Scene: a queue of customers in a shop. Customer at the head of the queue with a total of $19.10, hands the cashier a $20 note to pay. There is no till just an electronic card reader and a cash drawer.

A frown appears on the cashier's face as the sudden realization that skills learned in their "advanced" maths class will now be called on after years of neglect. They reach for the calculator only to remember that the batteries died this morning and nobody has had a chance to replace them. Concentrating hard finally an epiphany - $19 is just $1 less than $20 so they quickly hand the customer a dollar.

But no, the customer hands it back saying this is too much change. Panic sets in as the cashier realizes that they had forgotten the decimal place! How can they be expected to do university-level maths? They don't have a maths degree! Faint wisps of steam rise from their ears as mathematical machinery deep in their brain rumbles into action straining against the buildup of forgotten Tiktok videos and What's App messages. Finally, seemingly from nowhere comes the answer - it's 90 cents! With a flash of relief the cashier opens the cash draw only to be confronted with 25, 10 and 5 cent coins and a new seemingly impossible puzzle of how to choose the right coins to make up 90 cents....

My takeaway is that given the wonerful level fo maths education we now seem to have, sadly even cash transactions require working technology today.

This could have been even funnier if, instead of French for "Viva la revolution", you used the Esperanto "Vivu la revolucio!".

Both Canada and the UK have national health care and their academic salaries are on very different scales so clearly healthcare is not relevant to the level of academic salary.

Even after this change it will still be the BSOD just with a different value of B.

So you do see them! ;-) That's what I was talking about. Yes, the broken rate is probably not quite as high as it is for chargers because pumps have been around for over a century so we have had time to really optimize the design. However, when you are going to a location with 4 chargers and one is broken and the other three are in use you really notice it because you have to wait 30 minutes or so to be able to charge. If that happened at a petrol station you'd just wait a few minutes and use the next free pump without thinking anything of it.

Yes, but to be fair typical academic activities of an 80-year old professor don't involve running around while being shot at by Nazis or finding caves with weird alien beings. Instead it involves being called a Nazi because you innocently used what used to be an acceptable phrase and increasingly wondering whether you might be an alien being because nothing around you looks like the world you used to know.

It's not the discrepancy between academic and industry salaries that matters, it's the absolute value of that salary. That's why I ended up in Canada instead of the UK as an academic - UK academic salaries are not enough to be able to afford a house and support a family on, Canadian ones are. I don't really care what I might have been able to earn in industry because I enjoy my job as an academic too much to want to work in industry. However, I have to have a job that earns enough to afford a house and support my family at a reasonable standard of living - that's my bottom line and the UK salaries for academics are well below that, even up north where I am from and the cost of living is lower.

Clearly your subconcious looks for you which is how you manage to avoid pumps that are out of order without realizing it! ;-)

If you mean that you drove up to one, got out and found it not working then I'd agree with you. But I find it hard to believe that you have never been to a petrol station in the past 10 years that did not have at least one pump that was down for maintenance or refilling the underground tank. The difference is that you probably saw that the pump was blocked off and just went to another without thinking about it like most of us do.

Good point - nobody has a petrol pump at home!

The parent did not say "mass distribution", they said "mass availability" and that is not the same thing. Nor did they say anything about electronic distribution so narrowing the definition to only those media you outline has no basis in anything they said.

....is clearly "mass availability" before electronic communication,

No, but it is available for everyone to see so it is definitely "mass availability" of art.

Not really, because they were itinerant which meant most of the time they were off touring so unless by "friends and family" you mean those touring with them they were not available. Even the aristocracy would generally only host artists for small periods of time meaning that even they did not regularly have access either. Then there were the larger cities, like London that had the Globe Theatre back in Elizabethan times where plays were regularly available for the masses.

Nobody. They're replacing them with universal chargers that have BOTH. And support credit-card readers, which the Tesla ones didn't. And upgrading them from the v3 400V 175kW Tesla chargers to Applegreen's 800V 350kW.

Tesla's contract ended. It was rebid. Tesla lost. Elon whines and throws a tantrum.

It's probably not far from that - it is not uncommon to find a petrol station with one or two pumps that for whatever reason are not working. The difference is that most petrol stations have ~12 pumps and you only need one for 5 minutes at most so when one is not working you just go to another that's available and think nothing of it.

The problem with EVs is that they need the "pump" for at least 30 minutes if not more so you need at least six times more recharging stations as petrol pumps to handle the same throughput of cars. Then, because the time is so long, the owner is likely to have gone off to get a coffee, snack etc. and make not return exactly when the charging is done potentially making them take up even more time at the charger.

Capitalism is like democracy - it's the worst form of economic system except for every other economic system that has every been tried.