If you're marrying a nerd, get him or her a ring made of carbon nanotubes. Or a ring with an embedded RFID that unlocks a box to put keepsakes in.

Or find a girl of average intelligence who rolls her eyes at silly things like rings.

If she leaves based upon how much you spend, then you possibly missed other red flags along the way.

Many Bothans died to bring you this diamond ring.

Diamond rings also have a shitty resale value. The prices drops drastically when it leaves the store. Best bet is to take grandma's ring and resize it or reset the stone, but you won't be able to resell it for much.

Personally, I don't like diamonds. Emeralds look much nicer, and nice looking ones are much rarer. Sapphires are my favorite despire being more common.

Weddings don't need to be expensive. It's normally done just to flaunt the wealth. The wedding in the courthouse or city hall is just as effective, even a church wedding with only 20 guests at a backyard barbeque after will save a ton of money over inviting 100 people, and skip the dress and requiring costumes for the maids of honor and groomsmen. I've been to a Vegas wedding presided over by Elvis, it seemed to be affordable though I didn't see the bill.

Sour grapes is that that is. If they have flaws, they either fix the flaws or accept things. The incels are bitter and angry and has turned them misogynist in their absurd belief that they are "owed" sex partners. The more that they buy this incel attitude the more that women are repulsed by it.

Marriages do not require diamonds, that is a 100% marketing invention in the western world. I've known married couples without the rings, or with plain bands instead.

Personally, I felt that the Matterhorn train ride was quite exciting.

A question is why it failed. Is America just too backwards to accept a high speed rail? We can't even accept proper mass transit in most cities, we're so stuck to autos that we can't see over the steering wheel. High speed rail is not a stupid idea, it works well in other countries. And the LA to SF route is a reasonable route to envision; whereas Vegas to LA is silly and obviously intended just for lots of gambling (some mass transit that people do take very often near my are the weekly charter buses to central valley native American casinos).

Then again, why was BART disjointed for so long, unable to connect San Jose to San Francisco, and obvious route for the time? Because one city along the way refuses to allow extra traffic or noise in their elite community. Thus the route straight down the peninsula has to take the long way around the east bay. NIMBYism. Which also is part of the reason the high speed rail has had problems.

Because some stories sell better if you add "The First" somewhere in the title.

And yes, the HSR is under construction including my favorite part, the Dolly Parton Memorial Crossing.

It's a phrase made by religious people, and they often confuse atheism with agnosticism. The idea is that one who has some doubts about a god will suddenly want to start praying when the shells are dropping, but in actuality not really something that happens. Maybe they mutter "oh god oh god oh god" a lot but that's not the same thing.

Religous believers who have a focus on proselytizing often believe additional nonsense, that others will suddenly convert if only they listened. They may start a "logical" argument by assuming that the listener accepts the lemmas that this particular book is inerrant and full of truth, and that reciting scripture is all it takes to convince a listener of your argument. "Wait, they guy yesterday told me that his religious book was better than yours!" The most of what they do is convince some wishy-washy backsliders to recommit.

Not all metric countries are 100% metric. Possibly most have some alternate measurements that stick around for inertia reasons. Ie, UK still uses miles officially on all roads, and most commonwealth countries keep some imperial measurements around (not the British Imperial units are not identical to American Imperial units!). Never mind such things as kilderkins.

Metric is nice, but inertia and stubborness require a lot of force. Anyone in the US with even a small amount of science education will know a lot of metric units. All drug users are familiar with grams and kilos. Software developers are quite familiar with the two liter size of diet coke. The snag that is hard to get around with new measurement systems, even with those who regularly use them, is in estimating how much a measurement is. It's like a second language in that you have to stop and think about it. Ie, you walk for awhile and then think "I walked two miles" and it comes naturally to many, but then need to think about how many kilometers it is. And this alien nature is what slows the adoption.

On the other hand, if you're a (US) chemist you're used to grams because you use it al the time but rarely if ever deal with ounces on the job; most electrical work is all in metric; BTUs isn't used much except with natural gas but with electricity watt-hours gets used instead even though they measure the same thing. Inertia.

Time is still not metric. It was proposed in revolutionary France but utterly rejected. It's one thing to tell farmers to use meters and try to overcome that resistance, but the entire public is used to 24 hours a day and 365 days in a year and seven days in a week, to try and make them switch over is futile. Other measurements are used much less often, many are only used in trade and science where common measurements are very important and so adoption there is easier.

Perl was great in the early days. Still is great but the sheen might be off, as it's always been an obtuse language. But at the start it was great, and I described it to my professor boss as "I can take the shell, awk, and sed scripts and put them into a single file." It sort of broke the Unix paradigm of having each tool do just one job well, by doing multiple jobs well.

ARexx was great, but it was mostly an IBM tool that got ported. I felt it did things the right way, as opposed to how Tcl did things the wrong way in my view (integrating Tcl into your applications means you make Tcl the main loop and it's in charge, whereas with ARexx you could retrofit it into an existing application without redesigning it).

It saves some money with some jobs, but it raises costs in other areas in ways that aren't immediately obvious to middle managment (or IT management who often don't care about the other departments). Slower service, slower development time, prices that rise because the initial tier of cloud service wasn't sufficient, higher prices for expanded network bandwidth needed for the cloud, etc.

You still need local IT people for basic support needs. And those numbers dwindle when the cloud is used and they decide they want outsourced IT as well. Operating on a shoestring budget is fine, but you also get shoestring service.

Downtimes are often completely out of your control. In-house, you can still use servers even when the internet isn't accessible to the outside world. I have seen more downtime with Microsoft Azure DevOps than I have with the previous in-house environment. An outage at a major cloud supplier affects you, but probably hundreds of other companies. at the same time. You also still want local backups, or backups at a third location - don't trust your cloud provider to do it properly or to restore in a timely manner (no matter how important you think you are, the cloud provider doesn't care). At times latency is just awful as well.

Sometimes bare metal is needed - not often, but when it's needed it should not be dismissed merely because the cloud won't do it cheaply. If you've got overallocated usage of the real hardware, some tasks won't work well in either a container or VM. Ie, a simulation that could run reliably on a PC with 32or 64 GB but bogs everything down in a VM. Cloud services are not very flexible, you don't get custom solutions.

I have seen that with IT abandoning their own ownership of servers, that departments and divisions sometimes create their own internal IT teams to run and manage servers (with hardware security modules, or for building, testing, etc). I don't know how common this is, since cloud services are designed around the common case. Having separate IT teams is expensive, but when the central guys are 100% Microsoft toadies who are 8 time zones away...