Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

Their kids didn't. Treating everyone like an island is ultimately the purest form of the cancer that infects the US.

"those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain"

Is it impossible to obtain - the national ethos sees absolutely no problem with the unbounded consolidation of wealth and power, so long as it is in the private sector.

The joke is the private sector is so powerful at this point, your public sector is just a sock with the private sector's hand up its ass.

That'll never change as long as the concept of even moderate, reasonable redistribution of wealth is a national non-starter. It's impressive watching the way the US twists itself this way and that, where everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire voting for less taxes, less spending to make their supposed future rich selves happy for when they finally join the billionaire class.

Not 50 yet, although at one time I had a FOUR digit UID, but that login was tied to a university email I no longer have.

My next door neighbor for some period of time was a dancer. I got to know her and people she worked with and I've had a revolving door of current and former dancers in my life. Some of them have been fuckups, but mostly I've come to know these women as just normal folks who have a slightly more miserable job than most other service workers.

I don't know if anyone remembers this, but having a Facebook account was a requirement for Tinder users for the first several years of operation.

Most of my real life friends are strippers. Even when they're honestly just trying to meet somebody, their accounts get banned constantly just from doing normal Tinder stuff. Even for the most blessed with attractiveness, Tinder is a goddamn hole of suck.

A zillion years ago, I had a contract position at Disney. But I was a temp worker, so they didn't give me a desk. Or a phone. Or a PC to use. Or any official way to check my e-mail. But somehow they DID give me Forest Admin credentials for their ENTIRE Active Directory.

I was there for six months and when the full time replacement admin finally showed up, they had armed guards escort me out. My replacement let me know after the fact that someone done fucked up setting up my user account. I could've fucked the entire company, so I the order was given that I be treated as hostile until I left the premises. Why they didn't just, I don't know, select and delete the group memberships my account wasn't supposed have, I do not know.

Last year some IT worker at Disney got in a lot of legal trouble by using his still-active credentials to make tiny changes to the printed menus used on Disney Cruise ships. He apparently thought investigations into how that happened would eventually lead to getting his job back, but honestly ruining a print run or three of menus is probably about the most malicious thing I would've guessed WOULDN'T get LEOs to your door. It's just nice to know Disney's IT hasn't gotten any better since I worked there.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

"Sane people use C for that" for embedded systems? That's a very "all i know I leaned from Slashdot" definition of embedded systems you must have

Dunno if you're a programmer or not, but if you're not extensively testing and verifying what you wrote before you put it in production, you're doing it wrong.

You have to verify and test *all* code. LLMs are great for producing a bunch of boiler plate code that would take a long time to write and is easily testable. The claim that LLMs are useless for programming flies in the face of everything happening in the ivoriest of towers of programming these days. Professionals in every major shop in the world use it now as appropriate. Sorry that makes you mad. I'm not young either. I've been producing C++ on embedded systems used by millions of people for 20+ years. Nobody doing serious programming takes the "LLMs are useless" opinion seriously anymore.

Ah yes, this moral panic is totally different than all the other times people have been whipped into a frenzy by an almost bon existent problem.

We have real problems to solve. I'll leave the fake ones to people like you.

So basically this is a new version of "Listening to Judas Priest will make you commit suicide", the Satanic Panic and all the other utterly moronic moral panics that make people afraid of unlikely things.

Oh good, another moral panic. If people aren't terrified every waking moment of their lives, someone hasn't done their job.

Having spent a whole hell of a lot of time lately on Gnome, configuring it and testing various configurations for rollout at the company I work for, all I can say is that it just works. There's a browser, and bizarrely, printers just work on Linux now in a way they just used to work on Windows, and it's now Windows, at least in an enterprise environment, where printing has become the technical equivalent of having your teeth filed down. Where work does need to be done is on accessibility, so we have one staff member who will stick with Windows 11 for now. Libreoffice's Calc is good enough for about 90% of the time, and Writer about 95%. We remain open to Windows machines for special use purposes, but most people after mucking around for a bit are able to navigate Gnome perfectly well, since once they're in the program they need to use, what's going on on the desktop is irrelevant.

On the enterprise back end, supporting global authentication has been around a long time, and if you only have admins who know how to navigate a GUI, then you have idiots. The *nix home folder is infinitely superior in every way to the hellscape that is roaming profiles, so already you're ahead of the game.

Enshittification, where even the most modest of talents is pushed aside by someone writing "Draw me a picture of a Florentine woman with a smirk" in ChatGPT.

Facebook offers services, some free, some paid, to citizens of Brazil so yes, their activities can be legislated.