If you take the sun out of the equation, the planets fly apart in all directions. Hope that helps ;)

"Bigger" is easy, because there are obvious ways to measure the size of a government, like the revenue the government gets, the amount of government spending, the number of people working directly for the government, the number of people currently imprisoned, or who have been imprisoned at some time in their life. There's also slightly more abstract things like the amount of time people spending doing paperwork for the purposes of the government, and the total volume (pages might be a reasonable measure) of government laws, and regulations.

As for controlling more of our lives, I think it's significant that many of the most influential regulations are local. Cities design with building codes with the idea of servicing car traffic, emergency vehicles, and parking needs. This prioritizes cars over other forms of transit by government mandate, and puts a pretty steep upper limit on how walking friendly (or bicycle, or mass transit) city areas are allowed to be. In most places, you need exceptions to the rules to have areas without roads running everywhere.

A similar thing happens in food regulations. Many places around the world have small food vendors that sell a single (or a few) food items from a stall on the street side. The US has strict food regulations that require sinks, refrigeration, and other items that don't fit in that kind of environment. Most US cities also control the number of street side vendors that are allowed to exist. If you watch "street food" videos, that doesn't exist in the US because of our regulations.

Regulations add to the cost and complexity of housing. My great grandfather built a house. I read the requirements to do that now, and gave up. There are hundreds of pages of regulations and requirements, inspection schedules, and licensing requirements that must be followed. Some of those regulations aren't even free to access.

On the other hand, these requirements placed uniformly on many industries have some benefits. When you buy a house, you can expect it to be suitable in a huge number of circumstances. Self built, self designed houses sometimes have major design flaws, and sometimes collapse or burn down or flood for surprising reasons that could have been foreseen by experts.

It's very likely that more things we do are regulated, and those regulated activities are more tightly controlled than they were in the past. A part of that is that politicians are systemically more willing to make additional regulations than they are to remove existing regulations, even if some of those regulations are known not to work.

An immutable OS is useful for things like an alarm clock, where if you accidentally muted the sound system, you could oversleep. There's an obvious downside if you're someone that watches porn on your alarm clock computer, but sometimes compromises must be made.

(reminder don't take dietary advice from internet strangers)

Here's my fact based advice: on average, people that eat food sometimes live longer than people that do not eat food. You should sometimes eat food.

Ignore my advice at your own peril.

Does nobody use 17 in 1 hair detergent, body wash, conditioner, deoderant, moisturizer, hand soap, shaving cream, beard oil, lip balm, callous remover, hand sanitizer, bubble bath solution, epsom salt, dandruff treatment, cologne, hair gel, and junk defunker anymore?

There's a lot of answers here, but I don't think anyone said the magic words. To reseason cast iron, you need an oil high in poly-unsaturated fatty acids. Those are the kind that can chain together, and form a good polymer coating.

The thing that trips me up most about this subject is that 140 years ago, pork fat was very good for seasoning cast iron. Today, it isn't, because the composition of the fat has changed significantly.

The best seasoning coats will be thin, not appear or feel oily, give the pan a dark color slightly more glossy than an eggshell, and resist mild detergents, metal spatulas, and heat high enough to sear a steak on. If you have a layer of loose stuff in the pan, that's just a layer of gunk, and is probably adding some weird flavors to anything you cook.

The problem when photon containment breaks like this is that we can never be 100% sure which photons were SUPPOSED to be there, and which ones leaked out. We'll need a dedicated team of particle physicists with very small tweazers to have any hope of sorting out this mess.

Technically, Frankenstein's Monster was the author, and Dr. Frankenstein himself was the real Mary Shelley we made along the way.

"You wouldn't put on a tricorn hat, would you?"

I actually would, if I could find a nice one...

"...and leave your job to sail the seas?"

... That's an option? I didn't even consider-

"And you certainly wouldn't drink rum, and fire cannons, and carry a saber and tell silly parrot related puns."

buys a tricorn hat

According to NHTSA numbers, New Years Day (and New Years Eve) are no longer in the top 10 most deadly holidays for drunk driving fatalities, or driving fatalities generally. Strong police presence and strict DUI enforcement has done a lot to cut down on the loss of life in this particular case.

Just in case anyone wants this converted to freedom units, 9.792 km is 744 spindles, and 2,6 km is about 95 shackles. HTH

Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google's storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a "60 day grace period" ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.

He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn't really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they're going to delete his account in a week, which isn't enough time to retrieve his data... because he didn't do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn't do anything during the grace period, and hasn't done anything since the grace period ended.

I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I'm not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he's not paying that cost anymore.