Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.

Except when they aren’t. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.

Refunding the sale price is still theft.

What did you lose in this theft?

Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?

Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.

Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise “pay this price and own this movie” rather than “pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time”.

The industrial military complex is built on funding for proxy wars with Russia. I wonder if the issue this time is that they are worried that with Russia directly involved instead of by proxy, this war may end up breaking Russia if they lose. Dismantling the perpetual antagonist that motivates further funding of the war machine is not in the interest of those who make money on wars.

While a broad concept, in the context of your question, science is a metod to derive knowledge from observations.

Alternatives to the scientific method is to guess or to obtain knowledge from others. (Most other ways I can come up with, e.g. “religion” can still be sorted under these two.)

Obtaining knowledge from others is great, but may not always be available, and the quality of the knowledge derived this way depends on the reliability of the source.

For the other alternative, every sensible metric shows how science is a better method than guessing to derive knowledge.

Pants

The replacement for “this is retarded” I’ve started to use is ~ “I guess someone had to leave early for the weekend. ‘Good enough, let’s ship this and go home.’” with me gesturing like Khaby Lame at, e.g., obviously broken email validation field.

It isn’t quite as snappy, but at least my disappointment tend to come across.

No technology actually works, it is all a magical illusion. You may think a steam engine works with heated water and pressure; a computer with circuits and electrons; etc.; well, that is all gobbledygook, and what actually makes any of these things do things that occasionally seem useful is nothing but powerful illusion magic. If the assembly of mages decide to dispell the illusion, we’ll be back in the middle ages. For one thing, it seems they never really got the illusion to work quite right for printers.

The industrial revolution is an illusion created by 14:th century wizards.

As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).

Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.

The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.