Timwi

I'm curious: what modern features are you looking for when setting your house on fire?

It can still easily take hours if it's a whole movie you're copying and you're transcoding it into a more space-efficient codec.

You got the joke just fine. Just replace “wins” with “loses” in your own sentence.

Not trying to get personal or anything, but it sounds like you've never been an employee in this kind of organization. It is absolutely the higher-ups (line managers; not necessarily the CEO) who decide whether a train conductor is allowed to delay a train for reasons like this. Employees such as these are under constant stress and pressure to perform to expectations or risk negative evaluations, which can lead to the next raise being denied or, in some cases, dismissal. In many organizations with schedules, timetables, deadlines etc., employee evaluations often depend on coldly calculated heuristics such as proportion of on-time arrivals, not on a human evaluation like how nice you are to animals. Your delayed train just drops you in the statistics and “there was a cat on the roof” simply does not factor into those statistics. This is a direct consequence of the profit motive where “productivity” or “employee performance” is considered more important than peripheral considerations like animal well-being.

Hm, I think South Africa might be a contender. Apartheid was ended by a white prime minister and then Nelson Mandela was peacefully allowed to be elected.

No, the old demented dude is going to lose

The best kind of picking!!

Jokes aside though, where do you draw the line between calling out a misconception, and nitpicking?

I think the question of the extinction of an entire clade of animals is a reasonably significant misconception, personally.

Not sure how they're talking to one another if Lal is in the turbolift while Data is in Ten Forward

Rad.

Will it make a difference though?

I predict that Europeans will look upon the drawn-out and comedic campaign with smug disdain and self-satisfaction... and proceed to explain away their own increased support for right-wing nationalism and fascism. One day, we will all wake up and realize that we dun goofed but it's too late.

I do applaud your optimism. Wish I could have that same rosy view. Unfortunately company executives have shown time and again their true motives. You are of course correct that they are not robots; however, studies do show that they are disproportionately psychopathic compared to the general population, and the behavior of companies often reflects that quite visibly. Profits and the interests of stakeholders always take priority over basic human decency. It would definitely be refreshing if that is not the case here.

One, it's not the train drivers calling the shots here; the train drivers (like all employees) are stringently controlled by management.

Two, it's not “hate” to observe that companies just don't care about ethics and well-being. I thought most of us agreed on this, even the company executives themselves: when ethics conflict with profits, profits are always the higher priority.

Three, this isn't what “black and white” means.