Both Canada and the UK have national health care and their academic salaries are on very different scales so clearly healthcare is not relevant to the level of academic salary.

Even after this change it will still be the BSOD just with a different value of B.

So you do see them! ;-) That's what I was talking about. Yes, the broken rate is probably not quite as high as it is for chargers because pumps have been around for over a century so we have had time to really optimize the design. However, when you are going to a location with 4 chargers and one is broken and the other three are in use you really notice it because you have to wait 30 minutes or so to be able to charge. If that happened at a petrol station you'd just wait a few minutes and use the next free pump without thinking anything of it.

Yes, but to be fair typical academic activities of an 80-year old professor don't involve running around while being shot at by Nazis or finding caves with weird alien beings. Instead it involves being called a Nazi because you innocently used what used to be an acceptable phrase and increasingly wondering whether you might be an alien being because nothing around you looks like the world you used to know.

It's not the discrepancy between academic and industry salaries that matters, it's the absolute value of that salary. That's why I ended up in Canada instead of the UK as an academic - UK academic salaries are not enough to be able to afford a house and support a family on, Canadian ones are. I don't really care what I might have been able to earn in industry because I enjoy my job as an academic too much to want to work in industry. However, I have to have a job that earns enough to afford a house and support my family at a reasonable standard of living - that's my bottom line and the UK salaries for academics are well below that, even up north where I am from and the cost of living is lower.

Clearly your subconcious looks for you which is how you manage to avoid pumps that are out of order without realizing it! ;-)

If you mean that you drove up to one, got out and found it not working then I'd agree with you. But I find it hard to believe that you have never been to a petrol station in the past 10 years that did not have at least one pump that was down for maintenance or refilling the underground tank. The difference is that you probably saw that the pump was blocked off and just went to another without thinking about it like most of us do.

Good point - nobody has a petrol pump at home!

The parent did not say "mass distribution", they said "mass availability" and that is not the same thing. Nor did they say anything about electronic distribution so narrowing the definition to only those media you outline has no basis in anything they said.

....is clearly "mass availability" before electronic communication,

No, but it is available for everyone to see so it is definitely "mass availability" of art.

Not really, because they were itinerant which meant most of the time they were off touring so unless by "friends and family" you mean those touring with them they were not available. Even the aristocracy would generally only host artists for small periods of time meaning that even they did not regularly have access either. Then there were the larger cities, like London that had the Globe Theatre back in Elizabethan times where plays were regularly available for the masses.

It's probably not far from that - it is not uncommon to find a petrol station with one or two pumps that for whatever reason are not working. The difference is that most petrol stations have ~12 pumps and you only need one for 5 minutes at most so when one is not working you just go to another that's available and think nothing of it.

The problem with EVs is that they need the "pump" for at least 30 minutes if not more so you need at least six times more recharging stations as petrol pumps to handle the same throughput of cars. Then, because the time is so long, the owner is likely to have gone off to get a coffee, snack etc. and make not return exactly when the charging is done potentially making them take up even more time at the charger.

Capitalism is like democracy - it's the worst form of economic system except for every other economic system that has every been tried.

Hardly. Perhaps for some media but go to Europe and you'll see statues in towns and cities that everyone has been able to see for centuries although every so often some to get torn down and replaced due to chaing political foibles. Itinerant troupes of both actors and musicians were also common in earlier times - not much of it was high quality though...and arguably that is still the case. So no, mass artistic availability is not a new thing but the media and manner of what it looked like has certainly changed over the centuries.

I doubt anyone here does otherwise we would not be burning power on a laptop or mobile phone to post our opinions to Slashdot for others to burn more power reading. It may be less power than an LLM query but it's not none and it's not really necessary.

With talent like that in charge just wait until they confuse SMNP with SNMP and claim that the vaccine will allow your thoughts to be managed over 5G.