I stopped reading after the third book too, and that’s exactly the sense I got.

There’s no conclusions, just character deaths. It’s just an unraveling web that becomes less and less coherent the further it goes.

Caffeine is pretty well studied and it’s known that the long term health effects are nothing close to cocaine. I doubt if there was any good science back then on the long term effects of cocaine, let alone enough education for the populace to know and understand it.

However social perceptions may change anyway. What we consider as not serious may be considered much more serious in the future. For example many people get headaches or even migraines as a withdrawal symptom of caffeine, and we don’t consider a headache to be serious.

But I saw a Star Trek episode once where Picard gets a headache and it was a big deal because those had been solved for hundreds of years by that time! Turns out the ferengi were controlling his mind or something. So caffeine may be considered a serious drug in the future if it interferes with the detection of alien mind control devices.

It will be stronger than a normal coffee, but it still won’t have any caffeine.

There is a distinction between flavor and caffeine content. Decaffeinating does change the flavor but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it strong.

Selection in freecad sketches is really bad. Box select with dragging the mouse doesn’t work, you can’t mask elements (make only points or only curves selectable), selections are added to the current selection instead of replacing it even if you aren’t holding shift, and if you miss and click on the backgeound accidentally it unselects everything. And selections aren’t part of history so if you spend five minutes selecting a lot of specific elements and then misclick once, welp do it all over again, no undo for you.

There are a few tool buttons like “selected constraints related to the currently selected element” which are really helpful though.

Trans trees are trees.

I bought a vacuum sealer for $70

People don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of how things work to make their choices based on trust. People aren’t getting on the subway because they trust the engineers did a good job; they’re doing it because it’s what they can afford and they need to get to work.

Similarly, people aren’t using Reddit or Adobe or choosing their cars firmware based on trust. People choose what is affordable and convenient.

Now we need one that does that and is available on FDroid.