They aren’t wrong IMO - if you don’t do anything that requires a lot of processing power or really need a lot of slots for peripherals, PCI cards and drives, you might as well connect your external display, keyboard and mouse to a laptop. It gives you the option to take the entire thing with you, and a lot of people have spare laptops anyway.
I know plenty of people who don’t even use their laptop much because they’re doing everything on their phones or game consoles.
The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. I’d assume that books were still more expensive back then relative to people’s incomes, and they were also the only way to access that content while today you have e-books, PDFs, YouTube-videos or even websites, which are often available for free (not necessarily legally).
On top of that, many literary devices are unrealistic or exaggerated.
Eyeglasses are an interesting case, because there seems to be a causal relationship between being nearsighted and staying inside a lot as a kid, which used to be mostly people who read books or just spend a lot of time on school work. That’s less relevant now that kids stay inside to watch TV, play videogames or scroll on their phone, though. Also, many people who need glasses either didn’t have the means (e.g. no access to eye doctors, no money for glasses; probably not as important nowadays in most wealthy countries) or choose to not wear them due to vanity, and both of those reasons are kind of orthogonal to adjectives like “intelligent” or “intellectual”.
How many people actually collect books for show? That seems uncommon and it should usually be fairly easy to tell for people who are somewhat well-read.
The thing with chess is that it’s not fun if you aren’t any good at it, and the difference between people who are somewhat good and those who aren’t is pretty big. You can get there with pure perseverance (same with most other things that gets listed here, probably), but most people tend to pick hobbies that they don’t have a hard time with.
MS Word is essentially a monopoly, but that doesn’t mean that every detail of its features is worth copying - quite the opposite, actually. And again, why do you even want to automatically capitalize the first word after a line break that is not a proper sentence stop?
Or why LibreOffice is so stubborn on keeping the menu bar default instead of the ribbon-bar
AFAIK many users, especially those used to the old UI, dislike the ribbon design.
I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.
Why would you even want that? It’s dangerous to change written text automatically, a lot of people will be annoyed because they wanted exactly what they wrote. Capitalizing after . or ? makes enough sense to automate it because of grammar rules, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule for capitalization after line breaks.
Who wants to have personal effects in their grave anyway? When I’m dead, I want to become soil as quickly and cheaply as possible.
A scientist might think that the historical/scientific value is more important than the personal rights of people who died millenia ago.
The people who dug up graves in the early 20th century just didn’t see the locals as people, though, which is also why most of those museums were in Europe, not anywhere near where the artifacts were found (if the artifacts were given to museums at all, instead of being sold to private collectors).
If you ask me personally: A pharaoh is a king, and fuck the king.
AFAIK cameras can be identified by the dust/grain patterns on their lenses. Probably no risk of random users doxxing you through that, but I don’t feel comfortable opening myself up to mass surveillance like that.
I mean, give me a knife or screwdriver and it’s equal, but anything that requires extensive practice for basic competence is naturally going to be become focused on one hand (e.g. handwriting) or a specific combination of hands (e.g. you need two hands to play guitar, but people will generally learn to play it either righthanded or lefthanded and suck at the other one regardless of how ambidexterous they are).
I remember frequently telling my mother to stop smoking, hiding her cigarettes and the like (that was in elementary school). She still smokes, I never started.
I wonder where I got that from. I don’t think we talked about that in school so early, and I didn’t have like The Talk about drugs at home.
Yay. Chili flakes are great, too.
BTW, the worst pizza I ever had was served in Italy. Absolutely drowned in oil.
You’ll catch some flies (and various other insects) with fly paper. The good thing is that it doesn’t smell.
Never heard of houseflies going for vinegar, AFAIK that’s for fruit flies (and even that is rather tricky IME).
What about gun adverts? YouTube has a terrible track record for policing its advertising content.
First we’d need to define “internet” for this purpose. Does classic mail qualify? It certainly can carry more data than pidgeons, and if you can still have computers you might get relatively close to the 90s internet by sending data by mail (especially when you’re communicating with people within a day’s travel, rather than on the other side of the earth).
Other than that, you can do a lot with visual signals. In the Discworld novels, they developed a kind of optical telegraph network with a technique that is somewhat similar to ship flag communication, and optical telegraphy exists/existed in the real world, too, though it never got much traction. If you have computers, you might be able to get pretty alright data rates with something like that.