never learned how to do the more complex stuff in either Calc or Excel.

+1 for Libre office. I'm not sure if carbon copy is a good phrase. Each component are roughly equivalent but if you do anything more complex than letter writing or balance sheets you will find you need to learn some unique UI / code to get things done. None of which are hard and frankly I would have to look up on the internet for MS Office too. Libre gets the job done with some degree of file compatibility (all my files move back and froth with no issue - a complex stock portfolio balancing sheet that I got from an external author needed some work).

You might see if it's possible to remove Office 365 before you leave that job. If you still need office products, Libre Office works well enough for me. It's free and it won't take over your computer (and works on both Windows and Linux (possibly Mac too, but I can't really test that)).

Well that should settle the "what can US C4ISR/all seeing eye" question fairly definitively.

I really don't think Russia's nukes are a deciding factor here. NATO troops will not invade Belarus unless Belarus attacks NATO first. If Belarus does attack NATO first, Russia's nukes won't help them.

Russian nukes being in a country also doesn't seem to prevent Ukraine from hitting that country with missiles, drones or even invading it. Case in point: Russia.

Good summary at ISW:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/assessing-significance-current-russian-and-ukrainian-operations-course-war
Of course it all boils down to “Russia does positional warfare, Ukraine should do manoeuvre”…how the UA are supposed to pull off manoeuvre on anything besides a largely undefended border sector is still not clear.
My working theory based on Fall ‘22 was - erode, corrode, collapse. But the RA has adopted a very low energy state defence so this does not appear to work offensively. Operational collapses appear to require more precision firepower than Ukraine has in order to engineer.
What is left is - suppress, sanitize, breach, breakout - but we really have not seen this work in a defended sector.  The “sanitize” part is the bitch of the bunch as the attacking force has to pretty much create a box of ISR darkness for the opponent and neutralize everything for kms.  Again the firepower requirements are very high and will likely take an intense offensive swarm no one has been able to generate.
Or we are living in a Defensive primacy age and whatever it will take to reestablish the offensive simply has not been created yet.

FFS enough of the WW2 war crime stuff, it's just wasting everyone's time.  Didn't Steve ask for a stop multiple pages ago??   
Or start a new thread where folks can go and discuss WW2 war crimes. 
 

Looks like our buddy Kadyrov has a shiny new ride! Courtesy of Elon Musk.



 
Kadyrov's chariot

"In a gushing post, Kadyrov, who rules over Chechnya, a republic within the Russian Federation, described the vehicle as “undoubtedly one of the best cars in the world. I literally fell in love.”

He has sent on invitation to Musk to visit him in Chechnya. The letter closes with something that sounds a bit ominous

"And, of course, we’re waiting for your new developments that will help us finish our special military operation (in Ukraine)."

I used to view Musk with a degree of indifference, but not anymore.

I do not dispute the RAs behaviour in this war has been abhorrent.  It is a stain on them as a military that will not wash off on our lifetimes.  
But…illegality in warfare is not a scoreboard or balance sheet.  Any UA alleged warcrime should be investigated and prosecuted by the Government of Ukrainian. If they are smart (and I think they are very smart), these will be transparent and public fair trials within their legal system.  It does not matter that “Russia has done worse”.  Reprisals have no place in determining the righteousness of any action.
As to Russia, a major reason we will be unable to renormalize with that country is the outstanding war criminality on display.  Without full prosecution…and it goes pretty high up the chain, we should not lift sanctions and put out warrants for known RA perpetrators.  Russia’s continual disregard for the law of armed conflict will be why they likely will remain boxed up as a nation and never allowed to rejoin Europe…or at least one would hope.

So MAD is justification for such legal frameworks of “they did it first, so we can too”?  MAD is outside of the laws of armed conflict.  In fact MAD is outside warfare itself.  It is an action of species suicide - taking you with me over the cliff.  You are conflating prosecution of conventional warfare with an activity outside of the legal frameworks we have constructed…to avoid freakin MAD.
If Ukraine starts committing the same level and intensity of warcrimes, what do you suppose will happen to support from the West? It is in fact intellectually lazy to simply dismiss the whole “warcrimes thing” as “boys will be boys”.  There is never justification or legal normalization of war criminal behaviour.  To throw the LOAC out the window is to pretty much toss the international rules based order out with it.  At that point what are we fighting for?  If we destroy the rules based order we built, because we are angry or pissy with Russia - we basically erode or destroy why we are supporting Ukraine in the first place.
Trust me I get the impulse and the realities of warfare, but a major difference between a professional military and the RA is adherence to laws of warfare…even when it gets hard. Actually, especially when it gets hard.  Any military that starts to slip, forgiving or looking the other way on unrighteous shoots, is on a slippery slope.  Let it get too far and we won’t be able to tell the difference and that has serious strategic repercussions.

Easy now.  What we did not see was Allies rounding up civilians and executing them in retribution.  Further, and this is for everyone - just because you like CMBN and Band of Brothers, WW2 is the last historical citation anyone wants to use in the modern prosecution of warfare. In many ways it was as bad or worse than medieval warfare when it came to any laws of armed conflict.  WW2 is the reason we passed the modern laws of armed conflict and stood up an entire international legal mechanism to investigate and prosecute warcrimes.
Illegal "revenge" or "retribution" is not sanctioned under international law.  By this logic, Ukraine could have a few Buchas to "even the score".  This would be 1) illegal, 2) morally wrong and 3) harming to the larger Ukrainian cause.
Does this "tit-tat" stuff happen on the battlefield...definitely. Is it still illegal, yep. What civilians do not understand is that the hard part is not to get the guys to kill people, it is getting them to stop. (And before anyone pulls out Grossman and Marshall their conclusions are highly disputed, and from personal experience, simply do not add up to observations in the modern era.)  

I don't want people to think that I'm always dismissive of every complaint about the engine (I chime in a lot to say that this or that complaint actually isn't as bad as so-and-so says it is), so I'll chime in here and say that I think that the tendency of troops to get distracted by bunkers is a real problem. I've found it to be very annoying on multiple occasions, and it does make the hunt command very difficult to use. The best mitigation is to use target arc commands. So long as the bunker is not inside the arc, your troops won't get distrated by it and they will be able to follow hunt commands. This comes with costs, since you might find that you didn't make the arc large enough, and there are enemy troops outside the arc that you want your troops to stop and shoot at. But it's the best workaround anyone's found so far.

I think they're trying to generate enough artwork/3d models to make a presentable update. I believe that's a major bottleneck since they've only got a couple people to do that sort of work. They've got a lot of the artwork and modeling done, and it all looks fantastic. But I have no idea how much there is left to do, and I suspect they want to be pretty much done with the artwork before they actually post a new update. The masses need pretty screenshots to look at when they get the news about the exciting things being worked on.

True.
I'm not too keen on being on the receiving end either.

Depends on which end of the gun I play... 🤨

It sounds like it is time for some screenshots. In Windows 11, M$ has become far more intrusive and annoying, I finally had to turn OneDrive off. Please get a screen grab of your default save locations, mine default to C-Drive(SSD) but I've relocated the actual folders onto D-Drive(HDD), E-Drive(SSD) is reserved for games.

You may find this article helpful for Win11
How to stop OneDrive as the default save location