This just in, something that only exists as a sci-fi trope which has never been demonstrated to be even remotely possible is not on the verge of spontaneously emerging from something that is completely unrelated and comparatively unremarkable.

And Dell said “Great, thanks, saved us a ton on severance packages and allowed us to replace our high paid tenured employees with hungry graduates who are prepared to work themselves to death for peanuts”

That’s what my ex wife used to say

So yea, I hear you. I pretty much exclusively listen to NPR for news, and they are pretty balanced if not potentially a little left leaning from time to time, which I actually find refreshing.

But when a measurable percentage of the country thinks fox is fair and balanced, or that FB is a news source, the ability for our free press to safeguard democracy is severely threatened.

What good is free press when there are no longer facts and everything is opinion based?

Paraphrasing Asimov, ‘There is a cult of ignorance which operates under the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.’

When trump took a play straight out of the dictators handbook and started shouting fake news, I began to fear that this was the beginning of the end. The real beginning however was probably a few decades back when news went from dry and factual to sensationalist infotainment.

I have always felt that freedom of press was one of the most fundamental aspects of a working democracy. Without a free press, you cannot have proper checks and balances. Unfortunately, while press is still ‘free’, actual unbiased news gets only a small fraction of the viewership. Mainstream ‘news’ is nearly completely opinion driven, and profit is the incentive rather than the dissemination of information. The free press no longer serves its necessary function, there is no accountability, and democracy is at risk.

Get ready to spring steam from your ears people

Nice that might have been something they fixed.

It’s only happened twice, after updates, that windows turned one drive back on and remapped my desktops. In those cases I have just turned it back off and remapped back to normal. Then env:username works again and I think the only difference is the space in the path with one drive, though it could be something else breaking when the desktop gets remapped.

I’m probably using powershell all wrong anyways because I am an amateur.

I use it to grab a file from an sftp by calling on winSCP, then convert from csv to xlsx using the excel module, then run a bunch of VBA to reformat the file, then save the xlsx with a date stamp. I use task scheduler to run it daily and I have it on like 10 machines.

Works great when one drive doesn’t mess with my desktop path.

I am using that already, but if I recall, it’s the space in the path ‘\one drive\’ that makes that not work correctly.

Edit: I am actually using $Env:UserName

Even something as simple as:

move-item “C:\Users\computername\Desktop\afiletomove.csv” (“C:\Users\computername\Desktop\destinationFolder\newFileName (0:MMddyyyy).csv” -f (get-date))

Stops working as intended when your desktop no longer resides at that path.

Also, I have the same functions running on multiple machines with different names so I have to dynamically resolve the path and piece it together using strings.

One drive is the one that really ruffles my feathers.

It turns itself back on randomly, which wouldn’t be too much of a problem except for that it fucking remaps the desktop… a file that was previously located at C:\user\desktop\ is now at C:\user\One Drive\desktop…

Note the space in the path, they didn’t even have the decency to use an underscore… \one_drive\… even though it’s one of their own rules in powershell scripting.

For those of us using powershell to automate stuff this remapping is a nightmare and should be illegal.

Too bad I am in the US and will just have to continue to get support calls from time to time when a users desktop gets remapped behind the scenes.

Maybe there is a way using powershell and windows scheduled tasks to check to see if one drive turned itself back on, then auto turn it off and remap the desktop back to normal.

The absurdity of having windows check to see if windows screwed itself up, then if so have it fix itself is just laughable.