Google gets paid for those pointless ads. They care about you about as much as a beer drinker cares about an individual yeast cell.

This is what happens when you hire Windows "admins".

If you don't think women display their breasts, you might not have hit puberty yet.

Did you know Japan has earthquake insurance? It costs me around $130 a year to insure a house. How is this possible?

The answer is government regulation, backed by a public reinsurance scheme large enough to handle foreseeable events (up to about 12 trillion yen total payout).

All mortgages require earthquake insurance and is tax deductable. Therefore, most homes are insured. This is how insurance is supposed to work: spreading the risk.

Conversely, in Australia, when you insure a house, even in an area safe from flood and fire, it costs thousands of dollars. Many houses are uninsured. Insurance companies charge what the market will bear to maximise profit, heedless of what's best for society.

This is trivial to fix with the right regulation. Australia even has a blueprint with its health insurance legislation. Simply regulate that everyone pays the same rates for insurance regardless of where they are. Provide a tax deduction for premiums.

Yes, some people will complain they shouldn't pay more because of someone else's choices. Guess what? The same argument applies to health insurance. But the overall benefit to society and the economy outweighs a few extra dollars out of your pocket.

With all the cheating and GPS spoofing going on, honest customers are getting screwed over. This reduces the perceived value of the service brand and how much customers are willing to pay. This drives away the best workers and creates a downward spiral.

Ironically, traditional taxi services were disrupted by Uber et al for the same underlying reason. Looks likethe time is ripe for Uber to be disrupted...

Yes, a librarian's job is to preserve texts and CATALOG them.

No, a librarian's job is to catalog and preserve texts. Electronic texts take no physically space, so there is no imperative to "curate". It's perfectly fine, however, to create sub-catalogs of, say, non-self published works.

Chrome leadership looked at Rust a couple of years back and then decided not to use it. Interestingly, none of the decision makers had ever used Rust seriously, and none of them produce much code of any sort anymore.

What Google builds is coding pens. Even battery hens have it better; they get a whole cage.

Yeah, that's why Castel Dell'Oro in Naples, founded on a small island in the 6th Century BCE, where Romulus Augustulus was exiled in 476 CE, is now completely underwater.

Only it isn't.

Your claims are equal part ignorance and a pig headed determination to ignore what is in plain sight.

Real scientists use Kelvin or Celsius scales, and don't faff around with archaic units.

About 3 rods, or 3/4 of a chain.

All the unstable ones are dead.

Google shareholder here. Why does Google pay 20% tax when I pay 43% on average? Am I richer than Google (hint: no)? It's time for the OECD to set a minimum corporate tax rate of 50%. No excuses, no buts, no write offs.

Ex-Chrome engineer here. How long does it take to type enough of a search query to start autocomplete? More than a half second? The connection will usually be established by then, much faster if the TLS session is resumed. QUIC 0RTT is even faster.

Chrome runs experiments all the time, often only against Google infrastructure. The reason is because Chrome has billions of users. It is not OK to suddenly DDoS a third party website.

A lot of experiments don't work out. Some do, and are standardised in some way. I have no idea if this one is effective... Chrome cares a lot about users in the developing world and maybe this is a win there. The data will tell. But users on modern devices and networks will not suffer any ill effect even if they choose a different search engine.