Four years of lost full time income seems like a pretty high stakes deal - esp. when you would acquire all those same skills, likely much better, by just working and not eschewing social contact for those four years.

If the CNC machine's operation is critical to the functioning of the company, bring it up with with management at higher and higher levels until the CEO says (usually more diplomatically than my exact wording here)

The IT policy that's in your way is so important that no exceptions are allowed - damn your CNC machine

or, alternatively, tells the VP responsible for IT

Karen, fix this ASAP!!! Efficient and cost effective operation of these CNC machines is critical to our success and your job is to help, not hinder, the company. Henceforth and at the CNC team's discretion, materials and time wasted by reboots of a CNC machine because IT insists it be connected to the intranet will be charged to your department - get back to me by EOB today informing me that the problem is now solved and how it was solved. Remember, the CNC team is your customer, not the other way around.

On the occasions where I have had the misfortune of working at a large corporation with annoying and disruptive IT rules, I've had success with similar strategies. Yes, it's a pain, but I've always gotten the problem solved.

For example, we told customers of our product (a relatively small portion of the corporate revenue but perceived as being a fairly outsized "future" for the company) to disable virus scanning on the directory we cached temporary files in. Yet our IT prevented us from doing so on machines we were using for performance testing/characterization. I never had to go above the IT director level to get that resolved (albeit, I had to rinse and repeat every six months or so as some audit caught the "non conforming" machines).

Or, for another example that's happened at more than one company I was at, is the edict that comes down from IT that

All software not on the IT approved list must be uninstalled from all machines.

At which point I do a quick audit of my dev machines and my group's dev machines and find various open source software (such as emacs, gnuplot, etc) that developers are using that are not on the "approved list" (mostly because IT can't find someone to pay for the product and 'support' - and the deniability that comes with that). I then send the list to IT (ccing the level above the drone whose issuing the edict) asking them to

Please verify that we must uninstall these products immediately. Be aware that, due to the resulting unanticipated decrease in productivity, we will have to extend existing schedule commitments (including those that external contracts are contingent on) so I will need to raise this up to the executive level.

They invariably respond with something like

Okay, for now you can keep these programs installed while we research these products.

I then follow up with

When is the review scheduled for completion?

to which the answer is usually something like (which they just make up having no idea what to do)

Within a month.

I then put an item in my calendar for one month in the future and when that's hit and no update has been received (and it never has been), send off a note along the lines of

I'm checking up on the status of the developer installed product list I sent one month ago - is the review completed and when can I expect to see the results as I need to know so I can adjust schedules we have made, and are continuing to make, based on productivity levels with all of these programs being available.

and usually get a response from someone in IT who dearly wants to stay out of the hornets' nest along the lines of

The review is ongoing, your group may continue using the programs on your list until it's completed.

It's never gone beyond that and no developer in my group has ever had to delete a single such program. Sure, I sometimes have to repeat this process once every year or two, but I've got it down to a science.

Similar techniques have worked in the past to get IT to stop nagging me (and eventually my boss) about me exceeding email quotas (which IT didn't dare enforce by just rejecting email to my inbox so was stuck with "soft edicts"). My boss eventually came to me and asks why he's being bugged about my email quota and I told him "I've x emails in my inbox from the several years I've worked here. From time to time I search through them looking for something from the past. It's true that probably on 10% of the emails in my inbox are likely to be needed, but I estimate it will take me 3 work days to identify and delete the other 90%. When would you like me to schedule that?" and I never again heard from anyone about my email quota and never spent any time purging "unneeded" emails.

Make it an economic argument with evidence (details on the latter is rarely needed - the drones making these rules don't understand how, you, the customer actually uses their "services"). That usually works. Once you've stood up and roared and embarrassed IT a couple times, things get much easier -- but make sure you're standing on firm ground, not just complaining because you "don't need no stinking badges". It is sometimes much more effective to be feared than loved (you can outsource those issues requiring "love" from IT to others when necessary).

I'm not a Windows expert (and would like to abandon it but Quicken and HR Block software preclude me from doing that completely), but why wouldn't the CNC application precede every run by a check for MS updates and, if any exist, apply the updates (followed by a reboot if needed) and then reset the 'Pause Updates Until' option to be 35 days in the future?

Is that not possible to do programmatically or would this not work (at least for jobs that take less than 35 days) for some reason?

You figure out all that stuff when you have your first apartment with roommates or your first job if you didn't figure it out earlier. Little about college life in particular "taught" me to do any of those things (pay bills, deal with social drama, manage time) and I doubt that anyone had to teach Prof. Volokh or that he's had any problems in "adult life" in those areas as a result of perhaps having learned those things at a slightly different time and in a slightly different way than you than you think is "appropriate".

Are you suggesting that those that don't go to college are doomed to lack all those skills?

You learn to manage time starting as a toddler if your parents are present and doing their jobs. You typically will observe your parents paying bills throughout your life unless your household is wealthy enough to have all that handled by a professional staff (in which case it's likely your bills in college are also being handled by that same staff). "Dorm drama" is little different from "playground drama" and "high school quad drama" (and, in my experience, there's quite a bit less such drama in college as most of the most obnoxious and drama filled kids don't seem to go to college).

I interviewed Prof Volokh shortly after his graduation w/his BSc and he seemed much more mature and much more "adult" than any other "freshout" I've ever interviewed - in fact, in most respects, he seemed more mature and adult than perhaps half of those I interviewed with ten years working experience who went through the "normal" route and graduated from college at an "appropriate" age.

I'd bet that he did less partying than his undergrad classmates, but then I knew people who did little or no partying as undergrads even they they were "appropriate age" yet they turned out fine (and probably with less liver damage than the rest of us).

Tell that to this guy. When he was 12 years old, he was a sophomore at UCLA and graduated when he was 15. He's been quite successful and independent. There's no evidence that I've seen that he had any problem adjusting to "real life".

What purpose would there have been in holding him back (except, perhaps, preventing people from being jealous of the fact that there was someone in the room smarter than they were and who was younger than them)?

Hence standardized tests so teachers and administrators can't game the system.

As one who, had I been born a few days later, would have started Kindergarten one year later (and much more mature), I agree with the age issue.

I also agree that something like a curve should be established - but quotas are inappropriate. Standardized tests should establish class advancement (and may vary by subject). It would be unfair to the bottom 5% to hold them back just because they happened to be at an excellent school with high achieving students.

I don't see a need to limit advancement. There are so few students who end up being 10 years old when entering high school that these can be handled on an individual basis. There are successful people who graduated from well respected universities when they were 17 because they (1) are very smart and (2) have parents who placed an emphasis on education. (although in one case it was odd having to have mom drive them to school in their freshman and sophomore year in college!).

Would I recommend college? Maybe for an attorney, because once they pass the bar, the J. D. is a meal ticket for life, as there is no such thing as an unemployed lawyer.

It's true that there are probably relatively few unemployed lawyers at any point in time -- but that's because they eventually give up on being lawyers and become paralegals, truck drivers, contractors, etc.

Even for those who become and remain lawyers, the "meal ticket" may get them a Big Mac rather than caviar. According to Bureau of Labor 2022 statistics, the mean annual wage for a lawyer in the US was $163,770 and the median was only $135,740. Of course the cost of living has an impact - for example, the mean wage for lawyers in non-metro areas of Kansas was only $82,670.

As well, not everyone who invested in a law school education and completes it ends up passing the bar just as not everyone who gets a degree in Interpretive Dance ends up with their job title/role having anything to do with Dance, let alone Interpretive Dance (more likely their title/role would be something like Customer Service Representative).

A generally educated populace should result from most of the populace graduating from high school.

Unfortunately, most students go to public K-12 schools which too often set very low expectations for student accomplishment, advance students from grade to grade based on the calendar rather than level of academic achievement, and issue diplomas even to those who can't meet even sixth grade standards in core subjects.

These problems are compounded by these same schools often mixing students who are motivated into the same classes and environment as those who refuse to behave and have no interest in education (often their parents are to blame of course) thereby dragging down the educational opportunities for the former in the name of "equality" and/or "fairness".

The lack of national standards, including standardized testing to obtain a high school diploma, results in a high school diploma meaning virtually nothing to prospective employers. A high school diploma should mean, for example, that the individual holding it can do basic algebra and geometry, understand that the Bill of Rights protects one only from government but not employer actions, and communicate in written and spoken standard English. It is not, then, surprising that employers when they have the opportunity look for applicants who at least went beyond a high school diploma and had the discipline to successfully complete a course of study at the college level.

Education is a life long process. School merely establishes a foundation for that process. A proper education through high school is sufficient to embark on the life long learning process - college is not required. This is much, much easier now than it was even 30 years ago before the internet was available to all and content abounded on the internet.

For example in my entire formal full time education, through a Masters in a STEM field, I had little exposure to US Constitutional issues and legal analysis (and, it turned out, much of that I received was flawed, misleadingly incomplete, and/or superficial). However, after I completed my full-time formal education, I developed an interest in US Constitutional issues and now know more about these topics than at least ninety percent of the "populace".

In reality, relatively few pursuing a college degree today actually learn, from coursework, much outside their specialty. A Electrical Engineer major typically learns little about the history of the Crusades and a Performing Arts major typically learns little about Ohm's law or Kirchhoff's circuit laws and neither typically learn much about proteins and their relationship to amino acids.

it's insanely trivial to test memory

True - if you don't expect your test to identify 100% of the problems - esp. those that may be temperature sensitive.

And it's definitely not "insanely fast" even to do a "kind of intense test" which actually belies the "insanely trivial" claim. I've had memory failures that would show up on, perhaps, once every 20 hours of running MemTest+ - and go through many passes which showed no errors.

The one saving grace for San Francisco (and many other expensive areas in California) which will probably keep it from "going Detroit" is climate (fog beats sleet any day in my book). In addition, geography is on its side - coastal city/region and varied geography nearby making being conducive to a variety of recreational activities and make the area aesthetically pleasing.

These attributes alone make it attractive regardless if it's run by "liberals" or "conservatives" (or any other form of "idiots").

Had SF not had these "you didn't build that" sort of natural benefits, it probably would have reacted to the very obvious problems (which existed long before the pandemic - before the pandemic it was becoming known worldwide for its "poop on street" and "shooting up in plain view on the street" type problems) and addressed them responsibly years ago.

The absurd policies of SF politicians (elected and reelected by the voters) have dug a hole fairly deep so it will take a while to fill in that hole and it will be painful - but favorable climate and geography make it likely it will eventually recover -- albeit likely as a very different place run by very different people. If, as I think is likely, a major recession is coming in the next five years, the hole will be made even deeper before it can begin to be filled in.

I did some tutoring in a fairly low achieving school where fifth graders were taking a (I think required) "computer science" class. I was surprised - until it turned out it was mostly learning how to use Word and should have been called something else (perhaps "computer applications").

Students certainly should be able to use and build a basic spreadsheet and use a basic word processing application before graduating from high school. This might be done thorough a "computer literacy" class -- but certainly shouldn't be called "computer science". This would perhaps be akin to the "typing" classes that were once offered and expected to be taken by most students in my high school back in the dark ages.

Perhaps students should be required to do some programming before graduating from high school but I'm not sure of this (and maybe the "computer literacy" course could touch on this enough). They don't need to how to program anything complex but would have been exposed to it and have written a few simple programs. A class dedicated to programming should be called what it is - "computer programming" or "software development", not "computer science".

Don't get me started on the AP "Computer Science" curriculum...

And I'm saying this as someone who considers themselves a "developer" rather than a "scientist" in spite of a BSc and a post graduate degree in computer science from fairly well respected US universities.

for the life of the subscriber

Should be for the life of the structure or replacement structure unless the character of the structure/land changes significantly (such as from residential to agricultural) or until the structure is effectively abandoned for an extended time. Basically, as long as service is being paid for without an extended gap (perhaps more than five years), service must continue to be available.

If it could be done, that would be really great. Until your cell phone battery died....

In most cases that's easily remedied at a person's home. One can maintain a small generator or just use the one that comes with every ICE car - it may not be very efficient, but I can charge many, many phones (even in parallel) with just a quarter tank of gas (and perhaps just the existing 12V battery charge).

Depending on needs I can use various charging strategies. I can charge one phone at a time just off existing 12V battery charge until that battery charge drops below some charge level. Alternatively, I can hook up my cheap 12VDC->120AC inverter to the battery, run the engine at idle, and charge many phones at once (but BYOWW - Bring Your Own Wall Wart as I have plenty of extension cords and power strips but only a few USB wall warts).

With one of my cars, if I inadvertently run the 12V battery too low, I can just push start the car (thanks to manual transmission and perhaps the help of another person to engage the clutch in second gear once I get the car rolling) to get the engine running and get the 12V battery charging (as well as whatever cell phones need it).

Within a ten minute drive of me there are quite a few people who don't have cell service at their homes due to rugged terrain but have had landlines since the homes were built 70 years ago. Their land line service is quite reliable though even during power outages.

As well, a "flat on the side of the road" in this area is not an "emergency" - it's an inconvenience (as the weather is mild) and is (assuming one has had the sense to not buy a car with at least a compact spare) easily remedied via "self help" (get out the jack, wrench, and spare; apply parking brake and put transmission in appropriate gear; loosen lug nuts; jack up corner of car; remove lug nuts; swap wheels; thread and snug up lug nuts; lower car back down; torque lug nuts tight; put away wrench, jack, and wheel with failed tire on it; drive away).

On the other hand, an ischemic stroke is an emergency. If you're at a proper stroke center (which may require a combination of emergency ground transport and helicopter transport) within about three hours of onset of symptoms, you may leave a few days later with few if any side effects. If you arrive at the same stroke center five hours after onset of symptoms, you may be effectively bedridden for the rest of your life (although that life, mercifully, will probably be shorter than it would have been had you gotten to the stroke center a couple hours earlier and gone on to live a normal full life).