While getting lunch at an Amazon tech day a couple of years ago, I overheard somebody talking about how easy it was to place somebody with a clearance and AWS certifications. Now, this was Washington, DC, but I doubt it's the only area where that's true.
For about ten years I worked for composition shops, and eventually for a maker of typesetting systems. Through blurred eyes I could tell TNR from Baskerville from Garamond from Janson from ... Some of these fonts I can still identify.
But I have no idea what font was used in the book I just finished reading or the book that I'm returning to later today. My main question about a font is whether I can read it with old eyes.
I do agree that designers should care about these matters. I'll add that for some portion of the reading public TNR more likely means The New Republic than Times New Roman.
[Five minutes later: the book just finished, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, appears to be set in Palatino, never a favorite of mine. The one I'm returning to, I'm not sure.]
My stepmother taught in eastern Africa at the beginning of the 1960s. When she was getting ready to return to the US, her students collectively expressed their concern at her returning to such a dangerous place.
Am I a terrorist or have I ever sympathized with them? Does singing old IRA songs after a couple of pints of Guinness count? If so, it's well I'm not filling out a DS-160.
In A Sinking Island, the critic Hugh Kenner makes the case that the British Copyright Act of 1911, extending copyright from 42 years after first publication, or seven years after the author's death, to fifty years after the author's death, had an arresting effect on public perception of what literature was:
By inhibiting cheap reprints of everything published after 1870, the Act helped reinforce a genteel impression that English literature itself had stopped about that date...
Did Corregidor have MANPADs? Antiship missiles? Antiaircraft missiles?
Corregidor had improper stocks of supplies it appears.
They were using horse cavalry?
Did Corregidor have its own defensive air wing?
Did Corregidor have 150,000 defenders? Or just 15,000?
The Japanese were a battle-tested navy and army and airforce at that point, after dozens of imperial conflicts as well as the Sino-Russian wars.
The Chinese military are almost entirely untested, and likely riddled with corruption. A Chinese invasion will almost certainly involve a plan that looks like it's what an invasion plan looks like when reported to the CCP, but it won't be an experience-informed battle plan, nor am I sure the Chinese military will be able to handle the "battle plans are great until you get punched in the face".
Is it a sure defense for Taiwan against a full force invasion? Of course not. Is it a guaranteed victory for mainland China? Of course not.
The political risk to Xi is high. Even with a successful invasion, and an embargo/blockade, it could politically topple the CCP. A failed invasion would likely involve a highly destabilizing embargo/blockage that could similarly topple the CCP.
About a dozen years ago, I noticed that the young all seemed to know Python, and did not seem to know Perl. Given that they would be maintaining such code as I wrote and was worth keeping around, I moved to writing in Python. Now when I write Perl, I do silly things like forget semicolons.
Perl can be very well written. I deeply regret not encountering Perl Best Practices when it came out.
I'm trying to think back to the last time I saw a shopping cart in a movie. I think it was probably Terms of Endearment, but I don't think that the cart made it outside.
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