"Not much point in being wealthy, if you don't flaunt it."

Living well and not worring about money doesn't require you to "flaunt" your wealth.

"Because what use do you have for cash at home?"

Allowance for the kid. Pay the babysitter. Pay the guy who just painted your fence. Repay your sister for the birthday card you gave your elderly mother.

Etc.

Why would they be using the theme from Rocky for this?

It's appropriate in some ways, but it's also an American song.

Wouldn't you want to use Russian music of some kind for a Russian event intended to show off Russian technology?

"if you're a teacher teaching classes of the poverty level non-English speakers, what good does it do to fail them?"

By weeding out the non-performers you can provide the (few?) others who can do the work and learn with an opportunity to do just that.

The objective is to purchase "sustainable" aviation fuel, and thereby increase the demand for same.

That will require investment in the construction of additional capacity to create that fuel, unless there's a large surplus of unused fuel laying around somewhere. If there is, I'm not currently aware of it.

Thank you for posting your extensive, fully researched and well-reasoned argument.

We are thankful for your valuable contribution to this discussion.

'Carbon tax" generally faisl to stimulate a lot of investment in so-called renewable technology because there's no long term assurance that the tax will continue "forever". So an investment with a long term payback potential that could suddenly become a loser if the government changes or someone overhauls their tax policy has to provide a premium return to make investors take on the additional risk.

It's been done.

Look at the AMEX Platinum card for one semi-mainstream example.

There are others.

It's apparently quite frequent, as recounted in this article at least.

https://www.theguardian.com/ga...

If you want to walk out through the "enter" door you need to scan your receipt.

But you can leave by walking through the line past the tills and scan nothing.

So... what's the problem here?

Ok, you're crazy. :)

Not really, I guess, but you don't understand how things are manufactured at scale.

There's a minimum number of sales of a product that have to be made in order for the overall production line to be profitable. In some cases that minimum number can be made slightly smaller by increasing the per-unit price of the finished product, but there's also a limit to how much people will pay for something.

"Economy of scale" is a real thing, and some expenses are fixed whether you make lots or a few units. If there's a lack of sales and you're just making a few units, those expenses can kill the entire line.

Lifetime warranty: If it quits, we kill you.

Two part warranty: If it breaks you own both pieces.

#rm -rf ~/

That wont' delete much and it certainly won't delete your user data or make the system unbootable or anything.

There's usually not much in /root (the root user's home directory) that can't easily be replaced or ignored.

"I have no idea what they possibly could have been thinking when they decided to do this"

That's an easy question to answer.

It's an opportunity to collect fees.

That was my first thought, but according to their webpage https://www.opendesk.eu/en/ it appears this does more than what libreoffice does, such as task management, video conferencing, chat, identity and access management, etc.

But unless I'm missing something I don't think it's open source. The website talks about using open standards but your only option for actually getting it to "book a demo".

It doesn't appear to be either open source or available for download.