Schools have libraries, and those libraries are naturally segmented by age because of being attached to a specific school (elementary, middle, high). Kids have to know the book is there and seek it out, so that puts an additional buffer.
Books are also delivered via the classroom. Teachers, of course, exercise judgement there on what is age appropriate, both for content and for reading level. The bar should be higher there because students have little to no choice on the book.
Counterpoint: you needed all those different ports because we didn't have USB-C and wifi yet.
At least where I'm from (Portland), it's really not hard to find good beers, ciders, and so on. There are food carts that have 20 beers on tap and an extra collection of bottled/canned options.
The Grim Perl Reaper?
which the US promised Gorbachev wouldn’t happen
According to Gorbachev himself, the US made no such promise. According to that interview, the commonly cited quote from Secretary of State James Baker, "NATO will not move one inch further east," is taken wildly out of context. It was made during talks over the reunification of Germany:
...making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context.
With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.
He also said this, without further elaboration:
[Expanding NATO east] was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.
Here is where I think Gorbachev's interview comes in for some legit criticism. I honest find this a bit perplexing. Putting severe limitations on NATO membership, knowing that many countries would want to join, was a big ask. The proper thing is to write that out in legal language, translated into Russian and English, and mutually agreed upon. This feels like the geopolitical version of empty "thoughts and prayers."
I don't want to say my experience is that of everyone, but I recently was diagnosed with T2D when I gained weight due to COVID-19 interrupting my exercise routine. Dropping weight has brought my A1C levels back in line in the past, then when I gained back some my A1C levels went back up. I'm not particularly prone to weight gain, but getting much into the overweight range kicked me into a diabetic A1C range. My father has similar characteristics, with even a health weight and diet leaving him with pre-diabetic A1C levels. But then in contrast, my mother and her mother were obese for decades without a smidge of diabetes. Lots of genetics going on there.
There is no grand secret conspiracy. Why? The more people involved in a conspiracy, the more likely it will leak out. A conspiracy between two people may never get it, a conspiracy between a hundred people will have someone slip up in a few years at most, but an international conspiracy involving millions of people with disparate interests wouldn't stay secret for a second.
What we're seeing isn't a conspiracy as such. It's a conversation happening in the open about "business models" and "revenue streams". It's also based on customer expectations. There are definitely markets out there for the repairable, buy it for life goods, but there's just not nearly as big as the customer who upgrades their phone every two years. But obviously that's going to be different for diabetes. Reliably being able to repair pancreatic cells would be huge. If the companies selling insulin tried to internally stifle research to avoid cannibalizing their insulin business, other companies have an enormous incentive to take a crack at it.
Don't dismiss it based on that criteria. It's a particular type of study called a case study where they go more in-depth on a particular case or set of cases. Of course it should be complemented by other types of studies, but that's just true of science in general. The danger, of course, is when laymen and journalists get excited over something like a case study and start spreading bad advice.
Diabetes can damage the kidneys, so presumably the patient got a kidney transplant. But yeah, looks like the journalist is getting the causation the wrong way round, I can't think of why a kidney transplant would recover pancreatic islet function.
I'm curious where COSMIC will land. It takes the previous iteration of Pop!, which used a lot of extensions on top of GNOME, and instead uses Rust as its main implementation language. So far, its applications have seemed very snappy, but that of course doesn't mean that they are light on the RAM usage when it comes to a 2GB computer.
Along those same lines, the Lapce IDE is fairly lightweight. It's no vim, but it is a very good GUI. I am running it on my 10 year old laptop, 8 GB, and it is noticeably more performant than VS Code on a new computer.
It will be more efficient eventually, just not yet. The technology isn't mature yet. But as you've noted, those "pro-free market" Floridians and Alabamans want to ban it, because global elites and eating bugs or something.
The Magicians: The books were good, but the TV show really was in a class all its own. And it did away with using obscure words just because, that was annoying.
Game of Thrones: At this rate, ASOIAF is never getting done, so I'm by default giving it to the show for actually finishing the job.
Good Omens: The first season brought the book to life, but there wasn't source material beyond that. The second season did a great job fleshing out the characters and moving the story forward into the final season.