If my memory is correct, I bought it after my first college interview, lost it on the way home and got it back through British Rail's lost property department. I also read it eagerly from cover to cover. Almost fifty years on I'm a little scared of re-reading it, but maybe I should.

I also remember being very inspired by Life Story on the BBC in 1987. I was superbly cast, with Jeff Goldblum as a manic Watson, Tim Pigott-Smith, Juliet Stevenson, and Alan Howard.

The discussion was about "geopolitical importance", so having a big population and a 20 trillion GDP might be better than being near the top of this list with Monaco, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Bermuda. If we've moved away from discussing "geopolitical importance" to "doing a great job enriching their citizens" then fine.

There's also the idea of rating on a more absolute scale. 50% of the times you are kicked in the nuts are above average, and 50% of blow jobs are below average. It's possible for almost all jobs to be objectively terrible, so if 40% can be described as "quality" then that's very good news, but obviously we should be striving to make it 100%. Even when every job is "quality" there will be better or worse ones:

Michael James: Did you find a job?
Victor Skakapopulis: Yeah, I got something at the striptease. I help the girls dress and undress.
Michael James: Nice job.
Victor Skakapopulis: Twenty francs a week.
Michael James: Not very much.
Victor Skakapopulis: It's all I can afford.

Random tangent: would a golden gun be any good? It would weigh twice as much for a start: steel is 8g/cm3 and gold is 17g/cm3. Is this like the "shiny fiddle made of gold", which sounds good, but probably sounds bad?

The problem is that families would get a one-hour shift for *some* family members but not others, which is something that the current system avoids. Extra demerit points if some organizations choose November to February and others choose October to March.

It's simpler - just a calendar to annotate rather than changing clocks - but it could make life more complicated than it is now.

Value-added_tax#Comparison_with_sales_tax

So Italians do talk about the elephant in the room? :)

I'm certainly not a bot! As I've posted here before, my car is so old it has a cassette player, so I'm certainly in the market for an EV or a hybrid. I think if 1% of F150s were liable to stop suddenly and need a tow then we would be hearing about that too. It is possible that I may be overly worried about that particular kind of failure. My only experience of being towed was when I had two flat tires. That was at about 4pm and I only got home (about 25 miles away) seven hours later.

The things that don't look good are the unconvincing corpspeak about solving the problem, the supply chain delays (they are turning out new cars so they should have these components to fix the vehicles they have already sold), and knowing that some people have had the failure more than once.

(1) Informative video about home charging (link), (2) Great video about charging infrastructure (link), (3) Beginner's guide to electric vehicles (link).

There's actually a whole playlist of EV stuff from Technology Connections, but I'm not sure how to share it.

I was thinking about buying an Ioniq 5 myself, but Technology Connections and some other YouTube videos have made that look a bit risky. Short story: you can get stranded and need a tow because of a failure in a very important part of the car's charging system. Hyundai does not seem to have a very good story on fixing the underlying problem. Videos: My Ioniq 5's ICCU failed and Hyundai's doing a terrible job fixing this problem and Hyundai’s ICCU Nightmare: What Every EV Owner Needs to Know?

He really needs two numbers: (1) how much more people are willing to pay, and (2) how big a tariff barrier there will be for the imported laptops.

For (1) we have bids of 0% and 20% in the comments so far. Finding out what people would do isn't easy, but it's a lot easier than...

(2) Who knows what the tariff barriers will be? They depend on trade imbalances, border security, fentanyl precursors, prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, perceived trade retaliation, and a whole lot of other ad hoc factors. Even though China, Taiwan, and South Korea don't border the US, and they aren't prosecuting any former Brazilian presidents, you'd still have to have amazing foresight to know what the tariffs will be six weeks from now, let alone six years.

Wikipedia:

1999: "Perl Cookbook" and "The Education of Hyman Kaplan"

Wow - 26 years! It's been 16 years since my last badly-written Perl (or any Perl!).