Predation accounts for a relatively low rate of nest failure: only 34% compared to an average of 80% for birds in similar habitats. This may be enabled by their well camouflaged nests, or simply the lack of local predators.
Not out of range for moral support. I'm sure there's an alien out there having a shitty day. Like, maybe his spaceship got towed and he lost his job at the Dyson sphere. I'm rooting for you, buddy!
I don't think having well-defined precision is a rare requirement, it's more that most devs don't understand (and/or care) about the pitfalls of inaccuracy, because they usually aren't obvious. Also, languages like JavaScript/PHP make it hard to do things the right way. When I was working on an old PHP codebase, I ran into a popular currency library (Zend_Currency) that used floats for handling money, which I'm sure works fine up until the point the accountants call you up asking why they can't balance the books. The "right way" was to use the bcmath extension, which was a huge pain.
I work at big tech (not MS) and yes, the comp package really is that good, though not as good as it used to be. I immediately doubled my total comp when I came here from my last job, and now it's ~5x. I could retire right now if I wanted, so I don't care about layoffs anymore.
I wonder how many people still get that reference.