Also you can’t just leave your toddler at home when you go out for dinner, or drop your kid off with a boarding facility when you want to go on vacation

It’s worth noting that the lack of second language proficiency isn’t a result of laziness or ignorance

In Europe, most people are a short train ride from another country. There is also a lot of cultural exchange between countries within Europe.

Most Americans are multiple days of driving from the nearest non English speaking country, and that’s just to arrive in an area of Mexico where the people they will interact with overwhelmingly speak English.

In that context, there is little utility for most people in learning a second language. It’s also very difficult to achieve true proficiency when you are so rarely exposed to native speakers of a language.

We have had ultra-rich people and major wealth inequality for most of American history. Rockefeller (1838-1937) amassed a fortune in the 1800s in excess of $400B inflation adjusted dollars. By most measures, he was the richest American of all time.

The second richest American of all time is up for debate but contenders include Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), Henry Ford (1863-1947), or Bill Gates (1955-present).

Wealth inequality has obviously grown over the past 50 years but it’s worth noting that wealth inequality in general is not a uniquely modern problem. It is also exaggerated by comparing to the 1970s, where wealth inequality was at a historical low point (see graph below)

The real LPT is to remove water from cider to make an intensely apple flavored spirit without muting its flavors with heat.

Then sell the liquor to nobles and inflated prices without ever revealing the production method

I’d argue that “the last word” is the rOtring 600

Pentel makes great stuff though

Bezos owning both companies has little to no impact on where the contracts go due to shareholder obligations. The two companies are run as discrete entities. For example, Dave Limp, the new CEO replacing Bob Smith, comes from Amazon and is firewalled from any non-public information about Blue until he is fully transitioned to his new role.

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.

I live in one of these cities (Denver) and in my city’s case this push is part of a ton of other provisions including a push to set a maximum speed limit citywide of 25 mph.

About 80% of my trips out of the house are walking or on a bike, but it seems clear to me that policies like this don’t improve safety. It’s just lazy policy making. For example, if you set a 25 mph speed limit on a road designed to support 45 mph traffic, most drivers will still drive 45+ mph and you instead get a wild mismatch of driving speeds. This just slows traffic with an arguably negative benefit to safety. Similarly, if you ban turn on red in the city many drivers will still turn on red, but now whether or not a car will turn on red becomes unpredictable.

What our cities need is more dedicated bike and pedestrian infrastructure that is separated altogether from the roads, as well as greatly improved public transit.

Because you might find it’s really fun if you kept at it and learned the new skill?

Many rewarding hobbies take years of work to develop any significant level of skill in. Golf, racing cars, skiing, etc

Under this logic, why do we have exemptions for police? Why does almost every single police department issue handguns with a capacity of 15 or more?

Were you not here for the bit about the beans?

Because the biggest practical downside of Linux is a lack of natively developed big name software. It’s annoying to find some great software that perfectly meets your needs and then discover than it can’t run with decent performance on Linux.

Market share growing means that Linux becomes a better and more accessible option.