Great!

invited people to follow it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube

Sigh …

In a lot of ways, our current way of living has made us more resilient. Malnoutrition, frequent serious diseases and a high amount of environmental and food-borne poisons (soot, heavy metals, the snake oil that often passed as “medicine” back then) don’t make people stronger, they make them weaker. Our civilization diseases like obesity and allergies are their own issue, but they still beat dying from syphilis or influenza at age 30.

As far as propaganda goes, they had plenty of propaganda as well - it might have been cruder than today, but they also had less access to dissenting voices.

The health trend is definitely pointing downward in places like the USA, though. Let’s hope most of Europe can avoid the worst of that …

Your sister sounds awful. What’s your question, though?

Examples? The USA is in North America, not Sweden.

The global population doesn’t really matter for this, homicidal fanatical christians or jews aren’t known to travel halfway across the globe to murder people who insult their religion. They’re quite rare in Sweden, and with the Swedes’ penchant for extreme metal and general lack of religiousness, there are a lot of potential targets in that country - shouldn’t be that hard to find someone who burned a bible on stage in Sweden in the last 10 years.

Islam fanatics’ violent response is probably part of their point, it’s going to be a bit hard to prove that point by burning a bible or torah in Sweden. I agree that they were counterproductive, though.

First we’d need to define “internet” for this purpose. Does classic mail qualify? It certainly can carry more data than pidgeons, and if you can still have computers you might get relatively close to the 90s internet by sending data by mail (especially when you’re communicating with people within a day’s travel, rather than on the other side of the earth).

Other than that, you can do a lot with visual signals. In the Discworld novels, they developed a kind of optical telegraph network with a technique that is somewhat similar to ship flag communication, and optical telegraphy exists/existed in the real world, too, though it never got much traction. If you have computers, you might be able to get pretty alright data rates with something like that.

Mailbox.org already provides 3 different aliases even at the lowest tier, but I’ve already filled those with non-temporary aliases and I don’t really want to pay three times as much just for throwaway-aliases …

While we’re at it, anyone got a good site for temporary addresses that are basically used exactly once? And ideally don’t immediately get flagged as spam addresses.

I’ve been there for several years as well. Works great, and I get pretty much no spam.

At one point they offered “envelope with money sent via postal service” as an anonymous payment option, IDK if they still do that.

The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. I’d assume that books were still more expensive back then relative to people’s incomes, and they were also the only way to access that content while today you have e-books, PDFs, YouTube-videos or even websites, which are often available for free (not necessarily legally).

On top of that, many literary devices are unrealistic or exaggerated.

Eyeglasses are an interesting case, because there seems to be a causal relationship between being nearsighted and staying inside a lot as a kid, which used to be mostly people who read books or just spend a lot of time on school work. That’s less relevant now that kids stay inside to watch TV, play videogames or scroll on their phone, though. Also, many people who need glasses either didn’t have the means (e.g. no access to eye doctors, no money for glasses; probably not as important nowadays in most wealthy countries) or choose to not wear them due to vanity, and both of those reasons are kind of orthogonal to adjectives like “intelligent” or “intellectual”.

How many people actually collect books for show? That seems uncommon and it should usually be fairly easy to tell for people who are somewhat well-read.

The thing with chess is that it’s not fun if you aren’t any good at it, and the difference between people who are somewhat good and those who aren’t is pretty big. You can get there with pure perseverance (same with most other things that gets listed here, probably), but most people tend to pick hobbies that they don’t have a hard time with.

MS Word is essentially a monopoly, but that doesn’t mean that every detail of its features is worth copying - quite the opposite, actually. And again, why do you even want to automatically capitalize the first word after a line break that is not a proper sentence stop?

Or why LibreOffice is so stubborn on keeping the menu bar default instead of the ribbon-bar

AFAIK many users, especially those used to the old UI, dislike the ribbon design.

I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.

Why would you even want that? It’s dangerous to change written text automatically, a lot of people will be annoyed because they wanted exactly what they wrote. Capitalizing after . or ? makes enough sense to automate it because of grammar rules, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule for capitalization after line breaks.