USB was around as early as 1996, many intel motherboards included it, including socket 7 and socket 8 based boards.

Windows didn't support USB until 95 OSR2.1, and there were few peripherals on the market so the ports (if present) sat unused.
A lot of OEMs ignored USB - although the motherboard technically supported it, it would be disabled in the bios and the headers on the board weren't wired to any sockets on the outside of the case.

There's a lot of inertia to overcome, people had a lot of peripherals using legacy ports and were reluctant to replace them with new ones even when usb offered significant benefits. A lot of printers supported both usb and parallel ports, and yet i saw a lot of those printers connected via parallel ports to computers that had usb ports too.

Old software generally still works too, i have stuff that was written for VAX systems that can still successfully compile and run on today's linux machines.

The Linux kernel is pretty good at keeping userland compatibility. In some cases the old libraries will be missing from newer distributions but there's nothing stopping you from bundling old libraries up with your old apps if that's what you need to do.
For anything with source code it's often not much more than a recompile.

Support for the OS version may only be 5 years, but support for the underlying hardware will last a LOT longer and the new version is free, so you can update to the new version without having to buy new hardware.

Plus Linux distros generally aren't designed to tie you in to other services provided only by the distributor.

You are paying for it, otherwise the ad supported service would be available to everyone.

Long term yes, the economic model has to change or collapse.

This is the case in virtually all developed countries.

Plus the mere existence of this promise means that one of the motivations for having kids (ie someone to support you as you age) goes away.

Then you have improvements in medical treatments which keep increasing the number of elderly.

There are lots of other factors in developed countries discouraging kids too - like high costs of childcare, negative career impact and costs thereof, increased housing costs for a larger family etc.

If you are chinese and want a vpn to bypass chinese censorship then sure one linked to the chinese government is a bad choice...

But if you're an american who wants a VPN to download pirate torrents then a chinese one is actually a good option.

The "training costs" are usually an excuse. Shifting between different versions of the same software also incurs significant changes, and yet training is very rarely provided for this - users are expected to just suck it up.

You'll get a few delays, complaints and additional support calls at first as people get used to the new version. Eventually people adapt, and discover workarounds for the inevitable new set of bugs.

Teams is nothing special, you have slack (which is better but still controlled by a foreign corporation) as well as several self hostable options like rocketchat and mattermost.
The only reason people use teams is because it got bundled with other MS services they were already paying for. As an actual product it's not very good.

If you control a subdomain of a known organisation there are a LOT of malicious things you can do. People will assume it's an authoritative site for that organisation and are far more likely to follow instructions or run software presented there. Take the nvidia subdomain, someone could put malware there purporting to be an important driver update and a lot of people would trust it.

Cloud providers are not subnet based...
Legacy IPv4 addresses are in a shared pool behind a NAT gateway, and are then forwarded to customer instances on demand. There are APIs so although the addresses you get are random you can very quickly cycle through them until you hit on the one you want.

IPv6 with AWS at least works in the traditional way - each customer gets their own routed block(s), so if you kill a single instance the block is still yours and the address of the instance just goes dead.

Traditionally you'd have your own block of IP addresses so people were lazy about deleting subdomains, as they would still point to your block even if the actual server had been shut off, rendering the stray subdomains harmless.
And with IPv6, AWS still works this way - you get a block.

With legacy IPv4 AWS and other providers have a severe shortage, so they don't allocate blocks to customers. You get a single address allocated from a random pool. And when you stop using that address it goes back into the pool ready to be allocated to another customer. So someone malicious can spin up cloud instances until they hit upon one that has a stray A record pointing to it.

This is just one of the dangerous side effects from the kludges used to keep legacy IPv4 limping along. People are not aware of the extra risk involved, and how something that was previously harmless is now highly dangerous.

On top of the renewal costs, it should be mandatory to keep the work available at the same cost or lower (which is trivial with digital distribution since you don't need to maintain physical stock). No more taking stuff off sale so noone can get hold of it.

Also should make stuff available worldwide under the same terms.

Spare parts can degrade even when they're sitting in storage unused. Unless you are getting newly manufactured parts it's still very risky.