Is that you, Irving?
(Check out "The Royal Game of Ur" on YouTube).

>> "Jack Daniels sued Bad Spaniels"
A man bites dog story?

The comparison was the currency itself.

Even if today's orange is closer to 1982's orange than comparable Apples -- it's still roughly an orange and an Apple. If you stuffed $2,500 into a mattress in 1984 instead of buying an Apple, waited 40 years, pulled it out and went to the Apple store, it would still buy you an average Apple. You'd be a bit worse off in oranges, since they would be pretty much the same oranges, and fewer of them, but not catastrophically.

With Bitcoin, and its reverse-Argentinian levels of speculation, a pizza party today comes at the potential opportunity cost of a Porsche in ten years... or very possibly the reverse. Tempting gamble for some, surely, maybe even a profitable investment of debatable wisdom, but unquestionably a terrible currency.

An obvious artifact of crappy legacy 1990s website coding that cannot properly detect common characters entered via modern devices. Why do you ask?

Pretty much the entirety of the non-American anglophone world uses âoeHooverâ as a proprietary eponym like Americans use âoeKleenexâ to mean âoetissue paperâ or that rest of the world uses âoeAmericanâ to mean âoefat bastard.â

Itâ(TM)s not the duration, itâ(TM)s the distance. Thereâ(TM)s just a different scale of existential terror going on. The ISS folks frequently look out a window and can pretty literally say âoeI can see my house from here!â Even going to the moon you can still recognize the planet.

Going to Mars... youâ(TM)re just in the void. That could seriously mess with people in ways ground testing isnâ(TM)t going to reveal.

That was rather the point. We can make educated guesses about the mechanics of how things will work out, but since our observational N=0, we can't say anything whatsoever in the form "dozens of ships were lost with all hands, many others regularly returned with 30%+ of their crews dead." Maybe that sort of spaceflight invariably turns into some Lovecraftian descent into madness and they all cannibalize each other before they even arrive. Maybe including peanuts snacks and a smoking section mitigates the cannibalism to a greater degree than the choking hazard and probable death in an oxygen fire. We just don't know.

Actually, in the US, we have pretty precisely the same laws, but very few people care to enforce them and many actively ignore them.

Have you considered the possibility the end user is wrong and should maybe just look elsewhere?

Itâ(TM)s okay Cory, you can log in to reply.

Perhaps, and Iâ(TM)m just spitballing here, thatâ(TM)s because it fundamentally isnâ(TM)t actually public information even if a massively complex computational expression of it happens to be accessible as that companyâ(TM)s product/service.

No, the problem is stupid people rather persistently ignore context and are frustratingly biased to preconceptions. Like, for instance âoeyour long term health outcomes are better off with less than two drinks dailyâ is a vastly different assertion than âoeyour short term freedom outcomes are better off if you donâ(TM)t drink and drive, moron,â but a drunk will only consider the latter to be of any importance and will misinterpret the former to be uselessly imprecise.

Oh no, I believe in being patronizing and condescending to 100% of the population at all times.

Itâ(TM)s a heuristic for approximating around a mean. This is often done to communicate complex information to a wide audience that may better understand an imprecise but readily accessible quantity than a scientifically precise one that will satisfy pedantic aspie nerds with raging cases OCD, but completely alienate 90% of the population.

I've been wondering about that. I've got a heat pump, and one down side is that it fares poorly when the weather is significantly below freezing. It's been a wicked couple of winters around here in the Mid Atlantic, and it would have been nice to tap into a huge store of moderate temperature just a few feet below ground.