Do you have a group of people who are incredibly powerful, don't have to work any more yet often do, gravitating to getting involved in politics, and can pass that power to their family? Does that family power wax and wane over time as they fight with the other families in similar exulted positions?

You have an aristocracy.

Not really true for regular, bog standard black holes (accretion disk and jets are non symmetric).

Really not true for spinning black holes (the majority) that have ringularities and so poles.

Converting mainframe stuff to cloud is... nontrivial at best. If it were easy, it'd be off the mainframe and on something cheaper, because MIPS are horrifyingly expensive on every mainframe I've used. I've worked a lot on really legacy hardware (everything from a VAX cluster that's still in production to this day through Tandem nonstops to relatively recent IBM Z series stuff) and shifting loads to standard x86 hardware is never straightforward.

The hardware maintenance costs have been the least of your problems as an IT department for a very long time. You could bung off the shelf servers into colo racks and basically forget about them. All moving to the cloud has done is replace the emergency alert from your colo provider with a "the cloud is experiencing issues" message from your cloud provider (reliability and resilience may well have significantly improved, or may not depending on your cloud provider). Yes, you don't have to plan for new hardware every few years, but the cost of the that is small next to the cost of renting compute from the big cloud vendors. Even the dedicated staff planning out your hardware strategy have not gone anywhere, they've just become the staff planning cloud strategy.

Maintenance of the software has always been the biggest pain in the arse, and that is usually not particularly outsourcable.

Sadly, it doesn't magically maintain itself.

Far too many business owners seem to think they're going to make huge staff savings ifnthey move to the cloud, and are surprised when that doesn't happen.

Well, at least your bloated distended corpse will be an interesting radioactive yellow colour.

Is anyone still drinking seltzers? I thought that fad had passed. Might be wishful thinking.

"For the last time, we're not a search company. We're an adtech and creepy dystopian panopticon company that happens to do search. And some other stuff that we'll probably cancel by the end of this call."

He did a gig in San Dimas with a pretty cool keyboard solo. Only time I can think of he used any electric instruments.

So, you appear as a great big attention grabbing blob moving through the CCTV system. How useful.

If I was going to do anything dodgy I'd get someone else to walk near me in this thing confident that all security eyes are on him.

So I hear you're a racist now, Father?

Mine is people going crowd surfing in poor clothing choices, with boots and anything dangling being particular hates. If I had a quid for the number of times I've been kicked in the back of the head by someone wearing steel toecaps I'd not be rich but I could probably buy a couple of pints of terrible lager, which brings me onto...

Terrible booze sponsorship deals. I detest Tuborg. And carlsberg. Stop making them the only available beers.

Look up "knife angel" for something almost as cool as its name.

As someone bipolar from a well educated and if not from a wealthy background, certainly not from a poor background either, I'd suggest the sheer cost and pain in the arse of getting diagnosed will have an impact on that "later in life" part.

Most mental illnesses (bipolar included) get worse over time if untreated until you end up hospitalised. Then you'll be diagnosed if you're poor. If you have a bit more in the way of resources, you can get investigations into the symptoms earlier in life and treatments (possibly even "off the books" so you aren't recorded as having a mental illness).

You can manage a touch over that with ultra spicy food. I ate some wings in Manchester (they were very tasty as well as pretty warm) and about 25 mins later advanced gurgling noises were instructing me to find a pub and the toilet within with haste. The output was quite definitely the chili coating of the wings, oh my yes.

Vietnamese in the background like "what, we don't matter?"

Have you met soldiers? They're the people you give your gadgets latest "idiot-proof" design to for testing and get reports back like "scope does not automatically reject crayons hammered in".

Could do - that first shot on target is going to mess with everyone's targeting.

You really, really can fuck up shooting someone in the head. It semi regularly happens to people making suicide attempts. The results can be truly horrific, life alteringly bad, though I guess if your life expectancy is "until the squad can reload and fire again" that isn't as much of a concern. Really messy and unpleasant though.

Nope. The EU as a whole has major tensions historical and current, and always will. That doesn't stop them working together when necessary but can be a little awkward. It's like an ex you've got serious history with - kids and shared property, say. Most of the time you're civil to each other, every so often it gets bitter and horrible for a while but you always manage to grit your teeth and get a working relationship going again because it'd just be disastrous if you didn't. Britain is currently sulking in the corner though sent some apology flowers to get everyone to help out their neighbour Ukraine. It's all fun and games until it turns vicious.

You think 150 years is a long time to hold a grudge? Hahaha you sweet summer child. Ask the Irish how they feel about the potato famine, or the English about the French in general, or indeed pretty much any European country about pretty much all of their neighbours.

I'm surprised more countries haven't gone the way the UK did and passed deeply flawed legislation against everything psychoactive (with exceptions for some preexisting stuff).

Despite it theoretically outlawing stuff like incense, it doesn't seem to have been abused so far.

One way to get their stats for rape convictions up...

Depending on your reading speed, hammer through the book once with no notes, nothing. Think about what you read, you'll remember the bits that interested you more. Write them down and reread the book, making notes as concepts interact with the things you were interested in.

I don't often drive (<1000 miles a year) and I'm not having kids. That reduces my environmental impact massively.

Health-wise, it would be incredibly difficult to manage a meat free diet with my existing medical conditions (I can't eat any foods with tyramine, so for example anything containing soy, anything fermented, etc).

As for livestock welfare, I would rather accept that animal husbandry is here for the long term and push for higher standards.

Astonishingly, no, this one isn't Brexit related. The Netherlands has always been a smuggling hub.