> Lore and story wise [Oblivion and Skyrim] have incredible depth.
As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.
As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.
> unfortunately KQL doesn't seem to have INSERT, UPDATE etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Microsoft, and I use Kusto basically every day)
This seems to me to be a deliberate design choice. Microsoft doesn't want engineers mutating the databases by hand. There are mechanisms to do that (mostly outside of Kusto, and usually to resolve privacy incidents), but the common case of querying is not supposed to allow for arbitrary changes to the database.
Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.
Well, that's where you're wrong (with respect to housing in the USA).
Municipal zoning laws mean that houses are not getting built. Apartment growth is not keeping up either. Nor is condo growth. In the places with jobs, there is no available housing.
This lack of housing is what is keeping houses at top dollar in spite of the mortgage rate tripling over the span of a year.
It's due to the Universal Postal Union, which is a UN agreement that governs the costs and subsidies associated with international shipping.
The link below explains it well, but the gist is that China was rated to be a "poor" nation, whereas the USA was rated to be a "rich" nation. This rating essentially means that the USA is subsidizing packages shipped from China to the USA.
Trump (in a rare moment of not being an idiot) threatened to withdraw from the agreement over the subsidies. He didn't, but the agreement did get amended, and packages from China will start becoming less subsidized (more expensive) by 2025.
> I'm frequently asked where people can get such a ridiculously large amount of pi. Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!
I love the old internet. Users gave a shit about other users.
> Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz.
Granites are primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, which are both primarily composed of silica. Silica is the thing that causes silicosis, and when that granite was cut it was clouds of silica dust that covered your home.
You were no more safe in that granite dust than you would have been in quartz dust.
In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:
CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019
CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021
There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.
An adaptation of the "narcissist's prayer" for climate change deniers:
---
Climate Change isn't happening
And if it is, it isn't that bad.
And if it is, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not our fault.
And if it is, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, you should have stopped it.
---
Your comment is on line 3.
> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.
None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.
As you said, you never played Daggerfall or Morrowind. Just about all of the lore in Oblivion and Skyrim comes from Daggerfall, Redguard, and Morrowind.
As for the stories... sorry, but you're on your own there. Oblivion's was okay, but Skyrim's story was a trainwreck from beginning to end. Of all the parts of Bethesda games, it is the character + story writing that has suffered the most over the years.