That makes sense. Sorry, I grew up in a school system where recess stops after the fifth grade.
Also, you mentioned that lack of coat was a problem for lunch? I assume that means that your cafeteria only had outdoor seating. How did that work when it was raining or very windy?
Maybe it is because I am used to a colder climate, but how did you come to school without outerwear? Did your parents not notice the temperature in the morning and put a jacket on you?
Douglas Adams is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers of the period.
He is known for light, surrealistic science fiction comedy, not a genre generally considered “high art” but his mastery of language is superb. He is a master of analogies in a way that is both funny but also makes the reader think about the roles and conventions of symbolism in language.
Pokemon Pinball is better.
Where would people take trash then? Home with them? Most people would just drop it on the beach.
I feel the exact opposite of you: more trash cans in public spaces.
Also parking too close to a street corner. Technically illegal but very rarely enforced. It is a real safety hazard since, instead of being able to stop at the stop line and see perpendicular traffic, and driver has to enter the intersection to see (and then have their line of sight blocked by a parked vehicle in the perpendicular direction).
It also makes large vehicles like large trucks and busses take turns very wide.
Half of the scenarios you noted are not ones I have ever heard of (and I would bet are totally made up). Why would WalMart shoppers be exempt from sales tax?
You are right that advertising price with tax may be unreasonable. That does not preclude the store from putting the price with tax on the shelf. Out of all the scenarios you described, the only one that this would not cover is having an item be taxed differently if bought in conjunction with another item, but that can be noted in the same way that stores note a bundle or a bulk sales price ($1 each or 5 for $4).
There is difficulty in the case of a charge in tax rate (how often do those happen? Once every few years) or if there is a tax holiday (I see plenty of clothing stores have a sign for “15% off the marked price”). Those can be handled by having computer controlled shelf prices, which have existed for at least 20 years but never caught on much.
Any of Peter Molyneux games would make good remake targets, but you would want to remake the game he hyped, not the game he delivered. I would love to see a development team, with all the new game libraries and faster hardware try to deliver on some of his unfulfilled promises.
I rarely do, but they are very handy for quickly scanning a long document (drag the scroll bar until I see a header, stop, read the header, and keep going).
Google’s chat programs (Hangouts and Texting) are the worst at this. Not only do they put fuzzy timestamps to messages (5 minutes ago, 1 hour ago) they group messages together. Bring back chat clients that had an exact time stamp on every message.
The average amount of food I buy should be, on average, the same as the amount of food I consume, but the amount of food purchased during a given shopping trip varies, especially in the amount spent on nonperishables. I am likely to buy a lot of a given item, store the extras for when I need them, and buy more when I run out.
If I am wandering around the store, I may see an item (like a snack) that I am interested in trying and pick some up. In doing so, I am slightly delaying the next time I need to buy more, but it is an overall gain for the store since they are getting my money earlier and the future stock up trip may be from a different store.
On average, whether over a large enough population or a long enough time, people are living better and better.
Literacy rates are improving and information is becoming easier to access.
Medicine is always innovating. Medical care is becoming more and more available. Many deadly diseases are either wiped out or easily treatable.
For much (most?) of the world, nutritious food, clean water, and sanitation is available (if not always affordable).
Sure, some where in the world there is natural disaster, but we are constantly getting better at predicting them and buildings are being built to better handle them. There is still violence and unjust governments, but both are trending down.
That is not to say that we cannot do much much better nor that there are not easy things that we could do to improve. It is likely that your current situation has gotten worse in some way or another. But we are averaging ten steps forward for every step back (no matter how big and unnecessary that step back is).
Instead Spielberg put a bunch of lame movie references in, because he’s too senile to understand the game references.
Have not seen the movie, but that sounds like Spielberg nailed the tone of the novel. The book reads like a thinly veiled essay by an aging Gen X geek about how pop culture peaked during the authors childhood and the world would be perfect if we could go back to the 80s.
Teleconference is, at best, good enough and will never have the quality of in person discussion.
I am not aware of any teleconference software that uses perfectly lossless audio. Those small losses, though hard to hear, can increase the cognitive load of participants. Even with expensive headsets and good software, audio volumes will vary from speaker to speaker. Automatic volume leveling loses even more audio fidelity.
Due to physics (i.e. we cannot send a signal faster than the speed of light) and processing, there will be additional delay. It makes it hard for people to talk without speaking over each other. It makes discussions trickier since people are hesitant to talk right after one another. Instead of interrupting with questions, they will hold questions until the end, when the context may be forgotten, or don’t ask questions at all.
Even assuming that everyone has good lighting and has their camera pointed perfectly, body language is often lost. Every meeting software I have used hesitates to switch the focused speaker too often. If two people are talking back and forth, one will be religtated to a thumbnail video. When someone is presenting, they cannot easily scan the room to see reactions.
So, when talking on a meeting, the participants hear (almost) everything being said, but they miss out on all of the non-verbal communication and even some subtleties of the sound.
Sure, but many are probably locked into long leases. These leases also cover things like server rooms, show rooms, and storage areas. All of that can be moved, but there is cost (and risk) in moving them. Plus, it is convenient to have work areas for employees to use between meetings.
Also, some people, like me, prefer to work outside of their home, so it is good to have us in a single place so we can have impromptu meetings.
Some companies are reducing office space, taking desks away from employees that come in rarely or even switching to a hot bunk model (several employees share the same office and come in on different days) or a hotel model (employees sit in any open office and are expected to take all personal items home at the end of the day).
In office communication is much more efficient. It is easier to understand (and pay attention to) people in the same room as you than it is to understand people on a call (especially since most people don’t have a great microphone and Internet and LAN quality can vary). Some employers have adopted a policy of grouping meetings to designated meeting days and encouraging employees to come in on those.
Sure, but Windows Update was already part of the OS and web users were a customer segment that had an Internet connection. They could have pushed patches and bug fixes.
But seeing that even Microsoft abandoned making their own browser engine, it goes to show how complex it is to make one nowadays and with new web APIs/features coming out every few weeks it feels like, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
No, Microsoft is just historically bad at making browsers. It was not until Internet Explorer 7 that they finally implemented HTML 4 and CSS 2 without major glaring bugs.
What else is there that is not Chromium/Webkit based?
Tie more positive things to the federal minimum wage, for example tax brackets and retirement fund contribution limits. They go up every single year, so the government will either have to keep raising the minimum wage or go on the record to justify why the ratio is wrong.