Gambling has been lucrative since a bunch of cavemen got together and started rolling rocks in the back of the cave for the best cut of Wooly Mammoth. That's never going to change. The dropout will more than likely die a rich man.

I've been skeptical about the "Windows games on Linux" thing, but I'm hearing nothing but good things about Proton. If it is indeed as good as advertised, it could truly a way for young men to finally get out of the Windows world.

I would have moved my parents to Google's Chrome OS Flex, but while it's super fast and does a few things extremely well, its lack of support for things like DVD playback is a killer in the "Upgrade for Grandma" department.

It may never be a better time, but this is a huge reason why there will never be a "year of the Linux desktop". When Microsoft cuts support, most people will just knuckle under and buy new machines, even if they're happy with what they've been using. They bitch. They threaten. They shake their fist and tell Microsoft they'll go to something else. But most just give in and write the check.

The critical difference was that those old machines, and the software that replaced them, were created to make human workers more productive. To grow company profits through increased worker output. AI is designed to increase profits by flat out replacing those workers, not making them more productive. AI is intended to kill two birds with one algorithm: create software that does human work better and faster than any human could, and then eliminate the costs of human employment.... salaries, insurance and other benefits, training, et al. That's the crucial difference, the intent to replace people, period.

"As a European"...

You have zero room to talk. France has just collapsed. Again. France, Spain, Italy, and Greece all have debt exceeding 100% of their GDP. And you can't even defend your own shores from an army of military age North African men that are coming in waves specifically to sponge off of your welfare systems. Europe is a pressure cooker right now, and you're doing nothing to free any pressure.

I heard philosophy grads say the same thing. They were still always short on money.

Engineers have always made more money than the pure-science grads, and this accelerated in the 60's. Even the mathematicians jumped over, largely because if you have a talent for math, its fairly easy for you to slide into engineering, with is mostly math anyway. Just math with a real-world purpose. It's funny because, at the end of WWII, there was a big debate about where US science research funding should go. One camp wanted practical research focus with real-world goals... "Build me a generator with twice the output", etc. Lyndon Johnson famously summed up this approach with the question "What will it do for Grandma?". The other side argued for instead funding pure science research based on curiosity, and argued that practical advances would trickle down from those results. The pure science camp won for a short while, but what killed it was the Space Race. The US needed specific machines with specific capabilities on a specific deadline. "Pure Science for the principal of it" fell by the wayside to "We need that rocket to have a 60% thrust efficiency increase, next year". And it's been that way ever since. In the marketplace, and especially in the marketplace of ideas, practical engineering won. And what research we still did tended to be dominated by hyper-expensive physics projects that had practically no commercial applications at all. I think the death of the Super-Conducting Supercollider in Texas was the death knell of big pure science projects in the US. As a result, engineers are actually doing a good bit of our basic research now. It's just folded into their commercial projects.

Engineering spacecraft modules will get you a high income with steady, reliable pay. Choosing to look for particles that may never be found will not.

"AI" (which isn't really AI, but)... is indeed being overhyped. But it's also still going to kill millions of jobs that won't be replaced by new jobs. Both things can be true at the same time. And while AI will indeed create some new jobs "caring and feeding" for AI, it'll kill off far more in other fields that will never be made up, unlike, say, when the Model T largely replaced the horse and buggy. A major reason for what we're calling AI is to replace human jobs in order for companies to save money on human expenses. It's why these companies backed AI in the first place. Shareholder Value Uber Alles.

I've seen AI generated shorts on YouTube with Marvel and DC characters that are far more visually appealing than anything I've seen in a Marvel or DC movie. This is going to be a losing effort by Hollywood in the long run.

You forgot his fondness for handicapped spaces. In the early 80's, an anonymous employee left a note on his windshield in an attempt to shame him for the practice. He responded with a Captain Queeg-like obsessive search for the employee. Thankfully, he never found the writer.

If you live in Northern California, perhaps. But pretty much everywhere else, people are being told to get back to the office of find another job. In my area, the job notices are explicit about remote work not being available, and mandating an office presence.

Better Ukraine than my crane. *Ba-dmp-Bump!*

Really...

It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things

I don't know who you're talking to, but while they're generally happy with him, Trump supporters call him out fairly frequently when they think he's getting squishy on something. They were mad at him for the Syrian involvement in the first term, and in just the last few months they've been unhappy about both the strike on Iran and his flip on the Ukraine war, both of which they maintain we shouldn't be involved in at all. There was criticism of the Intel purchase. There was criticism about his vacillation a few months back on H1B's. A cursory glance at any Trump-friendly forum over the post few months will show lots of threads where his supporters are questioning or opposing him on something. They're not the thralls without a will of their own you seem to think they are.

What does Brexit have to do with their debt levels? Debt-to-GDP has been climbing across the EU as well, with the average debt over 88% of GDP now. Germany is the lowball figure among the major powers in the union at 68%, with with the other big boys... France, Spain, Italy... all at well over 100%. High debt is endemic throughout nearly every first world power, especially in the West. Why Britain is being singled out here is strange. The EU members with relatively low levels of debt are, ironically, the ex-Communist states (see the same link above). It's all of Western Europe that's been living it up on credit.