A Puritan? Hardly. The social justice warriors enforcing political correctness everywhere aren't, and have never been, from the Right, let alone the Christian Right.

Evangelicals haven't had serious sway in this country for 75-175 years (depending on your specific issues in question and threshold). It's all about the left wing and grievance-mongering. Reminds me of the mid-90's, before South Park made being politically incorrect palatable to the masses again.

There are some, but mostly those are people who aren't using personal computers to produce in the first place. In the early-mid 90's a common refrain (I remember my parents even saying it at one point) was "Why do we need a computer?" For those people, virtually everything you could respond to answer that question with (intercommunication with others, organizing, entertainment, writing text documents, etc) is served by a combination of smartphone and/or tablet with access to internet-enabled applications. Maybe a tablet + keyboard (or a Chromebook) for extended writing sessions.

The business users, academics, and developers are still there, but they now make up a much smaller fraction of the overall computer market. When you add back in enterprise users where corporate policy aligns well with thin client / network computing paradigms, you get an even smaller fraction that needs local personal computing... basically just those above, plus those who need or want local control for reliability, network reliability, custom performance (eg, gamers) or philosophical reasons.

So a need for local apps will still be present for some folks, but the large surge in the late 90s and 2000s doesn't have a need for a true PC. It's a shame, because it increases the barrier to entry from consumer to developer (Apple products, ironically were great at *reducing* that back in the Hypercard-installed-on-all-Macs days), but it's good because it lowers the barrier to entry for access to computing resources generally.

tl;dr: Desktop apps (and "personal computers that aren't smartphones or tablets") are going to shrink back down to the market they were before the late 90's. Congrats, all of us, on becoming geeks again. =)

Gotta disagree on that, judging from totally unscientific personal experience watching each incoming set of undergraduates at my local state university.

65-80 = Gen X
80 - 88 = Gen Y (if that)
90+ = Millennials

For political and cultural purposes, becoming "politically aware" somewhere around 2006 is about where I'd draw the line. A quick determiner is to ask them how much they remember about 9/11. If it's vague things about the adults being worried, or their 3rd grade teacher bringing them in for an announcement, they're probably a Millennial.

Whether it's due to accelerating change, proximity, or whatever, there's arguably a pretty large difference even across those 10 years or so. Born in '79, I graduated HS in 1996, which puts me right at the borderline of Gen X and the early Gen Y's. I spent several years working at McDonald's before leaving college to work in the tech industry (just in time for the dot com implosion, natch).

I could more or less imagine friends of mine over the next few years also working at McDonald's... I can't imagine college friends now (born in the early/mid 90's) doing it -- it's seen as beneath them.

Were you politically involved, or anywhere near a college campus, during the 2000's? The Bush hatred was strong. They didn't call it "Bush Derangement Syndrome" for nothing. And this was even before 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq War... Liberals never really got over the Florida election recount, hence faculty members turning their backs on him during mid-2000 commencement speeches.

Of course, the Internet was quite different then, and social networking as we know it was basically pre-infancy, but various political blogs developed strongly during this time, and all it takes is to scroll back into the 2002-2007-era Daily Kos or Democratic Underground archives to see outrage arguably on the same level as what you might find today. (I'm discounting the New World Order conspiracy theorists, who are along the same lines as the 9/11 Truthers, but accusations of a conspiracy around faking a birth certificate frankly pale in comparison to accusations of a conspiracy to attack your own country because Halliburton.)

I mean, I can't even imagine the outrage that would be present on the left if someone came up with a cover like this in an alt weekly with Obama on it: http://americandigest.org/sidelines/2012/08/if_anyone_deser.html. Meanwhile, people got bent out of shape at one parody New Yorker cover.

Part of this might be related to the slight age gap between the average liberal and average conservative, at least in the broad range of folks I know. Many people who are (now) conservative are those who are roughly in their 30's, and have strong memories of the 2000's and 9/11. Those in their 20's came of age in in the Obama era and don't have as much recollection of the political state before c. 2007/08.

In my circle, it's been widely the other way around... or at least it used to be, circa 2008 (Obamamania) - early 2012. By the time of the actual election things had moderated down somewhat, and it's been better since. But my feed was *filled* with pro-leftwing, anti-rightwing links of vitrol, often to ThinkProgress or Salon during that time, with lots of associated name-calling ("Those damn Rethunglicans", etc.)

I've been heavily involved in the arts community over the years, and had (and still do have) many friends still in college. The liberal skew was *extremely* strong.

Right before the 2008 election, when *everyone* was changing their profile pic to the Obama "HOPE" image/logo, I replace mine with the McCain/Palin logo. Friend count dropped by 10 in the first 30 minutes.

My point is that's is very hard to NOT have a "basic understanding of liberal principles", because they're the "default" view you see in most media and entertainment, and in most humanities coursework. "Income inequality is ipso facto bad" and "raise the minimum wage" are not difficult to understand the meaning behind; there's no need to assert a hatred of America. OTOH, "raising the minimum wage won't really help" is not easy to understand (at first), and it's quite simple to simply assert that someone who'd say that is "greedy" and wants more money, screwing over everyone else, and leave it at that.

If you de-friend someone (or large groups of someones), their stories are basically not going to be on your feed in the first place, and liberals have been shown to be more likely to de-friend conservatives over political differences than conservatives de-friend liberals http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/10/21/liberals-are-more-likely-to-unfriend-you-over-politics-online-and-off/

Unless you're a complete recluse or are making a conscious effort to sequester yourself from any popular culture, it's virtually impossible to be in your teens or 20's and not be exposed to various legitimate liberal political stances -- most often during college years. OTOH, it's quite easy to never interact with any "real life" legitimate conservative arguments, other than straw men that the liberal political arguments are using.

Thus you end up with 25 year olds who have no basic understanding of conservative economic principles, or presume that there's no other possible motiviation for some random socially conservative policy than abject hatred and/or slavish religious belief.

It does not have to be a one-turn coil, 350 turns would require only a MA of current, or only about 10000 times more than a big car starter motor uses! :)

Paul B.