I delivered the newspaper when I was 13. Is that such an alien idea? I used the money to buy my first computer.

Well hopefully they’re not putting melamine in the milk powder!

That’s just ridiculous to me. Why? I have had fries plenty of times which were way better than McDonald fries and all they were made of was potatoes, oil, and salt. The perfect French fry doesn’t need anything other than that. It’s all about choosing the right potato variety and then it all comes down to cooking technique.

The fact that McDonald puts anything else in their fries just makes me shake my head.

I care less about realism than I do about having interesting decisions to make. I think it’s a really big challenge for game designers to make it fun and interesting for players — even highly skilled ones who love to strategize — without the game bogging down by having too many dice rolls/decisions to make.

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.

It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.

Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.

If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.

How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).

Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).

Definitely stronger than humans, pound for pound, but probably not as strong as gorillas!

You’d have to be really strong to hold a shield that large, with that much steel reinforcement, without strapping it to your arm.

How does one rotate a shield that’s strapped to your forearm?

YouTube! Search for reel mowers.

Even brand new they can be bad if they’re not properly made or adjusted at the factory. Think of a pair of scissors where the blades don’t make good contact. Couldn’t cut newspaper with that!

His theories aren’t discredited. Many people have misconstrued them however. I wrote about this in a reply to someone else.

They’re terrible if they’re poorly maintained. A well maintained and sharpened one is very easy to mow with. The blades cut the grass like scissors!

Ahhh okay. Another approach to insect control (that doesn’t rely on trees) is a predatory bog. Loads of predatory plants as well as water with (insect / amphibian) predators of mosquitoes and flies.

Can be quite beautiful and special!

And before the petrol mower there was the mechanical reel mower. My grandfather had one of these beauties. They take a bit of extra care and maintenance (sharpening, cleaning, oiling) but they do a great job and are much easier to push around than you’d think! Super lightweight and much safer around kids and pets too. Plus they’re basically silent compared to those extremely loud engine varieties (petrol and electric)!

Do you have any trees back there? If so, the next step is to build bat boxes to attract bats to live there. They will eat those abundant insects and be very happy! Eventually it should become less annoying!

That would be nice but I don’t think it would have as much impact as you think. People who own multiple dwellings are a tiny minority of owners.

He probably made a lot more than that on the video. Plus he basically told the world it’s not worth it. Kind of a bad deal overall for the sellers. No wonder they didn’t want him filming inside the cafe!

Capital gains tax doesn’t apply to your principal residence.

Do you have a source for this?

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).