The post in it's entirety reads as a religious rant, but it might have had something to offer to the reader if you had bothered to provide some sort of philosophical foundation for why you feel that the middle way is the superior way. And that all excess is inherently not only nearly identical in terms of effect, but by definition harmful.

But then if you did not read it it seems a little disingenuous to say "this is a bad book", because you would not only not know but anything you did know you would not understand.

This is very untrue - there's a ton of services that do this and while it is against the ToS sometimes, there's plenty of place where ToS of this type are not legal and so you are perfectly within your rights to resell a gift card for money.

* at "random", during regular use

* when installing something, sometimes

* when removing something, sometimes

* slowly, over time

They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.

What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.

This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.

I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.

Edit: I think this is a reasonable solution because the hurdles and context-free nonsensical rejections you'll face if you interact with this process in good faith are far too high. It's dehumanising.

A sort of willful blindness to real consequence born out of a vast apathy for social impact.

The fight itself definitely would not be stupid, because words have meaning and by letting marketeers corrupt them we let them make all of society worse. The real tragedy here is that you think linguistic drift for a proximate profit motive is acceptable.