Annoying and overly literal puzzles are my generation's jam. And really any generation going at least as far back as those who read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or the Oz books.

I still haul Zork out once a decade and play at least the first one. I rarely have the energy to power through the second or third. I also occasionally pick up Return to Zork (1993) which is more of a full motion point-and-click game. A genre that really has no equivalent today and is perhaps more obsolete than a text adventure, as the low-res videos and acting have not aged that well.

No, but 30 years ago people thought I was being paranoid, a crank, or just being difficult (troll, contrarian, etc)

Are you suffering from memory loss or "brain fog" ? I'm not sure how months of telling people to wear a mask, stay home if they are sick, and get vaccinated translated to 100% cure in your head.

(effectiveness of last year's vaccine show it to be high in children, 79% and lower in adults, 34%. source: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/downl... )

Make whatever claim you want. But if it's not supported by evidence then you're just flapping your gums.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks there is a faction that wants to intentionally erode the public's trust in government services. To dismantle a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And replace it with a very different sort of government; one that eschews pluralism, reserves individual liberty to those with power(money), and establishes a rigid hierarchy with a unitary executive at the top.

For the most part, when the media talks about "math" in primary and lower secondary school we're talking about arithmetic. I remember learning Calculus as a teenager, and it was confusing and not intuitive, but once I got it there was very little more I needed to do. That was a completely different experience compared to multiplication, where I had to drill with flash cards before I had enough of the fundamentals in order to do arbitrarily large multiplication problems, and later it proved to be a vital prerequisite for long division.

Not everything stuck with me, despite practice. I'm really slow at polynomial division, I don't have the basic process down in my head and I use it so rarely that I tend to have forgotten steps when I eventually do need to do it.

I think by the time someone enters high school, they ought to have a basic skill in arithmetic. They don't have to be the fastest at it, but it's going to hold them back in the sciences if not mathematics.

Do you want a nurse that can't add 0.15 mL and 0.35 mL ? Processes in a hospital avoid putting people in the situation of doing arithmetic on the spot, but it tends to happen and people screw it up.

I'm looking at this website from Linux right now because it is HTML/CSS rather than a custom client for AOL or Prodigy or whatever.
Also PDFs work on Windows and Linux. And even calendar invites from my wife are working on my Linux computer (.ics).
Basically desktop Linux performs many (most?) of the same functions as a Windows or Mac in a compatible way. Different flavors of user interface (or whatever this is that the GNOME team calls a user interface)

Texas style all-meat chili is pretty good. But it is terrible at being a one pot meal.
It's all just some warped version of Mexican chili con carne. Which I never make myself, but do prefer over Midwestern chili. Some hot tortillas and Spanish rice on the side. It's excellent.
A few of the diners in Michigan serve something they call chili that is more like soup with bits of tomato floating in it. I like this too, but I will accept that it's not really chili but something else.

Any phone, shouldn't matter, should basically perform the same function in a compatible way.
It's like buying a can of kidney beans and then wondering if the brand you bought is compatible with your chili recipe. (that's right, I put beans in my chili. Because beans are CHEAP and my Mom wasn't going to buy two pounds of ground chuck just to make dinner)

Nobody is going to like this, but the secret to doing arithmetic: repetition.
You're not going to get it right the first time. And you're not going to remember it long-term unless you've been drilled on it so much that you've been in tears over it.

Math isn't natural for our brains, so it's rather difficult to learn at first, but everyone needs some basic grasp of arithmetic in this society. We're not hunter-gathers anymore, we have bills, taxes, and far more complex lives than we did 1000's of years ago. And we can't just sit in front of a phone and watch videos roll by and expect our lives to amount to anything. You learn by doing, and you get better with practice.

I would have thought they had the best lawyers, given how often the litigate. But maybe Disney's lawyers should focus on writing better contracts instead of billing Disney for costly litigation efforts.

In the long-term, consumers don't benefit. But the con is in the short-term gains and the benefit is to investors that get out in time, or otherwise have instruments that manage risk of a soon-to-be toxic asset.

Your average 401K or retirement fund manager isn't going to keep people's retirement safe, their focus is on the commission they earn for selling retirees extract things they probably don't need, like term life. Or doing almost nothing if they aren't using commission-based or hybrid compensation. I bring up 401Ks because that's where the significant fraction of the free money that fills these worthless investments comes from. It's ultimately the middle class that gets the short end of the stick in stock market fluctuation. We've seen people's retirements hit hard in previous bubbles, and there is less regulation now than there was in the 2000's and 1980's.

Ever noticed how the fictional TV shows in Idiocracy, often incoherent nonsense that people can't stop watching, are basically the same as the AI slop we have today?

We're not going to be fighting an robot army, like in The Terminator or The Matrix, but a destruction of our humanity from within and of our own making.

We've been putting shady spy shit into our "American made" products for 80 years, and famously caught doing it a few times too.

They're selling actual working hardware. But that hardware's value is significantly lower after 5 years, and almost zero after 10.

It will be time for all of us to prepare for a massive crash when forward markets pop up around AI hardware (think tulip mania). We're already seeing some serious red flags with businesses including their GPUs in their assets and taking loans on them.

How does any one of us survive a decade long recession? At an individual level, I don't think you can reliably do so. Ultimately people will have to relearn how to cooperate and come together and not be so damn greedy, not obsess about their standing in social media, and get back to the fundamentals.

The ones hit the hardest will be the luxury producers. I'm not talking about gold watches either. But online influences will suddenly find their payouts from YouTube and others have dried up when the marketing and advertising budgets are cut. Product reviewers won't be getting new products, because in a recession the best you can often do is just to keep making last year's products, and even so you might be cutting back in volume and completely removing the advertising budget.

The further we go down the wrong path, the bigger the correction. That's just how our economic system works, it's not centrally planned but it is manipulated by a few back actors for short-term profit. The consequence is the middle class watches their 401K get flushed down the drain.

Just like today, most people in power are willing to look the other way when money is involved.

Are these hypothetical babies likely to vote Republican?