If you do not like the free service provided by the gov't, you may still hire a private company to do your taxes. You can examine the results of the free service, and not file it or amend it afterwards. Or you can start with a private service. You would still have your freedom. What are you complaining about?

Furthermore, your ideologically driven paranoia is untethered from reality. Twice now, the IRS informed me of small issues that meant they were sending me back more money.

There is a level of complexity at which, no, I am not sure I would trust the gov't service. But for at least 50% of taxpayers, there is no real reason to believe the IRS would not do an equally good job at a substantially lower cost. Why are you against more choices and more freedom?

It is so "nice" of McD's to interrupt my very simple order to force me to close out screens asking me to buy stuff I do not want.

There is a kernel of truth there, but your appeal to the extreme is very unconvincing overall.

There is a world of difference between certain areas of code are inherently tricky so there are practical limits and costs to installing guardrails, and we are real programmers so it just does not matter and is not worth considering.

I have no patience for "that just does not apply to me and my co-workers because we are real programmers" attitude. A code base that is too precious to be properly maintained by anyone but geniuses sounds like a code base chock-filled with liabilities to me. At some point the project should grow up and be easily maintained and improved by merely smart young mortals who want to learn, with a bit of advice from the greybeards.

Indeed.

One might imagine that there are students out there who would like feedback on their essay, will receive and consider that feedback from the AI carefully, and will be able to apply the relevant lesson in the future. Nobody actually cares about those students because they were always likely to do well.

But the reality is AI will primarily be employed as a "make my essay better so I get a better grade with less thought and work" device. In that case, AI is actually making it easier to avoid learning how to improve one's writing without teachers or parents noticing how weak the student is for longer.

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.

It is not the lack of ability to apply critical thinking that caused issues for those math majors, but the desire to feel smart & special by understanding the secrets others do not. The only notable thing here is that math majors have the chops to earn the right to feel smart & special by real merit.

This. A bit of wage inflation is appropriate under these labor market conditions. If that causes some general inflation and we must live with 4-5% for some time, so be it. Squeezing things to bring down inflation a notch or two is probably okay, but we really do not want to force inflation back down to 3% right now.

Exactly right.

I see a lot of radical opinions presented as self-evident, as if abolishing landlords or doubling down on increasing real estate prices were the only options, as if nothing in between is possible.

For several decades running in the 20th century we lived an "in between", where an average of 2% after inflation increases in the average house price was the norm. Larger jumps were primary restricted to a few problematic markets in California and New York. In the 21st Century, we have seen 5%, 10%, 20% price jumps driven by easy credit and widespread NIMBYism all across America.

That is not sustainable. And if we do not fix it, I expect to see more and more clamouring for rent control.

The actual solution is to build more housing, especially apartment buildings.

Rent control is a well meaning bandaid that perhaps improves the situation in the short term but tends to make things worse in the long term.

I am persuaded.

JPMorgan presumably bought it because they wanted a fresh company to put in their frothy portfolio in this space, and they did not care about the details except it had the right kind of frothy look. The paperwork and effort to close this deal alone cost 6 figures, before getting to the purchase price, and they did not want to spend 2% of that to figure out what they were actually buying because they did not want to be told it was frothy.

If it were only 75% froth, they might have been able to package this up and sell it to a sucker. But at 99% froth...

Renovate the building and convert it to condos is most likely. Or demolish the building and put up a bigger one full of condos.

In the short run, that is okay, In the long run, there are fewer and fewer rental units on the market and situation gets worse and worse for the people rent control was intended to help.

A whole lot of tech companies are declaring ~7% cuts. It is just a fad among CEOs who want to seem to be doing something useful, when they have no ideas.

It depends what you are building, doesn't it?

If you need to test board performance and multiple iterations are likely to be necessary, shorter turnaround from a local source might well save money by getting the project done sooner. The cost of the components is likely to be much higher than the PCB itself. For specialized small volume production, $45k is a roundoff error compared to what you are burning in engineering resources on the whole project.

Consider a medical device where that overly expensive assembled board itself might cost a whopping $5k on a device that is sold to hospitals for $300k. If you can get the product to market 10 days earlier, it is worth paying a 10% premium on the PCB.

There is a lot of "important" works that make sense in terms of college preparation, but distorting the curriculum to be painful for 75% of your students is not a good idea.

And while we are here, William Shakespeare never intended for a general audience to read his plays. They are just not all that interesting as a reading assignment, especially when how difficult a read they are is considered. Shakespeare is wonderful when performed, the author did not intend random 16 year olds be subjected to this stuff.

The people who follow Friedman champion huge expenditure increases and lower taxes in order to achieve astronomical deficits, while pretending to love "small government". The last 50 years prove as much.