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It's just as much a sport as figure skating or synchronised swimming.

I'm not sure if traffic is "convenience" at this point. At least where I live, it's a nearly essential piece of functionality.

In fact, for local driving it's often the only reason to use a map app. I already know how to get to most of the places I want to go, I just need to know the best route to avoid traffic now.

I think it's a bit more than that. I think that the idea is that you simplify the problem so that the rubber duck could understand it. Or at least reformulate it in order to communicate it clearly.

It's the simplification, reformulation or reorganisation that helps to get the breakthrough.

Just thinking out loud isn't quite the same thing.

something manufactured of whole cloth and meant to divide us

I'm not so sure about that.

My parents grew up in London during WWII. My father told me that, on any given day, at least one or two of the kids in his school had recently received a letter from the government telling them that their father, uncle or brother had died in the war. Not to mention other deaths from bombings that happen on and off for years. For the most part, the rest of the kids in school never knew who had just had someone killed in the war, although I suppose it eventually came out to become public knowledge. The point being that you could be playing ball with some kid who had just lost a family member, and you wouldn't necessarily know it. He said that this shaped his attitude that death is just a part of life, and something that (in true British fashion) you accepted and moved on with.

This came up when my sister-in-law lost her adult daughter some years back and she was (and is) still struggling with it. My father has a hard time understanding her feelings. The two of them are just 22 years apart in age.

WWII is something that casts a pretty big shadow. But when I was born, it was less than 20 years later and its influence on my attitudes is several orders of magnitude smaller than on my parents.

At the other end. It's hard for anyone much less than 25 years old today to remember life before modern smart phones (if you assume the start of that as the iPhone in 2008). It's hard to deny that the smart phone has radically changed the way that we interact with each other and the world. Yes, old farts like me have adapted to it, but young people today have these things hard-wired in from the beginning.

So far, in this century, it's changing technology that casts the big shadow.

The point being that, while society changes in a continuum, big things that cast big shadows tend to define "eras" that shape the way that young people develop. And those big shadows are what cause "generations" to tend to clump together in attitudes and behaviours. And, no, I don't think this is made up just to divide us.

I'm totally unqualified to comment on this, but something has always itched in my brain about dark matter. It smacks, to me, to be the aether of the 21st century.

Except this is Canada, and $7.50/hr is about as relevant as comparing it to child labour in a t-shirt factory in Bangladesh.

The workplace should have a zero tolerance policy about abuse of the staff. If the particular location is one where there is a significantly non-zero chance of such incidents happening, then there should be a big red button on the wall that sounds and alarm, and summons security and possibly triggers a police response.

Employees should be trained to hit the button at the first hint of abuse. The employer should support them.

I'm not sure a corvette has ever counted as "major" warship.

The "supposed to be...", is a really big problem.

First, it's factually wrong. Homosexuality occurs all through nature and it's not a mistake or random abberation. Presumably there's some advantage to having a percentage of any population not reproducing. Perhaps so that they aren't burdened with children and are free to fill other roles in their community, herd, flock or whatever. This increases the group survival/reproduction rate, even though they aren't reproducing themselves.

Secondly, "supposed to..." implies that there's something wrong with any non-heterosexual individual. It sounds like, at best, you'll accept their homosexuality as natural but, at the same time, you understand that they're actually defective. That attitude isn't going to lead to good things, and not something I would like to see widespread in society.

And finally, the fact that you would even say this points out the need for more education on this in schools, not less.

I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.

Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.

Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.

Calling customers, "guests". A customer is someone with a business relationship with someone/something else. They're exchanging money for goods and services and have a right to expect certain value for their money.

A guest is something else entirely. A guest has no implicit right to expect a certain any particular level or quality of services. They are dependent on the magnamity of the "host".

Calling a customer a "guest" robs them of status.