It happens all the time. There's a long history of companies either started by guys at the bottom, or run by guys that began their career at the entry level. Wal Mart's CEO started off as a truck loader. GM's CEO started off on the assembly line. The guy running Planet Fitness started at the reception desk. Those are just the modern guys. In the past there are even more. Sidney Weinberg was a high school dropout that was hired as a janitor at Goldman Sachs. Twenty years later, he was running the company. He went from literally sweeping floors to overseeing multi-million dollar trades every day.

Wikipedia is great for non-political stuff. I look up aircraft and maritime field info and it's generally pretty solid. I wouldn't rely on it when the subject is even remotely political or controversial though.

The monkey spanking at Slashdot will be a Michael Bay-level extravaganza.

Nope: Amazon shoots down Punchbowl story.

LOL, "traitor" by who? The people that lost the vote? And?

We wouldn't have to do any of that if CIS and MIS programs would quit telling their students that COBOL is dead. COBOL has been "dying" all my adult life, according to the experts, and yet is so deeply embedded in certain sectors that it's never going away in our lifetimes. It's pretty much guaranteed work. Offer more COBOL classes and tell students that in major corporations and the federal government (especially the IRS) COBOL will be here until doomsday. Tell them that as long as mainframes exist, COBOL will be used. A paycheck is a powerful inducement to learn.

Since when does "well informed" require college? I know mechanics and plumbers that are arguably better informed (and read ) than other people I've met with a bachelors degree.

That's nonsense. If anyone destroyed "public transportation", it was the American voter. Because we love the freedom of having our own cars and resent it when some schmuck tells us we have to ride the bus. Any politician outside of Brooklyn or Berkeley that runs on making car ownership more restrictive in favor of forced public transport will be beaten so badly his own party will never let him sniff a nomination again.

American car culture is just that... a culture, beloved by Americans. There was never any conspiracy by Chevron or Texaco or even Ford to make us buy cars. As soon as we saw them, we went "Fuck, I've got to have that".

Yeah, but he was so good he apparently did it twice.

And yet there are studies showing a definitive link with cognitive decline in younger smartphone users.

"Need-based smartphone use may be causing cognitive failure in young individuals, including forgetfulness, distractibility, and false triggering. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to a higher risk of cognitive impairment."

Is it possible regular smartphone use is good for one age group and bad for another? Maybe. Maybe since kid brains are still developing, that has something to do with it. Of course when it comes to any study, buyer-beware. We've seen far too many examples over the past few decades of studies coming to one conclusion and then another study by equally qualified researchers coming to a completely opposite one.

Unless your job requires physical maintenance and presence, all jobs will be at risk from AI in the future. Star Trek-style AI doctors may even be coming, the only difference being that it won't be a hologram, but a screen giving instructions to a medic or orderly on physical care. Same for law. Same for, as you pointed out, accounting, management, coding, sysadmin, you name it. If you're a man wanting a paycheck, and you aren't one of the few that make AI software, then the future is physical. Grab that pipe wrench, that socket set, that chainsaw. And when robots actually get cheap enough? There goes manual farm work. Crop picking bots are surely on the way.

Ahhh, the computer nerd equivalent of the Sovereign Citizens movement. This boy's in for a shock when he tries to wheel out the Lawrence Lessig defense in a U.S. criminal court.

Yep. The only "contribution" America made to the rise of Hitler was that the US went into a depression and couldn't bail out Weimar with constant loans anymore. They were left on their own to the mercies of the French who squeezed them ever harder after the depression spread across the West. The Treaty of Versailles practically handed Germany to Hitler.

You. Fuckin'. People.

DoD does something that is undeniably good, something you would have cheered heartily at any other time, and now it's a conspiracy. Because Trump.

FFS. Get some help. Seriously.

If she knew what the AI was being sold for, why was she working there in the first place?. There's more than a little bit of dishonesty in her approach. It's like going to work for Lockheed and then being shocked, shocked that they sell things that kill people and break things.

So if she did this as a kind of do-it-yourself PR stunt, she can pretty much kiss any employment at western firms goodbye.