lol. lmao, even.

Thank you, this was my first thought reading the headline, followed by the Mcdonalds patent for making you say the product brand to end a commercial

Yup, this the real end purpose of "smart" appliances right here

You're assuming your personal experience is universal, which is very far from being the case. To start with, US does not have compulsory military service, the conversation is about countries where everyone (typically all males, except those exempt for medical and other reasons) have to do military service. Certainly the US army and other militaries will have a bunch of ancillary personnel like recruiters, janitors, cooks, hell you could even count subcontractors writing software. These are people employed by the army to do specific jobs it needs. Compulsory military service is typically short (except Eritrea, where it's potentially indefinite, I think in North Korea it can also be extended indefinitely, I'm not sure) so people don't specialise from the start and get at least basic firearms training.

And yes, if you're repairing military machinery it would help you repair civilian machinery later, or you could get a civilian job repairing civilian machinery from the start. But I can't judge, working for the military may well make sense economically or from some other standpoint. The point is, you made a choice to work for the military and I'm glad it worked out for you. But this is about compulsory military service where you by definition do not get that choice.

From a recent TV ad for Miele dishwashers: "I like German screws."

China doesn't have full central planning like the Soviets did, where you had no private ownership of factories at all and all the decisions like where to build which factory were being made centrally. They have a pretty normal capitalist economy (in some ways even more capitalist then say Europe, less environmental and worker protection regulations) with a very interventionist and powerful government. A bit like economies of Europe after WWII, with a bit more government power.

There are two reasons for a country to have compulsory military service. One, it has an aggressive heavily militarized neighbour (or neighbours) which it fears is likely to invade. Two, that country is the aggressive militarized neighbour others fear will invade them. Possibly a mixture of both. You certainly do not have compulsory military service in order to build any sort of utopia.

In the military you generally learn two things. One, using tools and learning skills designed to kill people and destroy things. Those are not really skills you are going to need in general life and practicing such skills in a civilian setting is, shall we say, discouraged. Two, you learn to unquestioningly obey orders. That is not really a trait associated with any kind of utopian society either.

That comes at a cost of interrupting your education, relationships and generally life for however long military service lasts, again, doing something completely unrelated to what you're going to do for the rest of your life. I know a lot of military vets in US end up working in law enforcement but as I understand many feel that has some bad side effects.

It's not just alcohol. Long ago, my family's house had a Brazilian pepper tree in the landscaping. When the berries got ripe, birds would arrive, eat the berries, then stumble and flap around on the ground and make strange noises for a while before sobering up enough to fly.

The BAe 146 more often than not, released a generous cloud of oil smoke into the cabin at startup. PSA would advise passengers of this and of the impending somewhat scary noise reduction maneuver that would occur just after takeoff.

What better time to put the blinders on everyone and add artificial delays to reporting the bad news... than when the wheels are falling off?

...and completely irrelevant for everyone else who woiud still prefer to have a habitable Earth

So many people have already been radicalised on social media, and it looks like their heads have been fucked irreversibly. They're now addicted to mindlessly repeating political slogans and hating people their politics (which is now more like a religion) tells them to hate. Even if Facebook, Twitter, maybe Instagram too were to die soon, which I very much doubt, they will just find some other social media, but one that only allows their political viewpoint. It's already been happening for some time (Bluesky, Truth Social, probably some other smaller places I'm not aware of), if Meta and its ilk were to die all it would do would be to accelerate that process. That could be even worse, total echo chambers like that might turn these people into even worse fanatics.

Some young people are apparently starting to recognise that social media and in general being connected 24/7 is doing bad things to them, but undestanding that addiction is bad for you and kicking the habit are very different things.

Yes, makes as much sense as cannabis being a 'gateway drug', or DnD being a gateway to satan worshipping. Same kind of nonsensical logic as someone who practices on a firing range inevitably becoming an assassin or someone who practices martial arts will use those to mug people. Clearly they've never heard of white hat hackers.

The problem is, people in positions of authority in education are often more or less completely computer-illiterate and view IT as black magic, so to them hackers are something akin to witches or sorcerers, rather than just people with particular skills (pretty rudimentary skills at that, we're talking about schoolkids here).

There has been varying guidance on prophylactic prescription of an antibiotic around dental procedures. I have sometimes had, from at least age 19, a sound variously described as a bruit or a mid-systolic click. For several years, dentists had me take amoxicillin around dental procedures. Guidance apparently changed, recommending antibiotics only in cases with more specific signs.

Postum has been resurrected. It is made from wheat and molasses. It was popular with Mormons and others who shun caffeine. It was in my family because my mom and grandmother reacted to coffee, so alternated between tea and Postum, and it was drinkable by kids.

What gets marketed as Kona coffee does not necessarily have much Kona in it. A limited amount of good quality coffee is grown on Maui. There were fairly large new plantings on Kauai some years ago, but that product at the time was insipid. I don't know if the growing conditions, the cultivars, or the newness of the plantings were responsible, but it was not worth buying except as a curiosity.