The last time I needed any sort of "advanced" support from Comcast, the person in India had no way to escalate other than mark it on the ticket and hope someone called me back in 24 hours (they did NOT).

It turned out someone assigned half of my already assigned block of static IPs to another customer.

So step one, give the AI a way to ring tier 2 at least.

Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

Obviously not. The Constitution applies to the government of the United States. It applies to the U.S. GOVERNMENT everywhere in the world. If a U.S. LEO meets an American in Mexico, the Constitution still applies. If a U.S. LEO meets a foreigner in Arizona (or mexico for that matter), the Constitution applies.

Wherever possible, give MS the boot. Also the Windows admins.

It works out to $638/per registered car.

If they weren't doing virtualization, that might explain why the cloud brought spend down. A few big servers running everything in virtual environments would have increased utilization enough to get prices below cloud costs. If IT is run badly enough, nearly any change will be for the better.

Also, doing everything on Windows didn't help costs or reliability any.

Isn't that illegal in Texas and Florida?

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

Stupid admins can easily mis-manage cloud resources just as easily as they can mis-manage on-prem. It's just that when someone manages to mine bitcoin on your cloud services, you get a big bill at the end of the month as well as having performance problems.

The key to saving a ton of money with on-prem equipment is getting techs that know better than to let MS manage it.

Except it doesn't actually save a buck. It's actually like those outfits that rent you furniture and appliances. It looks cheap to start but in the end it costs you several times as much as ownership.

Cloud computing only makes sense for overflow capacity and perhaps disaster recovery.

Being in tech after 35 means knowing that the latest silver bullet is just warmed over slop from 10 years ago and will work no better now than it did the last time it was abandoned but will probably cost twice as much. It also means remembering and being able to adapt a technique from 10 or 15 years ago that worked really well and didn't cost much.

Many younger programmers find embedded work on micro-controllers to be hard because there's no room for "application frameworks" or kitchen sink libraries. It's actually reminiscent of programming in C for small 8-bit home computers like the C64. But only older programmers ever had that experience.