Why donâ(TM)t Microsoft do what Apple offers? In their case, if you donâ(TM)t remember the password to your Mac or have a copy of the FileVault key, you can recover it through your iCloud account. At one time, it was optional to store online; I donâ(TM)t know if thatâ(TM)s still the case. I know this because recently I somehow mistyped my password the same way twice when I changed it and had to go through the fairly simple recovery process, even though I only use local accounts. So I blame Microsoft for this situation, not the user, beyond her choice of using Windows in the first place.

What you just said is super-creepy in a "one of us, one of us" kind of way. Have you ever read Brave New World?

Again, accumulation is a necessary mechanism of the system.

If you were running a centralized economic committee (like in the soviet system) then you need a way to figure out which committee members are making good decisions, and which are making poor ones. So one way is to give all the new ones a small portfolio and get rid of the ones that run it into the ground, and promote the ones that do well by giving them larger portfolios.

Under a free market system that allows personal ownership you're essentially doing the same thing. The people who make sound financial decisions will grow their wealth by making good choices of what to invest it in. The guy who sets up a really efficient trucking company in an area that has a lot of demand for transportation services will accumulate wealth. When his son takes over and stops maintaining the fleet and takes the proceeds of the company and buys a huge yacht, his wealth starts dropping.

When the government takes some percentage of profits and invests it into medical care, education, or roads, then we see general efficiency improvements across society (healthy educated people are more productive).

But if society were to take a chunk of wealth from people who've accumulated it and they handed it out as lump sum cheques to average people, you have to carefully consider what's actually happening. First of all, wealthy people don't have wealth sitting there in a bank account. Almost all of their wealth is in the form of shares of companies. So in order to pay the tax they have to sell a significant number of those shares on a market. That will drop the price of those shares, including the price of the shares sitting in people's retirement funds. So who is going to buy those shares? Who has the cash to actually buy them? It's not even clear to me that there's *this* much cash sitting around ready to buy shares. But what's certain is that the people who are getting the lump sum cheques in the mail are almost certainly not the ones buying those shares. So we're moving shares from people to some other people who have cash sitting around waiting for a good deal, and that cash is then paid to the government and given out to the population. Those people then spend it on, presumably consumables like food, clothes, televisions, electronic devices. Maybe a few of them pay off debts. Very few of them will invest it with the same economic smarts that lead to that wealth being created in the first place. So you forced the top wealth accumulators to sell their shares to some people who were sitting on a pile of cash, for a discount, and then you gave that pile of cash to the people who did nothing more than drive up inflation. I'm not sure this is good for the economy at all.

Paying a share of corporate profits to the government who use it to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure sounds like a better plan to me.

This is just the latest app produced by the "I could code this in a weekend" crowd.

You donâ(TM)t need to pay Apple anything after youâ(TM)ve acquired the hardware. You donâ(TM)t need to use the Mac Store if you donâ(TM)t want to; apps can be distributed as a download, like before the Mac Store existed.

He must have read that BS book that Oprah was promoting years ago called The Secret. "It is based on the belief of the pseudoscientific law of attraction, which claims that thought alone can influence objective circumstances within one's life."

Does the job. Been doing the job on Macs for decades (since 1992). Sometimes called Text Wrangler (it was the free cut-down version), until BBedit got a free version too. Please support Bare Bones by using BBedit.

And there's always VIM.

BBedit and Beyond Compare are my two must-have utilities on my Macs. Both companies have served Mac users for a long time, great products, great support and none of this bullshit and enshitification like so many recent software companies.

How can you have a speed limit for bicycles? They donâ(TM)t have speedometers!

Cycling 20mph (32 kph) on a normal road bike is easy. Here in the UK, e-bikes require peddling and the assist has to stop at 15.5 mph (25 kph). Anything else is illegal and requires a helmet, insurance, license and the bike has to be registered and have plates fitted.

There is also a problem with illegal e-bikes here, as well as them being used in crimes or causing a nuisance. But the far bigger problem are cars exceeding the speed limit. This is more dangerous.

And then thereâ(TM)s the culture war propagated by the right wing hate-bait media who claim the left are waging a war against cars and cyclists are the root of all evil and need to be banished. Theyâ(TM)re dehumanising cyclists in the eyes of some drivers who respond with aggressive, intimidating and dangerous driving.

Probably contains bugs for things theyâ(TM)re still including in recent versions of Windows.

Sounds like you're referring to the EU, not to Europe.

Since when has the UK not been European? Or was that a joke?

Europe is cheaper hey? Let me introduce you to HS2: budget in 2020 was £98 billion (USD $132B) for 230 km. That's over $570 million per km.

It might be a reality, but that doesnâ(TM)t make it a legitimate excuse as you first stated. Itâ(TM)s bad, lazy parenting.

Bullshit. There are plenty of ways to sit with children in restaurants without resorting to screen time or the children annoying everybody else. I say this as a parent myself. No doubt it starts in the home and every other minute spent with the children: how do you engage with them and how much effort do you put in to helping them stay or entertained. It's called parenting.

It's true, N. American vehicles seem to have misaligned lights a lot more often than European ones. N. America headlights also have a different cut-off pattern (non-existent?), which maybe is partly to light up overhead road signs, whereas European headlights have a very distinctive horizontal cut-off with an up-sweep to light the edge of the road better. This is why, for example, UK drivers put stickers on their headlights when taking their cars to the continent: it covers the up-sweep so it doesn't dazzle on-coming vehicles.