If people trust Google to keep them anonymous (which I wouldn't), apartment complex reviews are gonna get a lot more spicy. As it is, you only get reviews from ex-residents and morons.

I don't, and you don't understand the argument. Their business plan is simply not viable and they should fuck off and someone with a viable business plan should use the space they were wasting.

It's dangerous to go alone. Take this.

That's interesting to know. I never spent a lot of time with NeXTStep, though I have played with it a little bit. I think I have a VM for an x86 version around here somewhere, but it was a little crashy in a way that the 68k machines weren't and I don't know which piece's fault that is. I spent more time with OS X, but not a whole lot, so I didn't get that far into it.

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

More like an anti-solution to me. I almost never use File Explorer. On those rare occasions, it does not bother me to wait for a few seconds while it loads.

Me thinks that the real reason for making it resident is the greater convenience of Microsoft. Probably for some secretive tool that is harvesting my PI for Microsoft's greater glory and profit. Not visibly, of course, but using File Explorer in the background. (Any other comments along such lines?)

Better than the usual FP contribution from an AC, but I'm not getting your point and sure wouldn't moderate the FP interesting or funny (if'n I ever had a mod point to give). Perhaps you care to clarify (and even offer a more focused title)?

I do have some complicated thoughts on the topic. Maybe I'm even qualified as a resident of Tokyo to care about the problem? Calls for my ancient and little used sociologist's hat, however... But I really wish I had studied more psychology.

But I can reduce my answer to my stomach. I like Indian/Nepali food and I like trying new restaurants. I also like "atmospheric" coffee shops. (And sometimes I like to try something else.) I'm pretty sure I'm never going to run out of new places to try in Tokyo. However I'm pretty sure that would be true for many of the largest cities in the world... (AI angle via reviews?)

So how about the flip side of the coin? Why are so many people so strongly motivated to move into large cities? And on that side of the ledger things look really strange in Japan...

A few days ago there was a major fire that consumed about 170 buildings. That was in a small town far from Tokyo. However many of the buildings were empties. They call that an "akiya" for empty house. I've heard an estimate of around 100 empties destroyed in the fire. It's not just that no one wanted to live those vacant homes, and that there are places that will actively encourage people to live in vacant homes, but in this case it's worse. If those empty homes had been removed the rest of the community would still be there. Apparently they were the main source of kindling that made the fire so bad.

Another angle on the extreme demographic concentration. From the central part of Tokyo it is possible to walk to a suburb named West Tokyo. Takes about an hour on foot. Not long ago a bear was sighted in West Tokyo... Yesterday's news included a story about capturing (and killing) an extremely large bear near another town... Kind of like a war now, though I don't trust my (AI) source for this next item: Have the few remaining (and mostly quite elderly) bear hunters actually killed more than 4,200 bears in Japan this year? Actually seems quite possible. Nothing else to stop the bear population from increasing. They only look cute and fuzzy when they are quite young. But there was another story on the news about eating bear meat...

Combining the three branches? At least the bears rarely break into empty houses. No food smells. And so far I haven't heard of any bear sightings in the central parts of Tokyo... So in conclusion lots of people move to Tokyo because they like food and dislike bears?

As long as some little bitch keeps modding down my factual posts

All the extraneous bullshit Microsoft added to the start menu is always lurking in memory for performance reasons.

Fear of facts is a sign of cowardice

School issued devices often don't permit installing arbitrary apps, only those on the approved list.

Most iPhone owners didn't buy them outright. They got them "free" with their plan. Consequently out in the real world I commonly see people with old iPhones with cracked screens. They can't afford to replace them, we don't have an Apple store anywhere near here, etc.

The tariff revenues are needed to cover the tax cuts for the wealthy instituted at the same time, so no.

"An employer can only pay the workers what their output is worth, so if your industry is producing things that are difficult to sell, then you're not going to get a good paying job"

You're blaming the victim. If the employer's plan doesn't include paying a reasonable wage then their plan is crap and they need to go out of business so that someone with a better plan can succeed them.

"The experience of Detroit should be a warning to those who believe that this economic law can be avoided; the car makers sold the same stuff year after year whilst Japanese and German producers made ever better stuff."

That's not because they couldn't do better. They chose not to and depended on regulatory capture instead, preventing others from bringing more superior products to the market. Again it's the employer's fault and no one else's.

People who aren't you, but who are near you. They also matter. We all know quite well you don't care about those people, as you've let us know on numerous occasions, but they do matter.