I think you should qualify your thought experiment: "If you asked people who *chose* not to have children..."

I don't remember drives being that big in 1999; I thought they were more like 10GB at the time, but I could be wrong. And certainly high-end drives were probably much larger than the ones I was looking at as a poor new college grad.

But what's interesting is this - in 10 years, typical hard drive storage went up 1000-fold.

If that trend had continued, we would have 40+ PETABYTE drives today. The jump from the 80s to the 90s was phenomenal.

This is entirely true. And most of the time, you've got the menu bar up, so that camera notch is sitting over top of the center of your menu bar, which is almost always empty anyway. I guess it would be an issue if you wanted to use every pixel of the screen for full screen video. I have only seen photos of the new design, so I don't know how it handles full-screen applications, but I would bet that it blacks out the menu bar area, so the notch doesn't affect the video frame area.

This is probably beyond "casual thief", but I think it's interesting. My wife was traveling in Spain once, and a guy broke into her room, removed the safe from the wall, wrapped it up in gift wrap and walked out of the hotel carrying what looked like a present (there were scraps of gift wrap on the floor when she returned to find the gaping hole in the wall).

She had made the mistake of traveling with a couple of sentimentally important rings that she had kept in the safe. Not sure if a staffer might have seen the inside of the safe with the rings. The rings weren't worth a lot, but might have looked valuable. But to her, the loss of her grandmother's ring was very painful. She never travels with nice jewelry anymore.

My experience has been the opposite. Camping at Jordan Lake in North Carolina, I was apalled at the amount of styrofoam on the banks of the lake. It was all tiny chopped-up pieces - four of us spent about an hour trying to clean up what we could, but we didn't even make a noticeable dent in the 400 square feet of bank we tried to clean. Styrofoam is a scourge.

I wish I lived in your world. In mine, there's a leaf blower on my block daily, 12 months a year. I guess nobody owns brooms.

And inevitably, on a nice spring evening, somebody will fire one up at 7pm when we're trying to eat dinner on the porch.

Those things are scourges. I own an electric, but I prefer raking. I only use my blower to clean off a gravel driveway, and I only do that once at the end of leaf season (which for us ends in late December, early January). I'm usually all for civil liberties, but I'm generally much more supportive of freedoms that don't step on other people's liberties. Noise pollution is real. Some of it is necessary (the sound of traffic, construction, and other productive activities). But there are real alternatives to blowers, especially gasoline blowers, so they're not strictly necessary. And they're certainly not necessary for the ticky-tack shit people use them for.

The argument that religion is the only thing preventing us from immorality is completely flawed. The behavior you're describing has nothing to do with atheism or belief in a god. Humans of all stripes act that way. Fuck you and your semi-holier-than-thou-religiosity.

The Spotify app is terrible for podcasts. It doesn't support automated downloads. So every time I want to leave the house, I need to check a list of episodes and manually download them? That sucks!

I'm a long-time paid subscriber to Spotify. I still love the music side of things, but the podcast side is awful, and it sucks that at least one podcast I followed previously moved to Spotify. I'm sure the podcast is losing listeners because of this, and for that, I feel sorry for the producers of the podcast (although I guess I'm happy they got paid some amount from Spotify -- hopefully that's enough to offset the lost of listeners)

Why do reasonable people always try to find some way for bible stories to have their foundation in some actual event? What if it's just straight-up bullshit? You know, like Greek myths, or 8-armed Hindu gods, Cthulu, FSM, etc.? Sometimes I think that even trying to find a way to fit biblical stories into reality is like accepting that there's some modicum of truth to these stories.

But if you really think about it, what stories could possibly survive 2000 years of sharing and still resemble their origins? Have you ever played the telephone game? Within 10 minutes, the story is so distorted that you can't even recognize the original. Add in centuries of illiteracy, dozens of ulterior motives, and there is no reason to think that *any* story in the bible has any basis in reality.

yeah, backwards compatibility for software and hardware really sucks. I like to buy all new stuff every 5 years. Seriously, I've been able to use my games and controllers for 8 to 10 years per generation. I feel like I'm being treated like dirt.