For a lot of people who live in the Northern Hemisphere who are about to go into a period of long, dark nights during winter, your advice of "get outside, do things outside under the sun and let your skin do its work" is not really as helpful as taking vitamin D supplements.
Pokemon Trainer Club accounts (what you thing of as "Pokémon Go accounts", even though they're used for other Pokémon services) in the past were more buggy than Google accounts, but for at least the past two years I have had no more trouble with my account than my friends who have Google accounts. Additionally, they created a feature where you can link Google/FB to your PTC login so if it does go down in the future you can log in with those other services if you wish.
Tell that to Oxfordshire - plenty of companies still have Isis in the name (due to the local name for the Thames near Oxford being Isis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isis)
That's precisely the case with British schools/universities too. I know now that programming has been added to the curriculum, so in years time these intro courses might no longer be necessary, but the opportunity for prior CS/programming education depended heavily on which school you went to and that's a massive red flag for trying to enable people from all backgrounds to be able to study.
On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine you can make a multiple year degree out of just programming. Hence why the best courses will have a mix of both practical and theory.
The minimum purchasing/public drinking age is 18 (other than a single pint with a meal), but there's no practical restriction on parents letting their kids drink in private. My parents encouraged me once I was around 16 to join in with the adults whilst they had drinks. This led to me getting silly drunk a couple of times but with proper supervision. Same thing with going to some college house parties with 6th form friends - their parents knew that at the end of the night all the kids we're being picked up by their family.
The problem is if parents don't consider this and just ban drinking for kids up until they leave the house and aren't under their control any more. That's what causes people to go out of control at Uni since it might be literally their first experience with alcohol, or at least more than "1 glass with a meal" etc.
In MSU of early 00's most students drank a lot. I certainly did, mostly with other people from schools #2 and #57 already mentioned in this thread. But there was another company with a reputation of "real crazy drunkards". They were from another excellent high school, distinct from the Konstantinov lineage: the Kolmogorov's boarding school. Most of them left parents' house at age of 15.
My sister was at a private school in the UK and they were given drinks(a single glass of champagne) at certain events even before they turned 18, with permission from parents. Like you said, it's only illegal to buy alcohol under 18, but there's no problem with consumption itself.
I was given Buck's Fizz (Champagne and orange juice) when I was 5, at the birthday party of a super-posh boy who lived in the village. His grandfather didn't even ask my mum first. Upper class people apparently have different rules.
At Imperial, when the Google London office was new, the feedback from staff for why so few students hung around at their recruitment event was the lack of alcohol. Overturning this HQ-imposed very American policy apparently took significant effort.
People have different preferences. For example, I find it:
- harder to focus working in my own home
- harder to separate home life from work life
- more isolating, as you miss natural office interactions and conversations
Neither way is more superior than the other, and both should be accepted as just preferences and not forced one way or another.
Nintendos influence goes very deep into all gaming these days. Portable games started with Game-n-Watch and Gameboy, NES started off the popularity of game consoles, etc.
I used to think this as well, but my family and I decided to try one out and we explored way more than we normally do on holiday - due to the fact that you're in a different port each day, you end up visiting way more different places than a traditional holiday, where everywhere you explore has to be centred around your hotel. Cruises especially allowed us to explore a lot of cities and towns, which we normally wouldn't have gone to due to the lack of "chill out" time on city break holidays.
Of course, this is my experience of cruises around Europe, where there's a lot of interesting ports clustered closely together. The experience is probably pretty different otherwise.
