I do. Currently I use it mostly for personal stuff as part of my time spent on production support. Importing data from queries, exporting spreadsheets, reading complex json data and extracting needed info, etc. In the past when I was on DevOps used it with Jenkins and various automation processes, and I’ve used it as a developer to create test environments and test data.

As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.

But then it also says after that Originally Published: November 18, 2020 Who knows?

Great article, and shocking to see the prices mentioned and this at the end: This article originally ran in the February 1997 issue of Reader’s Digest.

That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.

First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.

Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.

Why switch? It’s not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it’s intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that’s why we make the computers do the tricky work.

My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.

If their smaller new house is worth less than their original the property tax bill will be less. This is one of the incentives to downsizing.

The have their new property paid for and also have a much smaller property tax bill and lower maintenance costs. There’s still plenty of incentive to downsize.

Paying taxes on profit might hurt a little, but it’s a good problem to have.

Such a sad story. We should start a Go Fund Me!

Even as a tax right-off it costs money. For instance about ⅓ of my income goes to taxes, so every $100 I donate to charity results in me saving about $33 in taxes. So a $100 donation only costs me about $67. It still costs me, and it still costs companies real money who make charitable contributions. They should be recognized for it.

The 7 Countries Study, upon which the hypothesis that saturated fat causes heart disease was based, has been proven to be highly flawed and misleading. Ancel Keys intentionally left out the data from many countries that contradicted his claims. During the last 20 years many studies have come out showing there’s no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease, and pretty weak association between high LDL and heart disease. Obesity, insulin resistance and systemic inflamation are much higher predictors. And there’s a lot of information to suggest seed oils - canola and soy bean oils especially - are quite harmful.

I’m excited to see this only for the DeSantis melt-down.

That’s not steroids… that guy literally injected oil - synthol - into his muscles to make them look ridiculously large. It’s not performance enhancing in any way.

A war can also solve another problem China has: too many men and too few women. War deaths will not only reduce the man to female ratio, but as in past Chinese wars soldiers will bring home war “brides”.

They don’t really avoid taxes now. Anything tip charged to a card gets taxed. Cash tips might not be claimed but that’s very little for most tipped workers. Additionally tipped workers paid below minimum wage make the employer responsible for making up the difference if they don’t have enough tips reported to avg min wage. That means the employers are very motivated to ensure their employee tips are reported.

Also, even years ago when cash tips were a significant % of tips, being predominantly low wage workers those employees would get virtually all their taxes back after filing a return as well. They wouldn’t get SS taxes back but otherwise for most not reporting tips didn’t amount to a lot of missed taxes. There were some exceptions where people made decent money - maybe high end restaurants and salons - but today with little cash use there aren’t many taxes missed.

You didn’t read the article did you?

They cite multiple factors but the largest seems to be a change to the way Medicare rebates are paid. Starting Jan 1st, this move allows them to pay less rebates to Medicare based on how they’re calculated and will save the companies millions. So yes… it’s actually directly based on the Biden administration changes.

Just because you can injest something safely doesn’t mean it’s safe to inject. Your stomach acid and enzymes kill many pathogens in low concentrations so the fact that you can’t safely inject tap water doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on the water.

Additionally I’m sure the water facet used to get the tap water wasn’t sterilized either. You wouldn’t want to touch a syringe to your water spigot before using it I’m sure, let alone inject the unsterilized water from it.

Clearly you’ve not had to write and maintain much XML.

Had no trouble here on mobile.