(Obviously I don't know your medical condition but...) it's wrong that people least able to work are those who most need to.

And out of curiosity, do you have kids? From your budget, I assume not.

There is nothing immoral about taking someone else's work and using it without compensation, unless you've agreed to compensate them before accepting the work. If some content creator has an inflated sense of their self-worth, or their work's worth, then there might be an argument about what constitutes due compensation. Claiming moral outrage just because someone thinks you're less important than you do is pretty juvenile.

So while these people may be breaking the law, accusing them of immoral behaviour really is a bit silly. What is immoral is when people are deprived of their wages or pensions after a corporation collapses.

And put in in a format that I can have confidence that I will be able to use in 20 years' time, and don't complain if I share it with my friends. (My actual friends that is, not my 25,000 closest friends on the internet.)

Very true. Corporate desktops are often frustratingly insanely slow, but this is usually not related to the basic power of the machine (i.e. due to doing stupid things on inadequate networks or similar). Unfortunately it is probably easier to believe the logic that "your computer is slow, so you need a faster computer" than "I need $100k for a new network infrastructure".

Wrong. English language uses numbers in a logarithmic way. The conventions "teen" "dozen" "hundred" "thousand" "thirteen hundred" and a myriad others illustrate how deeply logarithmic approximations are embedded into our language of numbers. We automatically use an extra digit of precision for numbers starting with 1.

Knowing plenty of PhDs myself, and having one... indeed...

Perhaps you weren't very good at maths as a kid? When I was in grade four, I distinctly remember puzzling over questions like "how does long division actually work?" I found the answers in things like associativity, distributivity, etc., though I expressed them differently in my mind. And when I got to final year high school, I was the only person in the class (top class, academically selective school) who could still do long division. I bet that now, 12 years on, I am again the only member of that class who can still do a long division.

The point wasn't that I am very smart... but that I was no doubt absorbing some long-forgotten lesson on associativity. There are kids who really do get the point of these patterns very early, and remember them, and use them in their secondary and tertiary educations, and who use the same skills in the workplace.

Nope. Many people can speak English well, and teach it, without understanding the first thing about linguistics. Nor do you need to learn grammar to learn a language---it may help but it is obviously not necessary for children. Maths is just another language, though it is possibly not a language everyone is capable of speaking.

Interestingly misconceived. Physics and engineering is about understanding why things happen. Maths is about refining abstract notions and identifying patterns among them. Naming and denoting abstract concepts is what a lot of maths is about. They are very different skills: you can be an excellent physicist or engineer without being good at maths, and you can be excellent at maths and just not get physics or engineering.

Well, I am a scientist. You give scientists too much credit. I have seen papers published in the British Journal of Cancer that did not satisfy the most basic considerations of epidemiology. It is very often the case that simple dumb objections to published work in high profile scientific journals are correct.

Me too. And I liked Crocodile Dundee.

Rubbish. If a store owner offers you ridiculous, unenforceable, unconscionable conditions, you don't have to honour them. They are the ones breaking the law by offering such conditions, and if you only keep as much as the deal as can reasonably be enforced fair enough. If they feel horribly bad about it, tough --- get a better business model.

Consumer protection laws are there for a reason.

Yeah, especially if you think that utilitarianism is the only moral philosophy. Some of us think that the moral cost of removing a person's only functioning kidney is rather more than the economic cost associated with their death.

Endolords.

IMO the problem was that a very early case was a severe atypical pneumonia and was misdiagnosed as a coronavirus --- i.e. a possibly SARS relative. That would have been cause for panic, but when the misdiagnosis was revealed, it should have been wound back. Unfortunately the WHO (who were responsible for the misdiagnosis IIRC) were already too involved.

There is if you travel through a country with serious security issues, like India or Israel.

So allow the judge discretion --- when a person commits a crime that carries the possibility of life imprisonment, they should know that at every stage it is in their interests to co-operate because they can be shown lenience. Keep it going post-sentence too --- if someone is given a lenience sentence for whatever reason, and later on they show that lenience was not warranted, punish them more.

Suspended sentences, good behaviour bonds, ministerial pardons, etc.