That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American. I’m sure you’ll twist that fact to suit you too :)

You’re third, after China and India. Now tell me how those don’t count ;)

Perhaps look into the DC-X program, fully 20 years before SpaceX Falcon: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Eh, the printed TV guide was a thing, and around here just about every newspaper had daily and/or weekly listings of what was on the different channels. Most cable subscriptions came with their own monthly TV guide as well.

Fond memories of going through the TV listings with family, circling the things each one wanted to see on the single TV in the house 🙂

The Milky Way isn’t stationary 😉

The Sun isn’t stationary 😉

What a funny way to spell “shine on you crazy diamond” 😉

That’s the way. I’ve been programming for nigh on four decades, and it’s almost a daily occurrence with junior devs going to stack overflow or chatGPT to solve an issue instead of just searching the code where nine times out of ten the problem (or a very similar one) is already solved.

Laying off a lot of people does wonders for the end of year report…

Plenty of philosophers over the centuries have thought long and hard about the free will problem, and not all of them have come out on the side of it existing. David Hume, for instance, had to resort to religion to solve his issues with it (God made us have free will), and several contemporary philosophers have come down firmly on the “deterministic but complex enough to look non-deterministic” side of the fence. in essence, that free will is an illusion, but a good enough one that we still feel like we have it.

They tried it in France after the revolution IIRC. Didn’t work all that well :)

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

• Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man, 1988

That was an interesting read, thank you!

Heh, haven’t seen the bash forkbomb in close to two decades… Thanks for the trip down memory lane! :)

Inflation doesn’t come from demand, it comes from someone raising the price of something - a raw material or a finished product. The combined effect of all those pricing hikes is what we call “inflation”, and they are almost always done in the name of increasing profit, not to meet demand (whether elastic or not). A system that demands infinite growth cannot work in a finite world, that’s the problem at the root of capitalism.

“Actual inflation” is just some capitalist a bit further up the supply chain “turning the screws on everyone just because they can”. Inflation is the ultimate proof capitalism is an inherently flawed system.

Biggest problem with it is that it lies with the exact same confidence it tells the truth. Or, put another way, it’s confidently incorrect as often as it is confidently correct - and there’s no way to tell the difference unless you already know the answer.

1. “Blam, blam, stop!, blam, police!, blam”…

I’ve always been partial to “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can really hurt me”.

Well, it was Zippo lighter fluid, so I guess my second mistake was calling it “gasoline” 😉