Unless you want to abolish timezones entirely, which would simplify clocks but complicate a whole lot else in society, you're going to need leap-something. Would leap minutes or hours really be much better? The idea that doing things less often causes more problems is a reasonable one.
In the 56 years since UTC was established, there have only been 37 leap seconds. At that rate it would take more than 5400 years before it would affect solar noon more than DST does. I'm more than okay kicking the can that far down the road in the name of avoiding all the ridiculous solutions that are needed to accommodate leap seconds. We've endured these headaches to potentially solve a problem for people who might not even still be using UTC.
Compare that to removing the leap day, where the start of seasons would be noticeably affected within just a few decades. Hundreds of years ago, a pretty insignificant headache was invented which is providing constant payoffs.
We need to do "leap hours" anyway--just today they changed to daylight saving time in the U.S.! And time zones are also adjusted every now and then, which also amounts to a one-hour change in the affected regions. Even if we didn't have continous practice with leap seconds, I think we could definitely include an extra one-hour shift for earth rotation reasons along with all the other ones.
Except for the gigantic Apple logo plastered all over the lid?
Don't get me wrong, I like Apple design (and I adore early Braun), but subtly branded it is not. You're supposed to recognize it instantly at any distance. Apple knows their brand value.
> They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.
Perhaps at the start of the industrial revolution, but not during most of it. Which is says a lot about how pricing shifts and finds equilibrium, not only for raw materials but also for human workers.
> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance
Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming?
Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learning on the job is exactly what people have done, always. Is it a good idea? Well, it is always better to have a professional at hand to help and do away with the beginner's problems from the beginning, but it's absolutely doable.
Programming is not a black art, but something anyone with a bit of logical thinking can pick up from a book. Hence the "Learn yourself Java in 48 hours" books the were so popular for a while.
I think your example highlights one of the places where even the current level of AI can be helpful and enabling, rather than a competitor for jobs, which is helping a person learn something new. Not always in all subjects (do NOT learn to fly a plane solely by AI, I say this as a flight instructor), and the person has to be careful to verify accuracy, but still it can be amazingly useful, and endlessly patient.
But the LLMs are quite the opposite: People should not bother with developing software, but ask the big LLM providers to do it for them instead.
In all aspects of the term, software is getting less democratized. But that is in line with a decades long trend, where computers used to ship with BASIC installed and now you need a specialized IDE tool which has a learning curve.
It used to be that you could dabble with HTML but now you need to learn a few javascript frameworks just to modify existing code. You used to start a piece of software by running it, modern server software is a fragile jigsaw that is delivered to production in the cloud. The list goes on. The future we are being promised is that you ask your paid-for development agent to make the necessary changes you require and deliver in to production in the cloud.
Which is fine, in a way, but it shifts power to the professionals. Just as Google, Apple or Microsoft owns your identity and your data, and you pay to use it, they can also decide to deny access for any reason. They are private companies, after all, and it is their data.
One of the books you mention is about an adventure involving a treasure. The other book is about catastrophic flooding in the first book and a comet that threatens the planet in the second, if I recall correctly. Which one did you think was about saving the world and which one was about whimsical non-issues again?
Of course, you don't have to like the books. They are both children's books. But of all the possible critique this one was particularly strange.
If that was true, it would be like that. But it isn't, so it's not. EU is wide, and does not always speak with one voice, but it has a clear history of doing their best to avoid funding the proto-democratic forces in the region. Any support of religious extremists is considered a failure and acted upon.
No one can do everything but everyone can do something.
If you are in law enforcement, do not follow clearly unlawful orders. The president is not your boss. This is a functioning democracy.
If you are a librarian, do not hide otherwise lawful books that the current administration dislikes.
If you are in logistics, do not collect obviously unconstitutional taxes. Make sure to challenge them in courts first.
If you are in a university, stick to what is true and scientifically sound. Do not hide inconvenient truths.
If you are a baker, do not refuse to make a rainbow colored cake just because you are worried what the people wearing metaphorically brown shirts might say.
The list goes on and on and on. This has been well documented throughout history. Fascism needs a seed to thrive, and that seed is people complying in advance. Not with actual laws, but with the idea what direction the law will take, just because it's easier for them. People not helping other people because immigration is not in vogue right now and who knows what the neighbors might say.
You can't make this up.
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