It's not like the writing in the original Star Wars film was all that great. Guiness's dialogue was cheesy enough that he begged Lucas to kill his character off (and Lucas, to his credit, found a way to get Guiness into two more films).

But if I were making fun of the third trilogy at this point, it wouldn't be so much about the bad writing (though in general it's bloody awful), but the almost complete lack of any kind of plotting.

The Producers? Young Frankenstein? Blazing Saddles? High Anxiety?

I'm not sure there's a funnier scene in any movie ever made in history than Springtime For Hitler (the reaction shots in that scene are the best I've ever seen in a movie), with the possible exception of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster doing a song and dance number to Putting On The Ritz.

For me, at least, Mel Brooks is probably the pinnacle of comedy filmmaking.

The only one I can think of is John Candy (which is a big hole), but Rick Moranis has been retired for many years now, and he's rebuffed most attempts to get him in front of a camera again.

And that underlies the reality of WYSIWYG, that there are limits to what any word processor can actually do to guarantee formatting and fixed placement. It's why Tex/LaTeX and PDF were invented to begin with, and why there's really a point at which trying to force any WYSIWYG word processor to behave that way is going to lead to fragile misbehaving documents that fall apart. As a very good example, the use of tables and frames in documents (both docx and odt) to guarantee the positioning of various elements creates can quickly lead to documents so fragile that any attempt to update styles causes havoc.

I'm working my way through some biology and general science courses right now in my spare time, and I'm seriously looking at re-familiarizing myself with LaTeX to produce reports and papers, because the amount of work I've had to do to get diagrams and images to stay put, and to break my cardinal rule relying solely on styles for formatting makes me think the kind of work I'm doing is much more in typesetting than in word processing.

"Don't Be Evil" - Google 30 years ago

"Be Evil" - Google now.

Selecting office software so that you aren't held digitally hostage to a government that is, say, threatening to annex a significant proportion of your territory, is both eminently defensible for operational, security AND political reasons.

Providing you have control of your DNS, it means using DKIM , SPF or similar measures. I've been self-hosting email for three decades, and it ain't complicated.

Bullshit web two-oh and AI jobs.

Of course they need proficiency in slop generators.

"Likes long romantic walks in the park, binging Buffy the Vampire, pasta, and overthrowing the US government by lynching the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House."

I've been using it pretty much full-time for the last couple of years, and while there's some compatibility oddities, all in all it works and works pretty well, to the point that I find manipulating styles far more coherent than in Word. It's actually opened some docx files that were just outright screwy when I opened them in Word, so I'm baffled at times how such documents get produced.

It's going into the oceans, just so the combination of pH fuckery and increased warming turns the world's oceans into an tepid acidic brine.

Actually, the warning was first sounded the warning was Svante Arrhenius in 1896, when he determined the UV absorption properties of CO2 and came to the pretty fucking obvious conclusion, based on chemistry and thermodynamics, that if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you will inevitably, as a basic function of physics, increase energy absorption.

So we can add chemistry to the list of things you're deliberately ignorant of.

Fuck, is stupidity and willful ignorance now viewed as a virtue? Or is it just sociopathy?

Existing energy infrastructure already pays for "capacity" thats not being used, to older systems like natural gas and coal. This is necessary because energy production MUST match energy demand or someone's lights are going out. When an energy source (power plant) on a reasonably big grid suddenly goes offline ("trips out"), the grid can tolerate it but drops dangerously low. Other plants that are only putting out say 70% of their capacity quickly spin up to max production to cover this shortfall and bring the grid back up to a safe level. (usually in terms of grid frequency)

These plants don't want to just sit at 70% production most of the time, that costs money to have capacity and not be SELLING it. So the grid pays them a percentage of the going rate for their unused capacity, because the grid MUST have some reserve in case of the previously described situation. They're being paid to have (but not USE) capacity. ie be a "safety net". If we weren't willing to pay them something for this unused reserve, then they'd have no reason to invest in having it in the first place.

Renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) are in similar situations. When its windy and sunny, they produce plentiful, cheap energy. During those times, non-renewable plants can shut down or throttle back, saving consumers a lot of money with their cheap energy. But sometimes production exceeds demand. It depends on the time of day or day of week. (and even time of year) Solar and wind aren't just "on" or "off". Once you get enough of them online, there's going to be periods of time where more energy can be produced than can be used. (and storing energy is hard - we're just getting going with grid batteries) But if you want all that delicious cheap power during the peak use, you've got to give them something for the times they have more power than you need.

So there's nothing new about "paying for capacity", we've been doing that for decades. It IS slightly more annoying though, since this is "leaving money on the table" since that capacity is essentially "free" power not being used. (no coal or natural gas required) That's just the thing with most renewables, they produce power on their own schedule, not when it's convenient for us. We need to improve our energy storage infrastructure. I'm not sure why this is only "becoming obvious" now, it's been a known issue for decades. Maybe it's just been a matter of waiting for better energy storage technology, or maybe it's a "we'll bring up this added expense after we're done paying for the wind and solar plants"?

All this means that just like the hydrocarbon plants, renewable plants need to get paid something for the time they spend not being fully used, because other times we NEED them to run at full capacity.

This isn't a problem that's going to go away on its own. We've got A LOT more ways to make power than to store it. Batteries are probably the best solution in the short term, but they're relatively large for what they store and are expensive. Pumped storage (dams) are the grand-daddies of energy storage, but have very specific geographic requirements. Molten salt is often considered (especially for solar) but has technical challenges and limited capacity. We really haven't found anything so far that works better than batteries, and it's not for lack of trying. So for now you can expect we're just going to have to keep paying energy plants (of all types) for unused capacity.

is to keep quiet about it.