No less than The Economist uses the BMI (“Big Mac Index”) to compare economies.

Cellebrite isn’t American.

Representives Omar and Tlaib would disprove that point.

We used to have progressive income taxes that did this.

Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk pulled them because “trickle down, a rising tide lifts all boats, thousand points of light, blah blah blah”

Alabama Burning

Yup, am a Canadian, can confirm.

We stopped building public housing in the 1990s, because we were all told that “the market” would provide. Well, the market provided. For real estate developers and house-traders.

Maybe, oh, just build public housing at scale instead of relying on a patchwork of underfunded and undergoverned agencies and P3 initiatives?

Aren’t these things trackable? Don’t phones have an IMEI and can’t they be remote-bricked if stolen?

I mean, police don’t care, but Apple could render these useless if they wanted to.

If you thought Viagra and Ozempic had a market, just wait…

This will be huge amongst the wealthy.

Jesus Christ, if that’s real, the WaPo editorial board needs a slap upside the head.

Stop. Rationalizing. Trump.

Anyone have that gif of Rupert Murdoch with a plate of cookies?

Found it…

Oh, if only that were true.

But what about that one guy who writes absolutely brilliant VB?

Anyone who reads the National Review likely doesn’t care, but I’m glad to see calls for “decorum” levelled against the right for a change.

Yes.

They’re hoping for a Reichstag Fire moment where they can win control during the chaos.

What a craven, gaslighting piece of shit.

Ah, the Oracle clause.

Don’t they have enough money yet?!

Are they not, ever, going to be satisfied? Does a tiny little modicum of restraint upset them that much?

(don’t answer that!)

“Duped” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.

Yeah, XP was pretty good.

I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.

That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:

• NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
• Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
• NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
• 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
• 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
• Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)

Anchoring the bottom

• 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
• 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
• 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
• NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
• CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
• 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)

A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.