I don’t see in the article what percentage of this increased ‘value’ was actually spent on stocks. It seems such a house of cards to say the unrealised value of retained holdings is worth anything like the figure you get if applying the most recent trade’s value to all existing shares. A value beyond a percentage of the company’s assets and projected yield makes for a pretty risky game of hot potato for anyone buying in at the end and the potential for ridiculously overblown paper losses for anyone who got in at the start of the pyramid scheme with knock-on effects that propagate out to the real economy through the contagion of doomsaying. Bonds are a far more transparent way of raising funds and incentivise productive endeavours with good fundamentals as the company needs to pay from profits rather than offloading rewards to the system of finding another sucker (which can happen with bonds as well if sold before maturity in the belief that the issuer will be unable to fulfill their promise).

For something in-between, there’s https://winstall.app/

I’ve never found Thunderbird search bad compared to alternatives, as long as I’m not looking to find content inside attachments. Really fast and responsive and being a desktop client without paginated results makes moving and deleting in bulk so much easier. Would love it to be as powerful as Voidtools Everything to get a bit more granular sometimes but otherwise pretty happy with it.

It starts to grind you down when you’re dealing with multiple users per PC and unmanaged PCs from a bunch of different sources. Propagating start menu changes to all profiles post install is a hassle in 10 & 11. Sysprep is a lot less useful for setting up the defaults pre install now. The out of the box install process is smoother these days without as much waiting to click through various stages but the post install environment reduces your quality of life with a bunch of clicky fiddling.

Would Explorer++ Portable run in your environment?

From the days of DOS till today Windows 2000 is definitely my favorite, the most cohesive, straightforward and consistent experience. For now I just hope software will keep supporting LTSC through till the end of support.

To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like “the time is a quarter to eleven” do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of “ten past ten” if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?