It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle.

E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice.

These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess.

You might eventually end up calling 15mm pipe half-inch, depending on where the cheapest pipe can be sourced from.

“Hi Officer John, that data is deleted and is no longer possible to access.”

Unless there’s a regulatory requirement (which there currently isn’t in any jurisdiction I’ve heard of), that’s a perfectly acceptable response.

You'd be required to show what you have but you aren't required to store everything forever just in case someone years later asks for it. Would be like showing up to fingerprint the scene 3 years after and being surprised it's too late.

Think of the children! We can't have privacy because children might be abused if we have privacy!

This argument applies equally to anything else that needs digital forensics, like SBF's personal banking history, or which user deployed a crypto-miner to some random staging server back in 2023.

I believe that was the point. Soft delete isn't a product requirement, it's an implementation detail, so product teams should talk about the user experience using language like "delete" or "archive" or "undo" or "customer support retrieves deleted data".

Yeah: You don't "delete" a bank account, you close it, and you don't "undo", you reopen it, etc. The processes have conditions, audit rules, attached information, side-effects, etc. In some cases the same entity can't be restored, and you have to instead create a successor.

"Undo" may work as shorthand for "whatever the best reversing actions happen to be", but as any system grows it stops being simple.

Sure. Did someone say that the behavior should be described to customers as soft delete, though?

I read a blog about a technical topic aimed at engineers, not customers.

I would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe.

I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.

It’s well known that living conditions went down for the average person as they moved into cities and industrialised. So the average living condition of someone living in London for e.g. being lower than that of a farmer in a country less far along on the industrialisation journey isn’t that surprising really.

If you had land yes. For a landless laborer in a rural area the conditions weren’t necessarily that great either. Of course population growth played a significant factor too.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France to see how much better the Brits had it than the French. Many of the accounts in the book are drawn from British working class _tourists_. Ordinary people in Britain had enough disposable income to visit France.

It's not a worthless question at all. The answer is "read the manual" and maybe also "your usage might meet the severe maintenance schedule and you'll need to read the footnotes."

Yes, it's not a question that has a literal numerical answer in the exact form that's being asked for, but if you ask an actual human they can 100% answer it for you.

Musk, being the world's richest person, is something of an outlier. He can afford to give free money to the market for longer than anyone else, and the size of the market might not be big enough to handle the imbalance.

There's a level of irrational spending which only institutional investors can counterbalance, and they might not have the risk appetite to get into a single market on a relatively less regulated platform that could rug pull them.

It's somewhat interesting how the wisdom of the crowd and economic theory for rational actors are usually combined as an argument for free markets.

While the reverse is not used as an argument against unchecked wealth.

My understanding is that unchecked wealth only remains that way until its owner acts irrationally on a stock exchange, at which point it is quite rapidly checked and becomes someone else's unchecked wealth.

Which is to say that Elon Musk can inflate any market he wants, but only by losing sums of money that will become increasingly significant as more and more people find out about the free cash giveaway.

I’ve used it.

There’s no functional difference in how markets work when 99% of wealth is owned by a handful of kings vs 99% of wealth being owned by a handful of oligarchs.

I don't really think so. You just swapped the term king to Oligarchs. In fact the Oligarchs are even worse because people think that they have freedom when they might not in fact have such freedom in the first place.

I swapped “kings” plural for “oligarchs” plural

I am laughing if its a joke lmaooo, just now realized it all of a sudden lol

pardon me I wrote king instead of kings and what you wrote in this comment felt like questionable to me first but now comical LMAO.

But my point still stands and aside from this mistake, I am curious in knowing the real answer to my question even now!

I don’t have an opinion on if it’s worse or not because some people mistakenly think they are free.

I meant that from the perspective of how market forces play out, hyper concentration of wealth into a few actors looks the same whether the title of the those actors is “king” or “oligarch”.

You start losing the wisdom of the crowds effect the market gives if you have a handful of people making the decisions for the entire market

No, loud conversation on a train during commuter hours really is rude where I live.

Most patrons have a conversation at a normal volume where the words are clear to their conversation partner but not to people sitting further away.

Speaking loudly enough to be understood from a significant distance is rude because it prevents other people from having their own conversations, and it forces people who are not having a conversation to listen to you. Speaking at an appropriate volume is not anti-social, it is pro-social: other people can't be social themselves if you're too loud.

The unwritten rules loosen up at night, during events, or at other times when there's a boisterous crowd.

Yeah, I'm not sure why or how non-technical QA staff are meant to test my implementation of a load shedder. I'm 100% sure they're not going to realise the API is suboptimal and refactor it during the process of writing a test.

Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.

They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.

It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.