I can’t read “My mate Paul” and not hear it in Philomena Cunk’s / Diane Morgan’s voice. Well played sir!

I have a surface pro x. I can’t install Google drive on windows. I can’t install Linux. Affinity apps don’t get graphics acceleration because of some missing directX support. Neither does Blender, or Fusion360. Darktable and Rawtherapee only work under emulation. How is this a $1000+ laptop? All those things work flawlessly on an underspecced base MacBook air with 8GB of RAM (up until you need to use all the ram to keep five chrome tabs open anyway).

I know there’s some hyperbole here, but my point still stands: the author is right when they said that Microsoft hasn’t given up… Because it feels they’re not even trying. Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW, and compatibility problems lasted a year. Not ten years.

Ah, it was just because of the “ban cars” comment with no more context around it. I’m happy with reducing cars, not with expecting cars to get banned altogether or to cease to exist magically.

Well it might be off, as there are other factors, but I wasn’t meaning it as hyperbole - road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and a typical bus weighs about 10 times the weight of a compact, so damage would be roughly 10^4 times larger. This is called the “Generalised Fourth Power Law” and there are tons of links about it:

https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/

(Which btw, you can apply the other way and state that you need an insane amount of bicycles to match the road damage of a single car).

If they took the top end bracket of SUV weights and the bottom end of bus weights, they could have reached vastly different numbers. I used 1800 kg (large sedan or compact SUV) and 18000 kg for a bus (the mercedes Benz citaro starts at roughly 18500 kg), to keep the numbers simple.

Good public transit does not mean less wear and tear on the roads, absolutely not. As I stated in a different comment, a bus that replaces 10-20 cars causes similar road damage as 10000 cars. Which is fine, but for completely different reasons. Public transport is good because it allows more pedestrian-friendly cities, reduces pollution, etc; just road wear and tear is not one of the reasons why it’s good, it’s one of the drawbacks.

Did you know that road damage is proportional to the fourth power of weight? A single city bus does similar road damage to 10000 cars. Since we’re talking about road damage here, shall we ban buses too? Do I need to tell my 78 year mom with limited mobility to suck it up and cycle?

I work in a related field and having fewer cars on the road is a priority of mine, but I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

$749

Windows

Done, I’ve read enough.

As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs

In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.

Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).

I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!

Which is why many of these things are regulated, especially if they include addictive substances.