Yes and no… with a real (not digital) piano it actually does matter how you hit the keys. If you don’t press quickly enough the hammer won’t have enough momentum to actually strike the strings.

I believe this effect is more pronounced with a grand piano, but the same thing can happen with an upright piano too.

EDIT: It’s not as finicky as with other instruments, though, so your core point is still a good one… just with caveats.

Technically, “bail” is a word… it’s not the right word but it is a word.

That was my thought exactly.

That guy is younger than me but looks old enough to be my dad.

This is what they have always been.

This is so backwards and crooked.

The government is supposed to solicit bids for specific projects and then choose the vendor/supplier with the best bid.

Instead, they’re starting with a pre-chosen supplier with a pre-existing set of products and then having them go on a fishing expedition looking for government projects they can create to have an excuse to buy those products.

This is completely reversing the proper order of doing things and in the process eliminating all checks on corruption and waste.

Entering and escaping are two wildly different things.

It can enter, but not escape.

Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.

I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.

His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”

If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.

“Great” meaning “very large”, not “very good”.

Gatsby turned himself into a larger than life character.

That is what I think the title is trying to get at.

Yes and No.

Yes, everything increases in difficulty but the increases in difficulty are asymmetrical.

The difficulty of reversing a computation (e.g. reversing a hash or decrypting an encrypted message) grows much faster than just performing the computation (e.g. hashing a message or encrypting one).

That’s the basis for encryption to begin with.

It’s also why increasing the size of the problem (e.g. the size of the hash or the size of a private key) makes it harder to crack.

The threat posed by quantum computing is that it might be feasible to reverse much larger computations than it previously was. The caveat on that, however is that they have a hard limit of what problems they can solve based on the number of qbits they have.

So for example, let’s say you use RSA for encryption and someone builds a 1024 qbit quantum computer. All you have to do is increase your key size so that it would require 1025 qbits to crack, and then that quantum computer wouldn’t provide an attacker any benefit at all.

(Of course, they’d still be able to read your old messages, but that’s also a fundamental principle of cryptography; it only protects you for a period of time)

It’s just a matter of preference, not quality.

It’s obvious what I meant from that is the opposite of how you are construing it. You need to actually read the entire comment.

OK, I’ll bite; do we need a concept for a “dual they” or a “ternary they”.

If so, then fine “singular they” deserves to be called out too. If not, then treating “singular they” as a special case just gives bigots space to claim that it’s some sort of deviation from the norm which then gives them cover for falsely claiming that usage is incorrect.

I think you misunderstood what I’m saying.

I’m not saying you can’t use “they” when referring to a single person; I’m saying that when you do that you haven’t deviated from the simple usage in any way shape or form.

I’m saying there’s no “singular they” because using “they” in that context is just the same as any other usage of “they”. It isn’t any sort of exception to the base rules and so doesn’t require any special treatment.

My hot take: there’s no such thing as “singular they” because you don’t need a special case for using plural pronouns with a single person; the basic usage already allows that. The plural pronouns refer to a group of people of any size. That includes a group of size 1.

A group of only one person is still a group of people.

That’s why it has always been correct to refer to a single person using the plural pronouns; you’re not directly referring to the person but rather to the group consisting of just that one person.

The reason this confuses people isn’t because the usage is incorrect but rather because what they were taught is incorrect.

People are taught that plural pronouns only refer to more than one person and that has always been wrong.

To see why that’s wrong, consider what happens when the size of the group is neither exactly one or more than one. For example if the group is actually empty or if you don’t know how many people are in it.

In both those cases you need to use the plural pronoun.

If the plural pronouns are a valid choice for both a group of size zero and a group of size two, then it would be ridiculous to argue that they are not a valid choice for a group of size one.

That’s not good enough because the vast majority of their wealth will never be spent. It will just be used to accumulate more wealth.

That’s why all of these billionaires have real tax rates in the low single digits (or less). Even with opulent spending habits they keep most of their gains unrealized, so they are never taxed.

Note that the inflation adjusted average rate of return on the stock market over the long run is ~8% (https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1980)

That means a 2% wealth tax on billionaires would not make them lose a single penny. Instead, it would just slow down the rate at which their wealth grows (while still growing exponentially).

The problem is that you’re eating too many bears. You need more variety in your diet.

Your compost bin should be mostly green vegetables, followed by smaller amounts of fruits and grains. Keep the bears as just an occasional treat.

If you assume 7% annual rate of return on that $230 billion, then 3 months “salary” would be a little over $4 billion.

That being said, as others have pointed out, the “3 months salary” guideline is just propaganda from DeBeers and no one in their right mind should ever spend that type of money on a piece of jewelry.