Sordid
Because that’s what intelligence is. There’s a very funny video floating around of a squirrel repeatedly trying to bury an acorn in a dog’s fur and completely failing to understand why it’s not working. Now sure, a squirrel is not the smartest animal in the world, but it does have some intelligence, and yet there it is just mindlessly reproducing a pattern in the wrong context. Maybe you’re thinking that humans aren’t like that, that we make decisions by actually thinking through our actions and their consequences instead of just repeating learned patterns. I put it to you that if that were the case, we wouldn’t still be dealing with the same problems that have been plaguing us for millennia.
I have an HP LaserJet 6L from like 1997. I recently managed to get it working reliably after decades of struggle and frustration that drove me to tears on occasion. So yes, as far as I can tell they’ve always been this bad.
Note the pattern: a willingness to ignore the details of what could go wrong, YOLO it and just test it out, and the assumption that if nothing goes wrong when you do that, it means that everything is fine and nothing else could possibly go wrong.
Did anyone else reading this bit immediately think of that other rich idiot that died in his ridiculous submarine?
Supply and demand. There are many workers and relatively few employers, so it’s much easier to find a cheaper worker than a more generous employer.
Technically yes, but in practice any gains are going to be counteracted if not outweighed by the electromagnetic noise from the fan’s motor. To avoid that interference and see any real improvement in your signal strength, you’d have to either use a fan with a shielded motor (the last such model went out of production in 1953, so good luck finding one) or a fan driven by an alternative power source such as a water wheel.