palordrolap

Hahaha no. That would be too easy. Americans, please correct me if I get any of this wrong:

The IRS knows how much tax each American owes, but each American has to fill in a needlessly complicated and obscurely worded form (or set of forms) outlining their incomings and outgoings and then calculate the tax they owe for themselves, and then take steps to pay that amount.

And if they get it wrong they are punished.

There's software that helps with the needlessly complicated paperwork, but the company that makes it is in cahoots with the IRS, and so buying a copy or hiring an accountant are all-but necessary to get it right and not be punished.

This is largely the reason it stays the way it is, because an entirely unnecessary industry is being propped up by the struggles of American taxpayers.

Oh and sometimes the IRS gets their internal calculations wrong, and if you don't get what they got, you have many, many hoops to jump through to prove that what you did was right and what they did was wrong.

The American Dream™

Well, back then it was the Soviets, and now quite a lot of what we see in the west is being guided by the hand of Putin, so it basically is the same thing happening all over again.

What are the odds that that's Maxwell's demon, also born of box-based thought experiments?

And then what are the odds that he's using Maxwell's silver hammer?

The connections are too good not to be true.

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool's errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it's cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

No. They were espousing some unclear but potentially bigoted beliefs that I took to be the sentiment I parodied with the first sentence, but those were not their words. They might have even been going for sarcastic/ironic espousal of the same beliefs, I'm really not sure.

I've added an explanation to my original comment to try to avoid any confusion.

(Edit: The first sentence is not a quote of the original, now deleted, comment, merely a restatement of what I believed to be the same underlying sentiment. I might've been wrong. Kind of hard to tell.)

"Their sexuality and their conception of gender is different to mine, and I know it's wrong to mess with kids, therefore they must be a danger to kids."

"I like ice-cream and I don't like the idea of punching small children in the street, therefore people who don't like ice-cream must like punching small children in the street."

These two sentences use the same logic.

Is "actually Earth" some idealised version of Earth where the greedy and the corrupt don't inevitably end up ruining everything for everyone but themselves? Because otherwise "actually Earth" and Hell could well be the same damn thing.

Or if you subscribe to the Catholic fanfic that is Dante's Inferno, we can talk about circles of hell, each one worse than the last. And where we are right now clearly isn't the bottom one. It definitely feels like it's dropped a layer or two in recent years, but we haven't hit rock bottom.

I could add a "yet" to that, but for some in this wondrous circle, it definitely already feels like it, and some feel like they're thundering towards it with no way to stop it.

But, I guess I'm feeling philosophical at the moment, because this just occurred to me: If there's a fly in the ointment, it means we have ointment.

These words will probably ring hollow in a few days when the ointment catches fire. (I'm not sure what that means in terms of translating back from metaphor into reality, but ointment catching fire definitely feels like something that could happen.)

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn't mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I'm not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro's package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can't vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn't need internet access to work.

There's that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were "too human" looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

Probably a side gig as the hat man.

That's a weird phenomenon to read about if you haven't heard of it/him.

Clearly a cousin of The Strid. Except the Strid is usually full to the brim and you can't see the literal death walls that lie beneath the surface.

Tom Scott made a video about it during his many adventures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCSUmwP02T8