Perhaps the title would be more accurate if it were "The way my friends and I prefer to think of it, the age of the universe is nearly twice as old as we used to like to think of it."
Perhaps one could say, "It was clear who was right and who was wrong--whichever side you were on, that side was right and the other side was wrong" whichever struggle is being considered. Whichever faction you identified with was right, just like now.
Chicago (Cook County) went 83% for Clinton in 2016, 74% for Obama in 2012, 76% for Obama in 2008, 79% for Kerry in 2004 and 68% for Gore in 2000. Biden's 2020 numbers were on the low side of average for a Democrat candidate there, probably didn't involve an unusual number of independents or disaffected Republicans...
Agree wholeheartedly with your (a) and (b), and would add:
(c) Emacs won't disappear after a few years (where "few" can mean decades if your career lasts that long - mine ran from 1967 to 2011 and I still use emacs daily) the way virtually every (or maybe every) "more intuitive" editor/environment will, given time. Your investment in learning it will really pay off.
While I've been a "geek" since I joined IBM in 1967, I've been primarily a writer for at least 35 years. In that time, I've used Wordstar, WordPerfect, literally every flavour of MS Word up to 2011, vi, iTerm and emacs.
I've converted files of one format to another to another to another, and finally to ASCII text and that is that. No more orphaning as one or another company goes out of business or decides to update their file format.
My editor now is Emacs and, depending on who/what I'm writing for I use plain text, or org or md if I need to include basic formatting. I've published enough to know that I'm a wordsmith, not an artist and going beyond basic formatting is a job for a typographic artist, which I'm not.
I know that makes me a grumpy old fart, as does my refusal to rely on The Cloud (i.e., Somebody Else's Computer) for backups, and so be it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (or more), shame on me.
There seem to be a lot of Apple users who wouldn't agree. My MacBook Pro is early 2011 so I haven't been able to use the newest, but I can't say that each upgrade from Lion to High Sierra was clearly an improvement for my use cases (writing and coding). YMMV.
I love my 2011 MacBook Pro's hardware - the case, the keyboard, the hinges. I liked OS-X Lion just fine, and every update since then has seemed to be a downgrade...I still need to use the 2011 Office I bought then now and then, or I'd have converted it to Debian years ago.
I've remained informed about these issues without frequenting any "news" sources. Government, hospital, pharmacy sites all provide that without the "clickbait" factor (or at least with much less).
"hide shortcomings" like what? Doesn't language like "by default" infer/suggest/imply that there would be circumstances in which they would save logs? And wouldn't an obvious circumstance like that be a warrant?
Not sure that history would prove that out. Highly structured, militaristic colonial powers (Inca and Aztec, Mandarin Chinese, Vedic Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Roman, Western European) all had pretty good runs. Have there been societies that "place a high value on all people and their many quirks instead of conformity to an arbitrary leader" who have been dominant for spans of centuries? I can't think of any.
Debian's been my workstation OS for many years. I mainly use Emacs, the shell and a browser so familiar and stable is all I ask of the OS. I'm on 10 now, will probably update to 11 shortly.
I have a Win10 installation on a drive on a second workstation should I ever need to run a commercial, Win-only app, but it mainly just gets started every few months to catch-up on updates. I'm fond of my 2011 MacBook Pro (the hardware) and have become less and less impressed with the OS and apps as time as gone by (and as I made the mistake of installing updates). It's the only machine that I allow the camera on, so it's the go-to for Zoom.