It’s self-evident

First came the dinosaurs…

It’s “de lementations”… Gotta say it right!

Because I said so.

Population density is definitely part of it - the only places where it would make sense is on the coasts, and that land is already in use.

If you could get past the land-use issues, where would they run? Boston to Miami is 1500 miles. If a train was built there (again, assuming land use wasn’t an issue) - where would it stop? How long could it maintain those speeds?

Anywhere it didn’t stop, why would those towns/cities/states support their tax dollars going to such an investment?

Then there’s the Final Mile problem - how would people get around once they got somewhere?

I’ve ridden trains in Europe - they work there for multiple reasons. One is density, but there’s also that Europe infrastructure either didn’t exist prior to WWII or what did exist got heavily damaged. They had to invest in trains, country by country post-WWII. It wasn’t like there was a Grand Europe Train Plan as many countries were still antagonistic at the time, and the train system incompatibilities that still exist reflect this.

What Europe has today is a result of a long, slow development of infrastructure and political relationships.

There’s lots more involved, but even these things show how different Europe is from the US - it takes sixteen OECD countries to equal the landmass of the US, divided between 50 states.

Imagine trying to build the Western Europe rail system(s) today if it didn’t exist, and much of that land was currently in use for manufacturing or farming.

Apples and oranges.

Check for Tupperware lids.

Socks somehow magically become lids when lost in the dryer… Or so I’ve heard.

The US doesn’t have pubs like Britain - ours are mostly bars, or food places with beer, or beer places with food. I’ve known only a few places that are similar to British pubs where it’s more like your local place for food and beer, where you’ll see families and kids - though most chains are geared towards families too, it’s not the same atmosphere as your “local” - at my local many people know each other, it’s that “local”.

Sports bars will have screens everywhere showing current games. Can be raucus during football season, but soccer is growing in the US.

Lots of places are simply the family name of the owner “Johnson’s Tavern” kind of thing, some have simple names “The Pub” or mildy clever.

Chains have a certain motif - see BW3. And while not really pub-like, you could take kids there for meals.

Take a look in Google Maps - pick a US city and search for “bar” or “pub”.

Yea, seems like the distinction is a scientific one, not a language one.

Still interesting, I had no idea.

The problem with pickles on anything is the flavor overwhelms other flavors.

Pickles do NOT belong on a burger.

Ooh, nutmeg? Ok, gotta try that!

Wow, and I don’t even like fish and that sounds incredible.

What is this “Cheescake haters” of which you speak?

Bechamel is the shit for lasagna.

Once you make it that way, you can never go back.

There’s several Mahna Mahna skits on YouTube (one with Sandra Bullock). They’re all brilliantly funny (of course I’m a fan of the one from The Muppet Show).

Also, (I’m sure you know) Cake did a cover of the song around 2000 that’s also excellent.

Try using one on Mint. A mouse that’s been around longer than Mint has been an idea doesn’t work at all until you search and discover a third party app to enable it.

ANY Logitech mouse works with generic windows drivers since 2000. Under Mint they don’t work at all without the third party app.

Or Libre Office. None even compare to MS Office, by a long shot.

They’re fine for the average person, but any business user is going to run into major walls.

We need to be brutally honest about what works, and the limitations. I’m not going to recommend a business use any form of OSS office.

Now Aunt Sally? For sure, because she’s not doing anything complex.

What’s more important is redundancy, as all drives fail.

What’s your replication/redundancy/backup plan look like? That’s more important than “which drive” (other than SMR/CMR), as even enterprise drives fail.

I’ve had consumer drives running 24/7 for 10 years.

Drives are a lot more robust than most people think, but they still fail at seemingly random times, so having backup is crucial.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my local data replication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 3 local copies.

All of these drives are 5+ years old except the primary data drive which is 2.

Turns out it didn’t work at the time.

Power management on a laptop.

Use a 10 year old Logitech mouse out of the box.

Mint’s stupid annoying print monitor.

Dealing with cached samba creds though the box to save creds wasn’t checked.

The lack of real competitors to office. And no, Open Office doesn’t come close to replacing MS office.

There’s lots that’s annoying.

But Linux is excellent as my servers, as my VM host, as my dedicated systems. Still has it’s issues, but works great for always-on systems with very specific tasks.

Linux and Windows serve different purposes.