Making this a generational war isn't going to help. It deflects from the real culprits: The financial industry and the colleges themselves. The incentive for the finance biz was obvious. It's another payment stream, and they got the cherry on top of it not being discharged in bankruptcy. The incentive for colleges is that when education is financed, it now makes it possible for them to raise tuition and other expenses. When you pay out of pocket, you're cost conscious. When something is financed, you're tempted to price it according to whatever payment you think you can afford in the future. Even if you don't, other people do and that will allow prices to rise. You're a price-taker in the market. You have no choice, except to turn away or maybe go with something cheaper and perhaps less prestigious; but that's going up too because everything is financed.

So it's not inter-generational conflict. That's deflection, and before some young socialist yells "class war!" that's not it either. Everybody is greedy. Socialism is just an alternative marketing plan developed by another bunch of suits, with an aim of going straight for power and relying less on money to get there.

So what's the answer? Rooting out corruption and greed, without regard for the cynical fronts of "generational war" or "class war", or whatever "war" is being pitched to accrue power to yet another bad actor.

Why would China (or India) struggle with a shrinking population? That, in and of itself, should also be a reprieve! I could understand an aging population (like Japan).

Once worked with a vendor named NOMBAS. I thought it was an amalgam of the founders' initials. But when I asked, was told it means "NO MBAs! Because I'm never hiring an MBA, again, as long as I live!"

People are grasping at how O2 could be liberated from molecules, and photosynthesis is the only known way. What if the O2 were not liberated? What if it were always there but the other molecules were reduced?. This line of thinking got me to aerotolerant anaerobes as a possible mechanism for creating such deposits.

The list of requirements is: 1. A bunch of these guys trapped down there with your typical N2+O2+trace gas atmosphere typical of Earth, or perhaps some other O2 rich atmosphere that existed earlier in Earth's history. 2. They thrive down there, and all their competition dies off. 3. They're not just a little aerotolerant, but *very* aerotolerant, evolving to the point where they could survive until they run out of the other elements they need and of course 4. None of the other things down there react strongly with O2, and sedimentary rock layers trap that environment until now, when they crack and release the gas.

It's a lot of coincidences and takes time, but not more than the coincidence and time for life to evolve in the first place.

But the imagine the huge white "dandelion" puff when scoring a direct hit.

Even to this day, sounds to me like

Dir-ty Deeds
Thun-der Cheeks

Remember when you could just arbitrarily change your colors? I seem to recall that if you did it in Windows (or perhaps some other popular Windows software) there would be a warning if you attempted to choose a setting with insufficient contrast.

How did we get from there to companies announcing a 2nd color scheme as if it were some kind of achievement?

Also, POKE 53280,0 and maybe POKE 53281,0. One or the other was border and screen color on a C-64, and 0 was black. So literally, what we could do with a couple BASIC commands in the 80s is some great new feature?

For these reasons, the phrase "dark mode" is rather triggering for me.

I think our high school did a surprisingly good job of this back in the 80s. We had NEC 8-bit computers and yes we coded on them; but a lot of the course was off-machine instruction that talked about algorithms. I especially remember a video we watched about sorting which outlined a number of sorting algorithems. At the end it compared them in real time using a simple graphic. Then we coded up bubble sort and quick sort on the NEC. Funny thing about that--bubble sort completed in a reasonable time, but we had a devil of a time getting quicksort to work and never figured out why. I look back on that and wonder if there was some overhead for our pathetically small value of N that would be irrelevant on modern hardware, if needed instructions were painfully slow on the NEC, or if us noobs just screwed the pooch on a more complicated algorithm. In any event, it was a lesson in how what's theoretically faster might not always work out for you. If I were on deadline and only had a NEC with a small amount of data, bubble sort might be the way to go!

The same thing could be said of music. Most people will never even play for tips in a coffee shop; but being exposed to an instrument is still good. For the love of all that's holy though, not the recorder.

I've heard Canadian schools teach kids ukulele. So much nicer, and you can get a plastic uke for $20 retail, probably next to nothing if you sent them to schools. I was talking to a musician lately who told me about that and he said the big advantage is that not only are the frets close for small hands, you can also SING while you play. So much better than that awful flute. There's some video out there with accomplished musicians playing recorder, and it still sounds bad.

So yes, expose kids to code but expose them to CODE, not some lame proprietary BS that's the software equivalent of a recorder. Good ol' BASIC with line number would even be OK. Just give them a few weeks. Most will not care, but for a few the light will go on, just like music.

Oh noes. A $trillions company is having a hard time putting another layer of icing on the cake. I'm going to lose so much sleep over this.

OK, I think we're pretty much on the same page regarding non-individuals lobbying, although there's a distinction to be made between things like AARP as opposed to Chevron. With modern technology, there's an argument to be made that you don't need non-profit advocacy organizations either because they could (in theory) mass-filter emails from individuals or something to get an aggregate opinion of what retirees really think, as opposed to AARP's reps. Not picking on AARP in particular, just using it as an example of a lobbying organization that isn't a for-profit corporation.

As for being in government 10+ years, there's more to that than the old boy's club. For better or worse, Congress has committees on various topics, and people on those committees accumulate expertise as well as power when serving over multiple terms. It might seem reasonable to remove such things from the political sphere entirely, appointing panels of experts in budgeting, the environment, etc. but that would inevitably lead to criticisms of "Who voted for those people?" or "it's the deep state". These committees are, AFAIK, an unwritten feature of the system that has cropped up over time, and I think some of them even involve handling classified data.

So for better or worse, we've got a system where tenure has value. Is it really a great idea to take out somebody with 10 years of experience on the Foreign Relations Committee? Maybe we allow the committees to be composed of members of Congress, and alumni so the experience doesn't go away. The alumni wouldn't vote, but would simply advise. They'd have to draw comparable pay, perhaps more because of that experience.

Lobbying is too broad a thing to make illegal. It encompasses legit activity such as writing your Congressperson. The right to petition the government is literally a part of the First Amendment.

What you need to target is the appearance of quid pro quo--the funding. Also, the authorship of bills by organizations, ie, Congress subbing out their jobs to special interests. The devil is in these details, because the very people who could intelligently figure out how to do it are...

...people with experience. This is why excessive turnover via term limits is not such a great thing either. I don't think we want a freshmanocracy.

I wonder how this breaks down by working conditions. When I was doing development, I felt like my pay and conditions were top notch. I had no interest in a union taking a cut of my pay because a lot of start-ups don't last much longer than a union contract. Rocking the boat seemed counter-productive to me.

OTOH, I can see how this would be very different in other environments. I've heard game development is very sweat shop, and sounds like it would be ripe for union organizing.

Earlier in my career I was at a company that got bought. I was entry level, non-union support. We were not unionized after the acquisition; but the company that bought us had a lot of unionized workers. Our pay went up considerably after the acquisition and I always attributed that to the "big company with lots of unionized workers" mindset.

I don't know how this poll would have gone 20 years ago. Pro-union sentiment has been rising lately, but this may also be a sign that the tech industry is maturing. When you get away from the 5-20 employee start-ups and in to established firms with 100s of employees, unions start to look more attractive--especially if the company isn't paying in line with industry norms and/or offering options that might "pop" on IPO.

You have an obvious point; but hear me out. If you find water it seems obvious to use solar to split it out as H2 and O2 for fuel; but H2 can be difficult to store. If you can find some nitrogen compounds, it might be better to use the H2 to make ammonia and use the O2 as an oxidizer for methane.

At least part of the problem with those kiosks is lack of standardization and/or stability of design. Just when I start to get muscle memory for self-checkout at one store, I go to another and end up looking like an idiot because my usual store lets me put things on the scale and punch in, but another one freaks out, or it doesn't prompt when I expect it too. I had this happen at Whole Amazon a while ago. Pretty embarrassing to be staring at the thing like a deer in the headlights while my mind wandered, wondering what kind of Twilight Zone I was in because the machine was doing nothing when I thought it should do something. Then the assistant pushed the button that needed pushing, and I blushed and muddled through. they probably think I'm stupid is not a pleasant experience, and I'm no stranger to computers. I just don't expect the UI to change that much, or the experience to be so different from place to place.

You would think ATMs, being involved with finance, would be very stable and consistent but I've seen a lot of different UIs and even changes to the UIs rather frequently. There's always that stupid bill selector nonsense. Who wants anything other than $20s? And when you press the bill icon it honks at you. No. You've got to press the danged plus sign??? If you can honk at me, you can make the bill icon do what I expect it to, right? No. They decided to make it honk at me. It took some getting used to. I hit the plus sign now. That means they'll probably change the UI soon--in fact some of them did. They made it harder to get $100 at a time. You can still do it, but more buttons to press. I gave up sometimes and accepted $80.

Anyway, I digress. I've seen a few of these things in fast food places too and it's just like they say--frequently an assistant has to rescue somebody because the interface was counter-intuitive or the thing just plain didn't work.

I don't expect this go get better. Somebody will always think that making a few tweaks to their picture menu will make it better. User-facing sales terminals are probably going to be one long ever-changing Slashdot Beta for a while. It's just human nature that they think changes are needed, when what's really needed is consistency. Ah, but who's consistency? Why, our new company's of course. We've finally got it. We'll solve all the problems created by your N different UIs by having N+1 UIs. Rinse, lather, repeat. Wait, Shampoo used to be under this tab. WHAT HAPPENED?