...at least as well as when people said no to customer support out of India. That's why they don't do that any more.

There was a time when businesses expected their employees to have basic skills for the job, and weren't afraid (or too cheap) to supplement their knowledge with in-house training, specific to the needs of the business. Now job seekers have to match the requirements of the job precisely, regardless of how unrealistic that is. The employee added value to the business, and the business added value to the employee. Employee loyalty was higher as a result, as the employee recognized that working where they were was providing useful experience (note: I recognize this was not universal.)

If you expect your workers to know everything they need to excel in the job without any training, you've hired people who can easily move somewhere else without thinking twice. If you provide nothing but a paycheck, don't expect long-term employees.

...were made of plastic?

I walk around my neighborhood daily, and I walk in the roads. I almost unconsciously move close to the side when I hear a car coming behind me, and it's typically several seconds before they pass by. What I hear is tire contact with the road. We have an almost unnaturally high number of Tesla owners in the area, and I hear no detectable difference between them and ICE vehicles. Granted, when a tractor trailer or garbage truck is coming, I hear it from much farther away, but those are diesel engines for the most part. Modern ICE engines aren't nearly as loud as they were decades ago. More than once when being passed by a car I've had to look at the brand or whether it had an EV plate on the back to determine whether it was an EV or not. ICE cars have gotten that quiet.

Granted, when starting up, or backing out of a parking space, EVs are damn quiet. But most of the time when a car drives by on an actual road, tire noise dominates. Where did they get the data to support the claim that ICE cars are sufficiently noisier to be a factor in 2 to 1 pedestrian collisions?

What could possibly go wrong?

Tommy Lee? Is that you?

It never ceases to amaze me how many "experts":
- think they can accurately predict the future
- think that the more intelligent a being gets, the more violent it is. Projecting much?

I presume that each display would be blurred in a manner synchronized to the glasses. Otherwise if the guy beside me has the same glasses, the privacy is removed.

I'm surprised no one else seems to do this. When watching a show, I'll see an actor, often in a minor role, and realize I've seen them in something else. I'll search for the show and look up the cast, then track down the character and see what else the actor has been in. Sometimes I'll do the same thing when I recognize a particular directing style, and I'll look up the director. It just connects things for me. I guess this is multitasking in a sense, but it's related to what I'm watching. I find it increases the depth of the experience.

Great cover story.

“Sometimes, the contributor himself discovers the flaw.” Sometimes, there is no flaw. Which do you think this is?

We seem to be approaching a time when it would at least be possible to have an app on your phone that would allow you to transfer money (in the form of bitcoins or other blockchain-based currency) directly to your phone. There it would serve as a wallet, allowing you to make direct purchases. I wonder if such a plan is being considered?

Just out of curiousity, where did you find an APM 2.6 flight controller with GPS module for $50?

That's a very of odd definition of fluency. I could be unfamiliar with the concept of intransitive verbs or genitive case and still be considered fluent in my native language. Not knowing whether to use 'there', 'their' or 'they're' in a given sentence has little to do with your knowledge of grammar and basic linguistics. If you have to analyze a sentence grammatically to correctly use 'their' in "She went to their house", you almost certainly are not a native speaker of English.

I suspect that many people develop a greater understanding of their own language, and languages in general, by studying a second language. I still remember the "Ah ha!" moment I had in junior high school when it dawned upon me the doing word for word translation of English to French was almost never going to produce the correct result. My world grew much larger that day.

But my fluency in English was unchanged.