If companies were forced to offer TOTP or hardbase-based tokens for MFA, the market for illegal SIM swaps would practically vanish overnight.

Our current Congress is on track to be one of the most ineffective in almost a century. And while that's not quite since the "beginning of Congress" as I stated, with the current state of affairs I see nothing that convinces me that we'll turn a corner anytime soon. While dysfunctional congresses have come along every so often, lately it's beginning to look like the new normal.

A lot of us don't have any of those options

That's true but I forgot to mention cash-based income as well. That does include a lot of people who should be reporting it, such as anyone who makes tips.

you would want to file yourself to claim all those things

I believe the IRS's new system can handle all of that just by asking some simple questions rather than having to fill out a ton of forms and manually perform calculations.

From the beginning of Congress until about several years ago when we became so tribal that we'd rather torpedo legislation than pass it and potentially make "the other side" look good in the process.

Shitty code is having a white space dependency in configuration files. LOL

Python and YAML Users: "Shots fired!"

They could certainly do that, but they wouldn't know your medical expenses, cash contributions to charity, business expenses, and many other deductible expenses. I guess it would work fine if you're alright with the standard deduction, but you may be missing out on a nice chunk of your refund.

TOTP and hardware-based tokens are more secure but many service providers don't support them. And the ones that do sometimes require using a particular provider. And the TOTP seeds sometimes can't be viewed and backed up, which means that if you drop your phone in a puddle, you're going to have a real fun time recovering ALL of your accounts. All of these issues can be resolved from a technical perspective, but no one seems to care because it requires a bit of effort and there's absolutely no profit in it. There used to be a time when we could rely on legislators to mandate basic security measures, but...

Much of what you say is true and yet it's irrelevant since you're refuting statements the OP never made. Gweihir said that "pretty much all tech we have today" - note that it doesn't mention anything about the industrial age or any other time prior to the current.

A venture capitalist has an opinion on a company? Stop the presses!

I'll probably catch a lot of crap for this, but here it goes. I've read a lot of posts lately regarding conversions from Windows to Linux and I was surprised by an extremely common theme. So many of them were warned against using Ubuntu by their Linux-using friends, so they installed one of a number of other user-friendly distros such as Pop, Mint, Zorin, MX, etc. It'd mostly work great, but an issue with a driver or some weird bug would eventually bother them enough to hop to another distro. The new distro wouldn't have the issue that bothered them, but it'd have some other issue that would grow to annoy them. After hopping distros several times, they'd say they "finally broke down and installed Ubuntu and everything just worked". Others never made it that far and went back to Windows.

I have absolutely no loyalty to any distro and I don't care what anyone else uses either, but I can't help but wonder how many people gave up without ever installing Ubuntu because their Linux-using friends told them not to bother with it. Most of the hate against Ubuntu seems to revolve around ideological issues that the average beginner couldn't care less about. Perhaps being pushed into using snaps, systemd, and other such behavior may eventually push them away from Ubuntu, but by then they will probably be comfortable enough with Linux to fix the issues they'd encounter in other distros.

Anyway, I guess my point is that when we recommend distros to beginners, I think it would be best to put our ideological differences aside and recommend the distro with the highest chance of success for new users. And at the moment, that still appears to be Ubuntu. You may now proceed to call me an idiot for saying something positive about Ubuntu.

If this keeps up then how are my fellow nerds and I going to smugly declare we "only use Linux" with an air of superiority?

We'll start identifying by which distro we run. And if one distro starts to dominate, we'll identify by which DE we run. The vast choices Linux provides offers a nearly-infinite number of ways to satisfy our urge for tribalism.

Epic Games has suggested changing the SVID behavior to Intel Fail Safe in the BIOS settings of Asus, Gigabyte, or MSI motherboards

This seems very similar to a setting JayzTwoCents complained about over a month ago.

TLDW: Some motherboard manufacturers are setting BIOS defaults that push the hardware too far.

How about letting creators decide if they want their videos to be used to train AI instead of deciding across the board for them? Perhaps a robots.txt equivalent for AI which lets creators opt in.

I make business decisions

Everyone makes purchasing decisions, not just people "in business".

I don't spend my money on payback for a corporation's previous "sins" like cashing in when they have the best in market products

If that works well for you, then great. But the reputation of a corporate brand is important to many other people - it's why advertising is such a gargantuan industry - and it's why committing "sins" can have detrimental effects on a corporation for many years. Consumers don't easily forget about being mistreated and they have little recourse to punish corporations for their behavior today other than avoiding that company's products.

You can buy what they sell at the price they ask or not.

Or you can buy from a competitor now that there are other serious options in the market again, aka "voting with your wallet". And those votes can be payback for prior transgressions when Intel had no significant competitors and rested on their laurels. I fail to see how your statement refutes the OP - not buying products from a company can very much be a form of payback.