The USAF did, however, evacuate aircraft from Fairford UK after the war had begun. Presumably Hegseth's evaluation of the "optics" had changed by that point.
You make some good points about the behavior of -eq.
I think these kind of trade offs are part of being a shell. Relaxing the type strictness is intended to make interactive use easier. It is debatable whether the additional complexity is justified.
It's still decent enough for scripting, and for anything beyond plumbing there is .NET
You can get a fairly long way with just bash and perl one-liners. I worked in data science in the 2000s, and this was the typical way I would merge .csv files and do other simple data manipulation tasks interactively.
It's not much fun, and the resulting code tends to be fragile. Every line ends up being piped through utilities like cut, join, awk, and jq.
IMO the structured output from pwsh makes those sort of tasks a great deal easier.
I guess it depends on your view of "easier". You may prefer a scripting language that has everything under one roof (even a compiler!), while I very much prefer the pipeline approach (which has many different compilers).
bash is fine for simple text files. perl is a natural extension for structured data.
Using pwsh I can achieve in a few lines what previously would have required a perl script and bunch of IO and class definition boilerplate. It is powerful for interactive use. The verbosity is only a surface feature: the abbreviated aliases are discoverable.
Powershell and WSL are great features of modern Windows. Too bad about the Copilot-isation of everything.
Who cares if the millionaires did leave? I expect most of their money is held by shell companies in the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Bermuda, Turks and Caicos, BVI, and other tax havens that Britain hasn't got around to regulating yet.
The point, I argue, is not just the leaving aspect, which is obviously untrue. It's the fact that without taxing them, they tend to meddle in politics and turn a reasonably good society into a social and political chaos. By taxing them we, the society, exert a form of very necessary political control whilst also funding essential services that make life liveable for the individuals.
"One of my favorites is the parachute hat you could keep stored in a closet by the window, along with rubber overshoes to soften the inevitable hard landing."
I recently stayed at the Orakai Insadong Suites in Seoul. The fire escape was a grappling hook in a hard plastic case under the bed. Our suite was on the 19th floor.
Trump is the first caudillo-style president of the USA.
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