There's a lovely collective facepalm right now as Virgin Gin isn't allowed to be called Gin anymore because the regulations governing alcohol say to be called Gin it has to have certain ingredients in it.

That might or might not be fucking stupid depending on what Virgin Gin is and what those required ingredients are. As an example, I'd think that most people would find it quite reasonable to require that anything called "gin" would have to have juniper berries as an ingredient.

Except for that one time it was Lupus!

Yes, that mean that nowadays, "advanced users" means "know how to read".

Alas, knowing how to read isn't enough now, if it ever was. All too many computer lusers (not misspelled) are aliterate and won't bother to read any warnings that accompany those links. To paraphrase an old saying, you can show a person all the warnings you want, but you can't make them read them.

And I don't want Google having complete control over search either. Which is why all my searching is done with non-Google search pages.

I agree with everything in your post except for that. My search engine is startpage.com, which acts as a proxy between me and Google so that it has no way of knowing who made which query.

Old school - a note under the door, at least when they make the bed and provide fresh towels.

Not everybody is going to notice a note slipped under the door or bother to look at it. Much better would be hanging the notes from the room's doorknob, similar to the Do Not Disturb signs. If you make them the right size, they cover up the place where you use your keycard to unlock the door so that you can't even get into your room without at least looking at the notice and there's no plausible way to claim that you thought it was spam.

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating. My father worked for several supermarket chains as a department manager. I don't mean that he ran the delicatessen for one market, he was the delicatessen supervisor for the entire chain. He told me once that if a market was doing very, very well, it would have a net profit margin of 2%. Now imagine what all of those CC fees are doing to that.

I like that old time rock and roll That kind of music really soothes my soul

And where were you The Day the Music Died?

Remember, I did specify lakes as a place where a ship would need a pilot.

The pilot will have to take into account calm areas and avoid those as well, but satellite weather forecasting makes that possible now.

In nautical terms, a pilot is a specialist in navigating through a harbor, lake, river or other difficult passage, and is not a regular member of any ship's crew. You have the right idea, but the proper job title is "navigator."

Don't pilots usually train and certify on just one type of aircraft? In other words, Airbus pilots don't fly Boeing, etc. If all the MD11 planes end up permanently mothballed by the two main operators of them (FedEx and UPS), what happens to the pilots who are trained to fly them? Will they have an opportunity to train on another aircraft type, or will they end up without a job? Are there other planes sufficiently similar to the MD11 that their training won't be too lengthy? Wikipedia mentions it last flew for passenger service in 2008, but doesn't mention it having been developed into anything else.

Of course it doesn't seem like this is a great time to be a pilot, given the ATC issues we're facing in this country - but that's a different issue.

That makes two dictionaries that chose two words for the 2025 word of the year. I will say I like this one better than the choice from Merriam-Webster.

I think we all know nothing good ever came from that place.

Republicans end individual mandate.
Republicans let the subsidies expire.

"Why would the Democrats do this to the American people??"

One of my state's Republican senators is all-in on chemtrails and "Solar Radiation Modification" lunacy. It's curious how these are the same people who think humanity isn't capable of affecting the climate by burning fossil fuels and pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

That's going far past anything I would know; I'm software, not hardware and it was a long time ago. All I remember is that there were a pair of uprights that helped hold the chip up and it went from the motherboard almost to the top of the case.