It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

Think about it realistically. Considering just food machines, what foods popular with Americans can realistically be sold out of a vending machine?

Popcorn is a clear winner. It can be made in advance, stored for a while, and then easily dispensed. Its profit margin is high. You can charge two dollars for a bag of popcorn that only cost you twenty cents in ingredients.

Packaged food like potato crisps is also a good idea for the same reason. You don’t even need to keep the vending machine heated. Similarly, cold drinks and ice cream can also be easily dispensed out of a cooled vending machine, although I don’t consider those different from “packaged food”.

But what other American classics are there to consider? Hamburgers are out immediately. They’re too complex to prepare fresh and most people wouldn’t buy a reheated frozen burger.

Hot dogs might be viable, but a machine that sells hot dogs can only see hot dogs due to the mechanical complexity. I think many people would also question the freshness of a vending machine hot dog unless you cooked it right in front of them and let them see it via a glass window. Additionally, a hot dog has a much lower profit margin. If you charge four dollars for a hot dog, it might cost nearly a dollar in ingredients along with the mechanical complexity of the machine. Most people would expect the machine to also dispense condiments like ketchup, mustard, and relish.

Pizza is also complex and would take several minutes to bake from fresh or reheat from frozen. I don’t think people would stand around for several minutes waiting for a machine to heat up pizza. Unless you can get the cooking time under sixty seconds, forget it. Pizza also traditionally baked at 700 degrees Fahrenheit, or 370 degrees Celsius. It’s not an easy to safely install a component that gets that hot in a machine. Pizza that is pre-cooked and kept warm tends to not taste very good.

Fried chicken tenders will lose their crispness over time, even when kept warm. There is no temperature you can keep fried chicken at where it will remain crisp for hours but also not overcook. Hot oil in a machine is a recipe for disaster. French fries are a possible inclusion (the machine in the post sells French fries), but Americans don’t really eat French fries on their own; they are usually served as a side dish along with something else.

Ideally, a machine should be loaded with frozen or pre-cooked food, which it merely keeps warm and dispenses to a buyer when purchased.

Think about Japanese food. Curry, in particular, can be served just barely hot and still delicious. Rice balls can be served refrigerated, as can cold Lawson sandwiches. Instant ramen is also popular, but that’s just packaged food that requires a hot water spigot. I argue that Japanese food in general is just more suitable to be served out of a vending machine.

It didn’t say “e-book” when I originally wrote the reply

You can donate books to the library, you know. They’re always looking for more copies of popular books and what they don’t add to their collection, they’ll resell them and use the money for more books.

Paper books aren’t “waste” by any means as they are easily recycled.

Most authors I’ve heard from (through their Internet posts) don’t mind libraries, but they’d rather you enjoy their books legitimately than pirate.

It might not be legal, but in my book, it is perfectly ethical to pirate a copy without DRM if you already own a legitimate copy (paper or DRM-inclusive)

I would be astonished if publishers figured out a way to put DRM on a paper copy of a book.

Here’s a DRM-free copy for sale:

It’ll look like this:

Once you buy this, it is truly yours. Nobody can take it away from you. You don’t have to agree to any EULA to read it. No account needed, no activation, no sign-up. You can even resell your copy if you want. There are no technical restrictions on it whatsoever. You can enjoy it any time of day, anywhere in the world, and there’s no need for an Internet connection.

Don’t do that. Authors make next to nothing from their books. You don’t have to support Amazon, but at least buy a paper copy or audiobook to support the author.

Unless it’s J. K. Rowling. Fuck Rowling.

Probably. I didn’t consider that, but everything is AI generated nowadays

But this is legitimately impressive

Other people have described the health effects, so I’ll describe the chemistry. Fats are made of long chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms attached to a “head”, which is made of other elements or structures. Carbon atoms normally can make a total of 4 bonds. Hydrogen atoms can make 1 bond.

Carbon being able to make 4 bonds means that in the chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms in fat molecules, each carbon atom makes a bond with the carbon atom before it in the chain, a bond with the carbon atom after it in the chain, and then bonds with two hydrogen atoms separately off to the side. This makes a total of 4 bonds. If all of the carbon atoms in the chain are like this, that’s “saturated fat”, because the chain of carbon is completely “saturated” with hydrogen atoms.

(Hydrogen atoms are white, carbon atoms are black, oxygen atoms are red)

Saturated fats have the often desirable property of being able to be tightly packed together, and thus are typically solid at room temperature. Butterfat is mostly saturated fat.

However, carbon atoms can also make a double bond with other carbon atoms. If a particular carbon atom in the chain makes a double bond with the carbon atom before it, it could cause a bend in the chain of carbon atoms. In that case, it also means that those particular carbon atoms in the chain that have formed a double bond with each other only have 1 available bond left (after also forming a separate single bond with the carbon atom before or after it), so it can only bond with one hydrogen atom. These are, therefore, called “unsaturated fats”, and because they don’t pack together easily, they are typically liquid at room temperature.

If there is a single double bond in the chain, it’s a monounsaturated fat.

If there are two or more double bonds, it’s a polyunsaturated fat.

Notice how the hydrogen atoms connected to the double-bonded carbon atoms in unsaturated fats can be connected to either the same side or the opposite sides of the two hydrogen atoms. If they’re on the same side, they are called cis-unsaturated fats. If they’re on opposite sides, they are trans-unsaturated fats, or trans fats in short.

This is oleic acid, a cis monounsaturated fat commonly found in many vegetable oils:

While this is vaccenic acid, a trans-monounsaturated fat. It is found naturally in butter and human milk and is not particularly bad for you:

Note that this is NOT the same picture as the one I showed for saturated fat. The 7th and 8th carbon atoms from the left are double-bonded and, therefore, are each missing a hydrogen atom. The one remaining hydrogen atom on each is bonded on opposite sides.

Note that trans-unsaturated fats are also pretty straight. This means that they can also pack together with saturated fats to make a solid product at room temperature.

“Hydrogenation” is the process of adding hydrogen to unsaturated fats to saturate them. This means that liquid oil can be processed into a solid product. That’s how margarine and shortening are made. In previous years, partially hydrogenated oils that weren’t fully hydrogenated could leave substantial quantities of trans-unsaturated fats left in the product, but after health concerns, many countries’ food safety authorities banned these artificial trans fats. Fully hydrogenated fats consist of only saturated fats since they have been “fully” hydrogenated, and that is what food manufacturers have been doing instead.

I am more saying that “the ends must not be used to justify the means”.

Is it wrong to say that I’m glad the head of a cartel is in jail?

No, of course not. He shouldn’t have broken the law. That will always remain wrong, and it must be if we want to enjoy an orderly rule-based society.

But at the same time… I’m glad it happened.

This is a legitimate concern, but I also question Mexico’s ability to adhere to those standards and administer justice correctly when El Chapo managed to give them the slip twice, even while under “maximum security”.

People suspect that this argument is not being made by Mexican authorities in good faith, and it is easy to understand why people think that.

Ubuntu Server, Debian, or Rocky Linux will save you a lot of headaches.

Most software is designed with these major distros in mind and using something more obscure will just cause problems later on when you realise that there are no guides written for it by the software vendor. Fixing broken software gets old really fast especially when it causes your stuff to break when you’re actually trying to use it.

The funny thing is that the Belt and Road initiative as a way of buying friends has utterly failed. For example, China built a billion-dollar bridge in the Maldives connecting Malé with its airport on another island but public opinion of China in the Maldives is still low. That’s despite the fact that the entrance to the bridge has “China-Maldives Friendship Bridge” written in large letters on an arch over the carriageway.

I really wish there was a way to kick countries out of the EU.

Work culture, especially in the US, is very conservative. The fact that you don’t understand that it’s better to be more conservative here regardless of consensus is astounding. Understand that the NSFW flag is a curation tool. You seem to think it’s a form of censorship. It’s purpose is to deal with the ten per cent on the far end of the spectrum who would take offence. And if your retort is that the majority shouldn’t have to accommodate the minority, that’s just a terminally online opinion that fails to recognise the fragility of real human interaction. It’s analogous to saying that bridge engineers shouldn’t have to accommodate the heaviest ten per cent of vehicles when figuring out what its maximum load should be when accomodating “most” vehicles is enough and that those vehicles should either lighten their load or find an alternate route.

I’m not going to argue with you over this because I don’t believe you have the foundational understanding of why things are what they are.

Try showing it off at work. Set it as the wallpaper on your work computer and see how “safe for work” it is then.