We never finished the first one. The losers were allowed to keep their flags and their guns. Instead of trying to be one big happy country we should have freed all the Africans and enslaved the Southerners, since they love slavery so much. Then we could have them picking fruit right now.

Mostly too rich. There are potential problems we don't want to deal with, and will pay to avoid it.

They can probably get local character set equipped key caps from China.

Remote work has not continued the way many had hoped. Too many companies, Microsoft included have largely decreed that if you want to keep your job, you're going to have to live/work in one of their hubs, or be very lucky. As a result, not only are many stuck there, but many medium and small companies have done the same. Yes, remote jobs exist, they are just few and far between and much harder to get than even a couple of years ago.

People can and do service their own transmissions, in particular doing a fluid and filter change is generally a pretty easy job. There are also modifications and upgrades to transmissions. You can buy "built" transmissions which include heavy duty parts which can handle larger power, torque, and/or shock loads than stock ones. There are "kits" of aftermarket parts which either address wear over time or even correct design deficiencies like either lazy or excessive engagement of clutches.

What's the measurement? If it's "GDP" then sure, the economy is booming. But GDP is itself meaningless to sustainability, which is the most important thing to measure in anything you hope to keep doing. If you want to keep having an economy, for example, you have to keep having consumers who have money so they can participate in it...

Hardware, yes. But what will you do with it? It's only really good for a few types of task. Where it's GPU-based, as all the Nvidia stuff is, you could use it for lots of different types of tasks. But Services? Energy needs to get a lot cheaper for that to be feasible, because providing services on this hardware is predicated upon using a lot of energy.

A bubble is "a good or fortunate situation that is isolated from reality or unlikely to last". What's good about it, profit for those who are profiting. Why's it isolated from reality, all three of those reasons. Why's it unlikely to last, reality is inexorable, no amount of ignoring it will cause it to change.

One bubble, at least three reasons why it's bubbling. Probably we could identify a bunch more, like nerd fantasy. One of the consequences of techbros being in a position to decide what society does with itself is that they will send us on tech-related wild goose chases.

The goal of making ourselves obsolete is typically self-defeating when we can't even agree to let humans have free time when they don't need to be working.

Been watching the news lately? "Never" is a long time.

C4C destroyed mostly old shitpiles with poor efficiency, so it was effective in reducing hydrocarbon emissions.

I suspect a lot of these machines will go to the third world and get refurb'd into PCs there, so people will benefit anyway. In fact, a significant percentage of them will probably get Windows 11 installed on them using the bypasses...

Microsoft put the same telemetry they put into 10 into 7 and 8 via updates. Some of those were "updates" that included nothing but telemetry, sometimes they bundled the telemetry with actual updates so if you wanted one you had to have the other. There are scripts and other tools to remove those updates, but if you are not using those and you have been doing updates, they all spy on you.

When you look at all of Europe, it's more like a weekly thing, and sometimes a daily thing. The ones that make the news are the bigger bombs like the thousand-pound bomb mentioned in TFS or the rare ones that cannot be made safe and have to be detonated in place, which can mean a lot of new business for window installers even with dampening.

You can't be the "baddest kick ass person on the block" without having an effective ability to fight. That means weapons, and it means training on how to use them most effectively. When going up against the Soviet Union, that means a nuclear arsenal. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we also helped ensure through deterrence that the Soviets never moved on Western Europe, and we helped ensure through diplomacy that World War III never broke out.

Pretty much everything not big-name-brand that's on Walmart or Amazon is marked up 25% or more from the Aliexpress price for exactly the same product. If you're willing to wait for it to come from China, you can get the same crap for less. I've just placed an order for an item that's $200 on Amazon and was $150. I expect it to take maybe an extra week.

A civil war is more likely than maggots reading something.

Calc will generate pivot tables, but not with a live WYSIWYG interface where you can tweak it as you go. It creates a new tab in your sheet after you fill in a dialog which is static, so if you want a current one or want it to be slightly different, you have to create it all over again.

I hear that these days it handles very large files OK, so IMO this is the last major feature needed before it can really be taken seriously as an Excel replacement.