The problem is everyone expects Calc to be Excel, including full compatibility with reading and writing of Excel’s file formats. As Excel is a constantly moving target, following that path means you’ll forever be a second-rate Excel that’ll never quite be fully compatible.

I find Calc to be a fine spreadsheet program myself, though I’m hardly a power user. If you want to use Excel, then just go use Excel.

That’s exactly how it works, well other than me having the dates off as the Boomers weren’t even born when Social Security was enacted by FDR. When Social Security was enacted, retirees started receiving benefits even if they never paid into the system, which was paid for by the current workers who were paying into the system. It’s been like that ever since. Social Security is also not a pension.

You are correct that for most people would be better off investing their Social Security taxes into a hedge fund but workers don’t really have a choice in the matter.

That’s not how Social Security works. The money the Boomers paid into the system went to paying benefits for the previous generations. The benefits the Boomers (at least the ones that have retired) are getting now is being paid by the workers in the younger generations. While it’s true the program has run a surplus, if the young taxpayers stopped paying into the system that surplus wouldn’t last very long.

Not that I disagree, but 90 would be silent generation.

If I really wanted something like that, I’d just buy a dumb fridge and rig up a camera inside of it.

To me, Fahrenheit is a lot like inches and feet for carpentry. As in it’s fine for things like describing the weather and setting my house’s thermostat. It mostly falls apart for must other things, though it’s still okay for cooking and baking. From a scientific perspective, any temperature scale that isn’t zero at absolute zero is nonsense, so it’s pretty much Kelvin or bust.

I’d assume that if we are ever communicating with aliens and trying to figure out each other’s way of expressing numbers and doing math, dimensionless constants like pi, Euler’s number (e), the fine structure constant, etc. will be important first steps. As you say, our units of measure are purely human inventions. But the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is the same no matter what units you use to make the measurement.

I don’t think it’s incompetence, exactly. If you’re not going to pay for Photoshop (Lightroom, Audition, etc…), Adobe would rather you use a pirated Photoshop as opposed to learning something else. Because even a pirated version helps them keep their stranglehold on the market.

It’s the same reason Microsoft doesn’t really crack down on pirated versions of Windows.