Thanks, that is much appreciated!
I keep reminding myself it is only a material thing, not worth being stressed or depressed about. 
Depending on circumstances, I may just turn it in and purchase a new one. I’ve got to calculate the lost equity, etc., but the good news is my insurance company is paying for everything—Uber, rental, repairs, etc., except for my $500 deductible. The problem is that I know that no matter how good they do the repairs, it will never be quite right.
And I thought markdown was a problem!! 
Once upon a time, on the way home from a camping trip, I was directed to stop at one of my then employer’s local offices to help with a system migration. My car was stolen, and recovered a few days later. $10k worth of repairs later it was returned to me. And yep, it was not quite the same. I traded it in for a new car and the dealer was impressed with how well maintained the recently replaced interior was!
Good luck with everything.
And one more thing. When they recovered the car, my golf clubs were still in the trunk. But my dirty laundry was nowhere to be found.
I had an old 1992 Ford Escort that got stolen back in the mid-2000s. Not a great car, and honestly when it got stolen it had a flat tire. They didn’t think that one through all that well.
Anyway, when I got it back, the only thing I could positively identify that was stolen was a catalog case full of Bibles and associated reference books. A concordance, a good interlinear, a few dictionaries, etc. Everything else was still there.
That one really made me scratch my head. 
Sorry to hear about the car.
I like Markdown. Yes, I want text with visual styling. But, I like the ease of denoting headers, links bold etc… with basic markup. I keep forgetting keyboard shortcuts, so doing the same thing with RTF means more clicking. I also likes LaTex separation of style and meaning - I do not want a more complicated markup though - so markdown is good enough for me.
What amazing things do I create - emails and notes.
I feel genuinely proud to be part of a community that can talk as passionately about a file format as this thread does. Well-tempered and well argued - and an Ackoff quote thrown in. I enjoyed it.
@Bmosbacker terrible about your car, but the power of nature - wow!
And it also makes it straightforward to change styles on the fly without touching the underlying document. It’s possible to do that in Word, or course, but I have always found managing style sets and document templates in Word to be a total PIA. It’s also nearly impossible to keep casual users from making in-line changes to your document that completely upend carefully crafted styles.
I come from the era of Correctype when rich text was limited to all caps and underlining, and semantic enrichment was centered titles and complex numbering and indenting schemes. (Don’t make me talk about footnotes …) If technology had somehow skipped over WordStar and landed on Markdown, I’d still be over the moon.
Anyway, horses for courses. I like Markdown for shorter, relatively straightforward documents and fully-featured text editors for anything that’s long and complex and requires special styling.
I am so sorry. How absolutely miserable. I hope repairs go smoothly. Try to still have a vacation, if you can.
Sorry about your car. Hope nobody got hurt. Had a similar experience which also smashed many windows in our accommodation. Hope it all gets sorted as quickly and easily as possible.
Oh … hail! Holy … hail!
Sorry to hear that you have to deal with so much damage in such a remote location. Hope you’re able to resolve the problems.
–
JJW
It gets even better …
They took the spare tire. To get the spare tire they needed to take the golf clubs out of the trunk. They did, and then they put the clubs back in.
Maybe they were all left handed?
Ugh. I’m so sorry. 
I’ve heard you almost can’t give most used golf clubs away. If thieves won’t even take them to pawn, that lends credence to that theory.
I would totally agree that they are plaintext. But it makes my point nicely. They are designed to be rendered. They contain formatting information because they are not meant to be viewed as plaintext, but rendered to display formatted rich text. This is equally true of markdown which is also a markup language.
There’s not really any final and universally agreed definition of “plain text”.
Just saying
@Bmosbacker I’m sorry to see the state of your car, I hope you still get to enjoy some parts of your holiday.
At the risk of making sweeping generalisations and offending everyone all over again, I think that article is interesting, but is only speaking to one use of Markdown, and it’s probably not the one many of us primarily use Markdown for in this forum, so isn’t directly applicable to us. Most of us seem to reference Markdown when we’re talking about our PKMs, whatever that looks like for us, so we’re not really concerned with building web pages, etc.
I can see discussion has been had about portability in this thread already, but I’d still argue (and it’s the reason that I use Markdown) that plain text (markdown flavouring optional) is the most reliable way to store one’s files. That may not be true when future historians look back on this period with the benefit of hindsight, but currently we only have the preceding years to compare to, and it’s plain text and a couple of its friends (e.g. PDF) that have survived the tech evolution so far.
A couple of further, half-form anecdotes and thoughts:
moving text between many apps is still a pain in 2023. Writing email copy in Google Docs for future upload to MailChimp for example is a nuisance due to sneaky formatting. I’ve not used Word for a while but it had similar issues last time I did. In this example writing in Markdown would avoid the problem.
I wrote some notes in Pages last week (sometimes I do this if I need to add images - I agree Markdown is not great for this, it’s better just for text). I needed to share them with a colleague who was travelling on a crowded train. I knew they weren’t an Apple user, so thoughtfully sent the text as an RTF file. Turns out that doesn’t work on Android by default. I should’ve just sent Markdown, but ironically I’d been uncertain if their device would open the file. RTF even now does not have universal application.
There’s a winding detour in this thread about the portability of Markdown in different apps that misses the point. Whilst the rendering of Markdown may look different in the reading view of different apps, the underlying point is that the editor view will always be the same: e.g. if you write *asterisked word* it will look the same in edit mode regardless of whether it renders as italic or bold in reading mode, and you, the author, know what you intended.
Realistically for most of us there is always a trade-off in the tool we choose. Most of us are not going to spend years crafting an app that meets all of our exacting criteria. I don’t think anyone is (or should be) suggesting that Markdown is the solution to all of digital life’s writing woes. For example, I use Markdown because I prioritise portability. The compromise I make is that I dislike how it handles images and so I do use other apps to supplement this when needed. The next person may handle far more imagery than I do and not really care about portability, in which case Markdown is a daft tool for them to use and they should find another format that suits them.
I can see that as per the original article’s point, in this web age pushing Markdown straight to web is probably constraining the creativity of web development. The web has moved on a lot from the days of simple html and css, and Markdown may simply not be the tool it once was for seamlessly transitioning from writing to “print”. (And neither is Word/Google Docs, so let’s build something new that provides portability and an element of universality like markdown/plain text does!)
Long before there was Markdown there were other text formats that emphasised document structure over appearance. Such as Bookmaster.
Personally I prefer this approach - with rendering separate.
Well, at least they were considerate enough to leave your clubs. I suspect they were not in a financial position to play much golf!
Perhaps they thought they would get in some “light” reading after the heist.
Thanks. And you are right about the power of nature. It took 5 minutes to cause, I’m guessing, at least $10K of damage. It is not just the expense of replacing glass and dents; it also includes all of the sensors (lights, rain sensing wipers, driver assist technologies, etc., all of which have to be replaced, repaired and or recalibrated as well. When I read the various responses to my situation (including the examples of things stolen), I remind myself of these words from Jesus:
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust [and hail] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:19–21).
Read them is easy, taking them to heart is harder.