Win 3.x would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if you had a 386. It was one of its touted features. (There may have been a setting to turn this off and on, it may have been off by default). Personally during this period I used DESQview (or however it was capitalized) as a multitasker.

Windows 3.0/3.1 would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if running on an 80386.

So did the Acorn Archimedes (the computer the ARM CPU was originally made for). RiscOS even had things like anti-aliased fonts by then, and certain user interface concepts that didn't show up elsewhere until Mac OSX came out.

However, the PC and Microsoft was already massively entrenched, and the news was huge - finally the computers most people actually used at work were going to catch up with the Mac, Amiga, Archimedes and other machines.

But anyone could tell that Windows was going to be huge. The PC was already dominant and Microsoft was already nearing monopoly position in the PC market (and IBM compatibles at the time had fallen in price such that they were price competitive with the Amiga) and the upgrade path for most people was not to buy a whole new computer but just add Windows.

I remember the news at the time. It was huge. Finally, the PC that nearly everyone was using was catching up to the Mac, Archimedes, Amiga etc.

Raising minimum wage *past a certain point* won't help anyone. If you've ever done basic calculus you will have come across the concept of oprimization - in the abstract for instance, finding where the derivative of a function that's some sort of concave-down curve crosses zero.

The minimum wage will be like that. If you graphed the spending power of the minimum wage people (their income minus their expenses) it will probably be some kind of curve. Starting from zero, the graph will slope upwards, until you hit a peak, and then it will slope downwards as the increased labour cost exceeds the benefit of higher wages.

We are probably somewhere to the left of this optimal point. The increase LA is making probably will move people closer to the optimal point. Increasing the minimum wage to $100/hr will move you to a point far to the right of the point at which the first derivative of the graph crosses zero.

Most farms are highly mechanised and the cost of labour makes up only a tiny part of the cost. (My dad's ex's family are farmers, and farms employ a tiny fraction of the number of people than they did even just 40 years ago).

That assumes 100% of the cost of a product is labour costs.

In reality this is not true. In your example, the wage might go from $60/day to $120/day, but the product will go from $60 before to $80 after. Competition will mean many businesses take lower profits rather than pass on the entire price increase, and virtually no products are 100% labour cost. While wages cannot be raised infinitely, there will be an optimal point, and I suspect we are well below that optimal point as other cities have already demonstrated.

Only if 100% of that product's cost is labour.

In reality this is rarely true, and competition means that businesses often can't pass on all of the cost increase - what it'll mean is businesses will make a little less profit, prices will increase by less than the increase in the minimum wage, and more people will have some sort of disposable income they can now spend on discretionary items. So sales increase.

Certainly you can't raise wages infinitely, and at some point you'll hit a peak, but I suspect we are a long way below that peak.

And before that due to the British Empire which covered a third of the planet.

What is curious is that small children almost always regularise verbs. In English, I've heard children say "buyed" instead of "bought", for instance. The only other language I know is Spanish, and my Spanish friends have told me that the same thing happens there too - kids saying "sabo" instead of "sé" for example.

The problem is that the holy rollers won't lose money. Gays are a tiny minority. It is estimated that at most 5% of the population is gay, and only a fraction of them are "out", the rest miserably pretending to be heterosexual to fit in.

It is entirely possible that there will be *no* photographers in your small town who will photograph a gay wedding.

Should a shop be able to refuse to provide a cake with a mixed race couple on it? Or a black couple?

Speak for yourself - I got my FAA PPL in about 50 hours and adjusted to today's dollars it probably cost less than half of that.

Navigable airspace in the US starts at the surface, everywhere. Don't confuse class G airspace with the idea that it's unregulated.

When it comes to road safety, sentience is overrated.

If a non-sentient computer can drive a car safer and more efficiently than me and other people, we'll be better off for it.