I'm in my better shape in the last 30 years, maybe in my entire life. The most surprising thing is how simple, cheap and little time consuming it's been. Compared to gym subscription, the swimming pool, rubber mat and couple of kettlebells are spare change.

TBH, gyms have lower prices now over here. You can find a decent subscription for 30€/month, half of what used to be. But they're overcrowded. For me the main factor is time. I end up wasting a lot of time waiting for a free spot or shower, changing clothes, etc. Training at home is much simpler. Combined with a couple of days out swimming or running, a better solution, for me anyway.

Edit: between my previous comment and this one, I've completed my daily home routine :-)

I would add a little nuance. One thing is your job isn't advancing Humanity Progress in a very direct and unambiguous way, say you work for some Very Important Organization that Does Good All the Time. Another thing is your job is totally useless or even harmful to society.

Maybe most of us are in between?

I've worked at dysfunctional companies that made me personally unhappy (busyworks, company politics, waste, bad bosses, bad teammates...) that somehow made some good things in the grand scheme of things, other that made me very happy with more neutral results.

Someone has to do mundane things, even to raise children and give a chance to the next generation to improve the world.

I don't believe putting too much thought in purpose is healthy.

It's completely functional and not ugly. Again, you can choose real wood or some of those composites. Also maybe changing screw system (the original setup is like the one showed in TFA) you could make it nicer. I bet there are tons of designs like that out there.

I disagree. That's an executive power position for an entity that lacks sovereignty. Giving it the legitimacy of direct vote is highly problematic.

Start by giving more power to parliament.

It only works when you have a path to not only listen but also improve the situation. If 10% of calls or emails are related to X and you can solve X, then you can reduce 10% of calls or emails. Otherwise is just fixing problems manually but not going to the root cause.

Thinking of changing this distribution is highly disturbing because of time wasted, much more limited options and huge price differences. Of course YMMV depending on location, Madrid here... the world the article describes is totally alien to me.

I'd choose XP instead. People disputing the performance maybe should consider the hardware at that time. Real problem with 9x was low-level stability. Juggling with compatibility was difficult, file access comes to mind, it was a kludge. It was possible but hard to maintain the system in a sensible state.

XP was the first to bring NT architecture to desktop. It was a huge success. Many despised the colorful UI, I actually like it. They started moving things around, but annoyances were fixable. Microsoft has adopted more of a "my way or the highway" attitude since.

It also had many multimedia features for burning CDs, editing videos, etc..

(FWIW I mostly switched to Linux after XP so this isn’t nostalgia).

2000 is, by far, my favourite Windows OS.

NT has always had both server and workstation versions.

That was Win2k (DirectX). XP was full of bugs and holes before SP2.

Not sure if it covers exactly the same terrain, but perusing the article, it seems to be the case, with a single instance being the degenerate case.

I've made something like this in the past. And I did it exactly because `List<Foo>` was too expensive and slow.

    class FooSOA extends Collection<Foo> {
      double x[];
      double y[];
      double z[];
      
      Foo get(int index) { return new Foo(index); }
      
      record Foo(int index) {
        double x() { return FooSOA.this.x[i]; }
        double y() { return FooSOA.this.y[i]; }
        double z() { return FooSOA.this.z[i]; }
      }
    }