I donâ(TM)t think intelligent is the right word. There was such an intersection a street over from my house in Toronto and I would have to get off my bike, go and push the pedestrian crossing button and then get back on. Fucking annoying and whomever thought it was a good idea was clearly brain dead.

Merkel's relationship and strategy with Russia/Putin was complex. I believe her goal was to maintain stability and prevent escalation to avoid conflicts or more serious conflicts. Hindsight is 20-20 and sheâ(TM)s been criticised by many people for how she handled Russia.

Chrome is a better product than Firefox, but if I wasn't such a heavy Mac user, I would make the same choice as you. I can take a lot if it means no Google in my life.

I ditched Firefox and Chrome at least 13 years ago and have used Safari exclusively since. In fact, Chrome hasn't ever been installed on this MBP, which I've had for five years. I don't miss their bloating and battery drain, nor having a privacy raping app from Google. I also appreciate the integration with Messages and Mail for how easy this makes 2FA on web sites that send codes, as well as unified keychain and history across all of my devices. That doesn't mean I'm unaware of the current state of the other browsers: I do have FF, which I dabble with occasionally, but it drives me nuts, it's just shit and it's obvious why it's losing market share, and I get forced to use other browsers on remote Windows machines or in local VMs of Windows and Linux.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

The 2013 rMBP can run OS XI, aka macOS 11 Big Sur. There are either a lot of people who didnâ(TM)t update their OS or a large number of very old devices out there, or both. Well, Mac hardware of good and it lasts along time. Yes, I have a Core 2 Duo-based 2007 MBP I still use.

And you Terminal is listed under "Developer Tools" in Privacy & Security? FWIW, mine is also listed under "Full Disk Access".

I'm on an Intel MBP. lldb never requires a password. I only debug command line apps - maybe that's it?

Iâ(TM)m wondering whoâ(TM)s typing passwords these days for elevation. Havenâ(TM)t all Mac laptops had Touch ID for years? I have an external keyboard, but itâ(TM)s still easier and faster to reach over to my MBP for one touch authentication.

I donâ(TM)t get prompted like this. Is this is an extra step in Apple Silicon machines or Iâ(TM)ve just granted more permissions to my terminal?

Oh yes! I remember being at an air show on a small RAF base and a Vulcan did a low-level turning pass with the belly to towards the crowd. It was probably one of the loudest things I've ever heard. Military engines certainly have different priorities to civilian ones.

we no longer live in First World countries where you can rely on the power to stay on

Speak for your country, not the rest of the First World. I haven't experienced a power outage since I left N. America in 2008. Given the lag in grid investment here in the UK to reshape it with all the changes, that might change. But for now, it's been incredibly stable.

Maybe I wasn't clear: Concorde was loud, irrespective of whether the throttle was fully on and afterburners lit, or not.

I'm also glad we don't get any 747s anymore, which were quieter than Concorde. 777s are definitely the ones I've noticed to be loudest these days, especially when planes are coming over every three minutes from 04:30-05:00 in the morning. They're offensively loud compared to the 787s and A350s, and even A380s. But this is a different story.

I think you've downplayed the flight time on a conventional passenger jet for LHR-JFK by an hour at least and exaggerated the Concorde time by 30 mins.

Concorde's prices were determined by a number of factors such as fuel, but one of main ones was exclusivity/privilege.

I've heard this theory too, including from my own father. Maybe that's how it was portrayed in the British media at the time? I can't really find much evidence for it on the internet though. As far as the written history on the Internet goes, it's mostly about the noise. Maybe hysteria about the topic was whipped up for political reasons, but where's the evidence now?

There certainly were bans put in place for political reasons, such as India and Malaysia banning Concorde because they couldn't get the access they wanted in terms of landing slots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...