Speaking personally, I stopped itemizing when the standard deduction went up. It's now so high that my "big three" deductible items (charitable giving, mortgage interest and state income tax) no longer come close to the standard deduction... so I don't even bother trying to add up all the little ones.

Then create some excess. Don't spend money you don't absolutely have to. Absolutely don't give any of your money to the bank (in the form on interest, or even worse: fees). Get a better job... do some side work... instead of wasting time on the web use the web to learn new skills, then put those skills to work for you.

It doesn't take a ton of excess... it takes a little bit of excess every week over the course of years.

They are part of the transaction because they inserted themselves into the middle of it. I fully agree with most of the concept behind activation lock it even gave one of employees a small amount of piece of mind that the phone that was stolen out of his car was useless to the thief (though he much rather would have just had the phone).

But it would be nice if there was a way to contact the owner and ask them to release the device. Obviously Apple isn’t going to give that contact information to the new “owner” of the device, but a way to request that Apple send a message would be helpful. Even without an automatic unlock timeout.

This statement right here is a big part of the problem. While education is important... and can be very helpful in "upwards mobility"... it should never be done on borrowed money. Borrowing money with the hope that it will solve all your problems (or, really, any of them) just leaves with even more problems because now you've added an increased amount of debt to your problems.

Banks, credit card companies, the credit reporting agencies, etc make BILLIONS of dollars every year keeping people in debt. They'll continue to push this propaganda that borrowing money will solve all your problems, but it won't.

Subsides for the lower classes to reasonably priced state schools and trade schools (that "reasonably priced" part is important... us middle class folk need to be able to afford it to) will actually help people who have been historically disadvantaged get a leg up by giving them an education but not leaving them with a mountain of debt. "Free college for all" is not the answer... there's no such thing as free. The Government doesn't have any money... they only have the money they take from citizens. If you pay overpriced college tuition with taxpayer money, you also haven't actually solved any problems.

Also, college is not required for all jobs. Some form of education is helpful for nearly every job, but a traditional four-year degree is not. That's another problem that needs solved... employers requiring degrees where no degree is necessary. Of course they do that because of this "everybody should have a degree and if you can't afford one, just borrow money to get it anyway" nonsense.

So the crux of your argument seems to be that college is important and everybody should go.

But this action does NOTHING to help with that. It rewards people who made poor financial choices in the past... which will just encourage them to do it again. And yes, borrowing money to pay for an overpriced university is a poor financial choice. And, of course, with "money" flowing freely while everybody just decided they could deal with the problem later, the universities just kept increasing their prices.

As someone said above, taking money from plumbers and bricklayers to pay the college loans of lawyers and office managers is horrible idea.

Indeed. It looks like we just made a 300 billion dollar campaign contribution to the Democratic party. Not even counting the (almost impossible to calculate) inflationary impact.

Spending more than you earn is living outside of your means. Full stop. There's no "well, but" wiggle room here. Living outside of your means is the best way imaginable to remain poor (or become poor if you didn't start that way).

Now, how to solve that problem is where you can get some argument. But in reality, there's only two ways to solve it. You need to either spend less or earn more. In an ideal world, you actually do some of each.

Sure, they could stand to be more forthcoming... and more information very well may come out. But this sure seems like an attempt to stir a pot. Forcing the reset of passwords is a pretty standard reaction... especially if you have any suspicion that passwords could possibly have been compromised.

So if the domain's MX is pointing at Google's servers and you just "do a little setup inside of Gmail" but it's not part of G-Suite (Google Workspace, whatever). then does that mean that I can easily receive mail at something.unused@yourdomain.com?

I'm leaning toward that as well... but I have an issue. My parents are on my Google Apps account along with my wife and 4 kids. So a total of 8 accounts. That doesn't work with the Family plan. The business plan is quite a bit more expensive :(.

So it looks like I need to either leave a couple people out or change my thought process entirely.

I also use KeePass with a .key file that has never been on the Internet.

This feels like something that will encourage bad password security as people will think they're doing the right thing by using "strong" passwords in a password manager, but they'll reuse those passwords so that they stay under the limit.

Windows ME never should have happened. Windows 2000 was supposed to be where the combined the professional and consumer lines (NT and 95/98 respectively) into one product. As I recall, however, they had some issues getting DirectX to work right with the NT 5.0 kernel. So they shipped Windows 2000 as the professional product and then had to slap together something for the consumer line. They pulled a few things out of 2000 and tried to make them work on the 98 kernel. Then they shipped that as the Millennium Edition.

Microsoft does have quite the history of rehashing their old mistakes in new ways.

Can you point me in the direction of a scripting language for web development that avoids HTML and JavaScript?

It's possible to be walled garden without being iron fisted.

The main complaint here isn't that an app needs to progress through the approval process before it's released to Apple's users. It's that Apple has a requirement that they get a 30% cut of any revenue generated through iTunes. Then they're using the app store approval process to reject any version of the app that doesn't have the ability to subscribe through iTunes. This prevents Spotify from simply saying "Go to spotify.com in order to purchase a premium membership" (or whatever they call it).