>If you automate everything then you break the social contract.
You don't automate everything. You just automate the things that are economical to automate.

Some things are difficult or impossible to automate, and other things may be left to humans because it's more economical as long as there are people willing to do the job for less than it costs to automate.

>No way in hell kids are going to continue once "old people" are doing the same thing.

In the last week I heard some radio personality reporting about a celebrity using the phrase. The radio personality basically said if a person the celebrity's age was using the phrase, that was the end of it.

>Things went off track in the 90's with the introduction of shrinks/counselors in schools and really in general.

Child psychiatry and shrink-type counselors* in schools - particularly elementary schools - date back to way before the '90s, at least in parts of the United States.

*Not to be confused with guidance counselors, which are to help teenagers with career or college decisions and paperwork.

>And then they would be denied health insurance?

Nah, just guilt-tripped into buying a specific company's "special" breakfast cereal.

>free Mac is High Sierra forever

It doesn't have to be.

Note: Don't try to install macOS 26, OpenCore Legacy Patcher doesn't support it, yet.

XP to Vista had 5 years between OSes, but XP got free updates for 12 1/2 years.

Microsoft would've had much better PR and a much safer Windows ecosystem* if they extended free, no-strings-attached Windows 10 support until 7 years after Windows 11 shipped, until October 2028. By then, the number of Windows-11-incapable computers still running Windows 10 on the internet** will be much lower than it is today.

* In about 4 weeks, bad guys will release "never to be patched for free" exploits to millions of vulnerable computers

** If you want to run Windows 10 stand-alone or on an isolated network and you take proper precautions against poisoned-USB-drives and the like, go for it. I'm sure there are many industrial machines and embedded systems out there running stand-alone that have Windows 10 and earlier at their core. With proper precautions they are safe.

>(excluding the various feature updates, and also excluding the Enterprise LTSC versions because, let's face it, nobody's legitimately running those at home)

I'd be surprised if there were exactly zero people who legitimately use Enterprise LTSC versions at home.

More likely, it's in the less-than-1-per-thousand but more-than-one-per-million legitimate installations of Windows Enterprise that are in a residence (primarily remote workers in corporate environments).

To be fair, your computer is doing a lot more behind-the-scenes work than it was under Windows NT 4 in 1995. Spell- and grammar-checking are more sophisticated and run in real-time all the time. Virus protection and other security software is constantly running. There are many more active entry points on the network that have to be managed all the time. Web browsers are a whole lot more complicated, and that's just to comply with published standards, nevermind the browser-specific deviations and the plug-ins. And so on.

That said, your point is still valid: Even with the extra legitimate load, the performance is lagging in large part because of programming that is optimized for something other than compute-time or compute-space. If I had to guess, I would say a lot of "written in the last decade" code is optimized for time-to-market (which is legitimate) and how-advertiser-friendly-can-we-make-it (not so much) rather than the end user's experience.

>No one cares about the river and aquifer water quality, or how expensive it is to treat for high nitrate levels.

River water quality in the United States used to be a lot worse.

>This resulted in a flood of CS students of varying talent. The talented ones worked hard, the not-so-talented ones somehow ended up with diplomas and entered the market.

The truly talented ones didn't have to work hard, things came easy for them because of their talent.

A student with average talent will have to work hard to make straight A's.

A "top 1% talent" student won't have to work nearly as hard for the same results.

If the "top 1% talent" student works as hard as the average-talent student striving for straight A's, he will stand out from the crowd for being so good.

I've met a few of those "top 1% talent" people. Some chose to work hard and they got rewarded for it. Others slacked off and blended in with the hard-working "average talent" crowd but they enjoyed a lot more free time because, well, they were able to get a week's worth of work done in less than a day.

>I won't accept anything except PDF from my own government

I prefer ASCII text when doing so won't result in loss of information. PostScript also works for me.

I also accept ink (or toner) on paper.

>Trying to prevent China from obtaining tech is futile.

In general, you are correct.

However, there is some tech that is so closely guarded that even its existence is only known by a small number of people.

Imagine if a small team working for the military figured out how to create a "targeted" bio-weapon that would kill the target but leave everyone else asymptomatic. Even the existence of such a thing would be so closely held that only the team working on it and maybe a few higher-ups (likely including the President and a few lawmakers who deal with black-ops budgets) would even know it existed.

In this case, "security through obscurity" in combination with all of the other operational security that would go into such a project would likely keep it out of the hands of the Chinese.

Sure, the Chinese may be working on something very similar, but very tight security means they won't get there any faster than if they were the only country/organization in the world working in this area.

By the way, this particular "small team" example is entirely hypothetical (I hope). But substitute "nuclear weapons research in the early 1940s" and the concept is similar. A major difference is that nuclear weapons research involved tens of thousands of people instead of a "small team." However, only a small portion knew what the research was really about or had the skill set to make a good guess.

Many low-press-run or one-off publications never made it to Google Book's library-vacuum effort of the early 2000s.

Ditto the countless archives in courthouses/governments, schools, religious institutions, companies, and elsewhere that haven't been fully digitized yet.

It's not like these are being deliberately kept secret as much as they are obscure or the maintainers don't have the funds to digitize them.

If you have time or money to donate to your local historical society or other not-yet-digitized-archive-maintainer so they can digitize their archives and post them online, that would be a big help to getting the information "out there" so it can be sucked in by search engines, LLMs, and other tools.

Savannah Bananas
* are much larger than "nano"
* real intelligence, not AI
* use less electricity, especially if it's a day game
* more fun to watch

Foreign companies thinking about creating jobs in The Netherlands may now think twice. "Could something similar happen to me?"