NoSorryCannot

Word isn't so hard to replace, with some teething, but you're going to have problems replacing Excel. Nothing else is at feature parity, and converted xls documents emerge looking pretty gnarly.

The fact that much of the US and similar places around the world are scaled for car travel means this comparison between living with a car and without a car in such a locale is completely distorted. That is, yeah, I think it's the Midwest in you.

Cities often have a terrible public transit or pedestrian/bicycle experience because they were built for cars. The alternative is a completely different city and lifestyle.

A monopoly on violence is a necessary condition for being a state. It is something that is true for states but not other things, and it isn't circular to say they are potentially more dangerous for having that attribute.

I've never seen a machine disobey the long-press, though it's probably happened before to someone.

Anyway, I'd rather avoid accidents.

All things about how society organizes and regulates itself are politics. There exists no pure, apolitical thing to prize for being beyond politics. Asserting that there will be no moderation of speech beyond the minimum required by law is a political perspective on how things should be conducted, and a pretty strong one.

I have a problem with it being taboo. It's not a talk about the birds and the bees and can absolutely be addressed in an age-appropriate manner.

Kotlin has more compilation targets than Java, so I don't know that you can say that.

M1 Magnum XL

Not OP but I have tried to get along with it several times and every time, it dried my skin out so bad that I would itch, crack, and bleed. Leaves everything "squeaking" like Ivory soap, which I also don't like.

I will use it for housekeeping but I don't let it near my body anymore.

I feel your frustration but I don't think I want a Wikipedia with secret citations and an editor voucher system. Such a scheme would not be in the spirit of Wikipedia, which is nominally supposed to be verifiable and editable by any reader, and could only reinforce the gatekeeping mentality of its editors.

The person you responded to mentioned all-cause mortality. Remove the base rate, then you're left with excess deaths. How do you explain excess deaths if they are not covid?

And that's not to say an explanation other than covid is impossible, but it would need to be compelling.

I won't argue against the value of a native slide toggle, but they have different semantics compared to a checkbox, in my opinion, and you shouldn't use a slide everywhere you had used a checkbox.

Slide toggles would be completely bizarre on a survey, for example. "ah yes I'll just turn on 'member of the armed forces'"

7 billion years has got to be a bit of a stretch goal, even if you're very bullish on biotech...

Honest question, what law would enable them to forcibly do that? Or was it a little extralegal?

Gross.

Exceptions have some of the properties of a discriminated union, which is why they're used this way. Sometimes it seems parsimonious compared to the alternatives.

And stealing bread is illegal for rich and poor alike!

Wine isn't anywhere near good enough to offer this as part of a mainstream migration.

I've been a Windows user all my computer-using life but a couple of months ago, I switched to Linux. I was feeling harassed by Windows; you must log in with your Microsoft account to do this or that, ignoring my default browser and opening things in Edge, disabling features if I don't turn on telemetry, and so on.

My Linux desktop experience has been a little worse than I expected. It's inferior to Windows in several ways. But all the same, I think I'm done with Windows for the time being.

Not if there is a rasterization step in the process. That's essentially what printing and scanning achieves, rasterization, and we can do that without the printer and scanner.

Of course, the artifacts introduced by printing and scanning (especially with contrast turned way up) gives it an air of legitimacy, although these can also be simulated.

I'd say the implied request for help or at least ideas for troubleshooting or alternatives is so obvious and natural that it doesn't merit this level of suspicion about ulterior motives. It's completely normal to say "I can't reach the top shelf" and mean "can you help me get something off the top shelf?"

As an aside, commonplace implicatures like these are a kind of what's called "pragmatics" in linguistics.

It's always a little frustrating to me to see this framed as some very recent thing to do with Twitter or whatever.

People have always folded beliefs into their identities and felt embarrassed or defensive when they are challenged. Most high-profile since forever is religion.

Which brings me to another frustration, when it's presumed that there is something wrong with beliefs being involved with identity. I'm not even sure what capital-I Identity is supposed to be if not a system of beliefs about yourself and the world and how they relate.

I don't think any of this is as new as it is often assumed to be. There appears to have been a rise in "identity politics" but even this is wrong; politics has always been about identity, it's just that nationalism or socialism or other principles can be part of someone's identity. Or in other words, they are beliefs.

So maybe we are more individualistic in our politics, and maybe that is bad. Or maybe it isn't... It's probably a mixed bag!

It isn't new and it isn't going away. Employers have always exercised discretion in dismissing employees, and they especially exercise it for high-profile ambassador-like figures in the company. Public outcry (also not new), possibly amplified by media (again, not new), is just one justification they might use, and it's not the worst or most chilling among them.

There is no satisfying solution to stop this because of course we generally want businesses to be capable of responding to public pressure, though we might not always agree with the outrage or like the people it comes from.

Who said they didn't?

Mazdas don't have touchscreens, incidentally. It's one of their design constraints.

I wonder what the economies are of splitting the difference between total electrification and battery power.

Strategically-located sections of electrified rail to charge trains as they pass through without stopping. Retractable catenary so still compatible with existing clearances. I'm sure someone has had this idea before.

You might not need nearly so much infrastructure, but you invite bottleneck congestion.

The essential property of seals is that they are fragile and offer tamper evidence. Removing a seal or opening a sealed document is supposed to be destructive to the seal, the document, or both. Seals are still used for this purpose.

Electronic signatures don't have this property.

If it helps, these documents were not written down by the authors but by a professional scribe whose job it was to write a beautiful page, or to keep trying until it was just so.

The handwriting in historical letters, while still often beautiful, was not perfect and had errors.

The reason pigments or anything else is blue is also because of physics.

Horrifying?

People always have made and always will make mistakes and we've been using technology to avoid accidents or minimize the consequences of them for a long time.

Technology preventing accidents is not horrifying.

The trouble of regulatory bureaucracy or liability is adjacent but separate.