Obviously, there are great open-source alternatives in numerous instances, but, some applications are staples to the point you can't swap them, yet.

Yep, or if they do use JS, you can generally just tell the console to bypass it because most of the time, the console is active, and full out debugging information.

100%

Exactly, because the content is, generally, terrible, so they need a clickbait title so you start to read, before you close the windows or tab 2 minutes in and move on. Take a look at your typical news hour at 6pm, if you cut out the fluff and nonsense, what are you left with? Sure, the weather lady is cute, and honestly, I think that's why half of the people even watch. Even the tech segment, or customer issue segment, is, generally, comically stupid. "Do you know if you get loan, you owe it?".

No, media companies are dying because instead of journalism they produce crap, it's all crap, that doesn't deserve money. Look at the CBC or CTV, it's all short content, empty of value, with either no point, no substance, or just a copy from someone else. If you want compensation for your content, make good content! Why do people fund Lunduke, for instance? His work is generally free, on YouTube and Twitter, but, people still pay because it's good.

Bypassing the lacking paywall filter simply by changing your user agent, or, disabling JavaScript, or using the inspector and deleting the node (yes that sometimes works), doesn't constitute any kind of theft, your browser can already do all of that. Which means a website should expect all of that by design. If you really want to design a "paywall" we've had them for decades, just require a user to login, and until they do show nothing, and once you do, you'll destroy most of your user base.

The claim that the information and reporting is so good, that it warrants a paywall, is stupid. If it's so good, ask for donations and support, and prove the work is good, by having people offer to pay, out of being impressed. Paywalls give the impression that the information / reporting behind them is low quality, and you're only hiding the work because it can't stand on its own.

Fair enough, but speaking more practically, as in my province that's not really an option.

I never made a racist statement because I'm not racist, my point was simply to collapse and consolidate the N services into a few or one. The Accessibility Service department, was just a waste of resources. People needed help, but it was over funded and overstaffed, and still is. I wasn't joking about completing 12-weeks of work in 2-days.

Healthcare was a shit show at the school. The school required you to have insurance, and if you didn't have private insurance, you had to buy the school's insurance. Due to a series of incompetence actions by the lady who ran the insurance, I don't remember her title, I ended up with the school's insurance to spite having private insurance. I honestly don't know why anyone had to have it, it covered zero, literally zero, of my medications. One month I ended up with a bill of just over $3 000 for my meds, the school covered none of them.

Administration was so bloated, five people would be doing the job of one person, but none of those five could resolve anything. I mentioned in a reply that I had an issue with something, and no one could solve it. I marched into the assistant deans office and solved it in 5-minues, after 5-weeks of getting nowhere. Going to back Healthcare, the number of people running Health Services, boggled the mind. There was the lady who managed the insurance, there were another two ladies who dealt with the insurance company. There was a lady who dealt with the insurance refusals, such as refusing to cover medication. One lady worked as resolution officer when you had issues with the insurance, who was different from the refusal lady. A few nurses worked there, all of whom were nice but didn't do much to resolve issues, they mostly did birth control, first aid, and a lot of blood pressure checks. There were multiple heads in that department, who I don't know what they did, there was a doctor and a pharmacist who consulted as well. That's from memory, but I might be missing some people.

Software wise, I know they didn't get everything for free, maybe Microsoft did throw license packs around like a gangster in a club, so I might be out to lunch on the that point. One of the packages we had to use, this was 2010–2012, was $$$$ expensive, and the school bought 20+ licenses for it, at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars. I remember asking one of my professors why we had to use it, and why we couldn't develop an Open-Source version in house because it wasn't special. It was some low end, crappy, lab book software, that crashed a lot.

Again, I might be out to lunch on the program idea, I don't know, but I would think it cost more to run those programs / courses that don't bring in the high skill students. The other thing about the atriums, and other frill, a lot of it wasn't covered by rich people because the tried billing us for it in fees, but Ontario allowed you to bow out of fees that were fluff and pointless, I'm paraphrasing. Basically, every one refused to pay for those things because why are broke students, bread line students, paying to look at a rock wall, in the middle of a hallway, with a water feature?

The school I went to was financing everything using international students, and over charging them to make up the short fall. When Canada limited international students from entering, the schools couldn't make up the short fall, and hence now they're laying off people.

I believe your account 100%. In my first year of university I had an issue, doesn't matter what it was. For weeks, I spent time trying to contact people in Student Services, to help. Always got a run around and nothing happened. The answer was: The next person will be able to fix this, every time, yada, yada, yada.

After ~5 weeks, I got pissed off, and walked to the office of the assistant dean, the second or third person in charge. I didn't schedule an appointment, I didn't email anyone, I just walked down, right past the desk of his aide, open the door and started talking. He looked up confused, listened, and said something like: "That's ridiculous, have a seat.". He pulled out a piece of paper, wrote down my problem, and started calling people. In 5-minutes he had it resolved, shook my hand, and I left.

The fallout, security interviewed me, the dean of the program interviewed me, the student services head interviewed me, and a few other people. All the professors of my program got in trouble, I got in trouble, and you know who didn't? The people I wasn't trying to get to solve my problem! My issue could have been resolved by one person, in a few minutes, but due to the vast number of staff, and overhead, it was spinning tires in mud.

That was one issue I had, I had numerous over the years, let's not get started about medical, dear lord.

Maybe post secondary institutes wouldn't be broke, if they focused on education, and useful education. What's useful? Well, perhaps instead of having programs like "The music of Taylor Swift", "Feminism theory", "Women's Studies", "Understanding the Simpsons", and so on, you could just drop them and focus on core programs like Engineering, Maths, the Sciences, and then have on the side programs like History, ART, Philosophy, and make sure the bulk of your funding is come from the STEM programs.

If that's not the path you want to take, maybe get rid of the pointless "extras", for instance why did my university have multiple decorative atriums? Why did the school have expensive art work, and art installations? Perhaps cutting back on the frill, would help, I never used any of the "atriums", as a "hangout", which is how they were sold to the students, and every year there seemed to be some new gimmick.

Should we talk about the grotesque waste in software licenses? Every computer had Windows, and Office, why? Now, if those were free, fine, but were they? I don't know what bulk pricing at that scale might be, but I doubt it was on par with Fedora and LibreOffice. I understand that some specialized software, like AutoCAD, needs Windows, but the vast majority can go free. Even specialized software like MATLAB, just use Octave, and down the stack you go. I took Engineering, the list of software they wanted me to use that was closed source junk, a kilometre long, the number of titles I replaced with Open Source, almost all of them, I think, from memory, there were only two programs I couldn't swap.

Should we talk about Student Services? I know some services are required, but Native Service, Black Service, Gay Service, Lesbian Service, Pride Service, Better not be White Service, X Service, could we not reduce those into one or two, and group them under Accessibility? I worked in the Accessibility office one summer, I got dismissed, why? I completed summer worth of work in 2-day. 12-weeks of work, in 2-days, ya, they weren't busy.

Maybe, we could stop supplementing the yearly budget using immigration? In Ontario, Canada, they cut the number of international students, and now schools are going broke. What did you think was going to happen? Part of the model relied on robbing internation students, to fund all the frill and nonsense, that wasn't core education? Lets go with a combination of all of these, and more, and focus on education, and maybe then, we don't need mass layoffs.

You're right that Computer Science isn't really Software Engineering, but it's merged effectively. We've lost the art of design, and "coding" has become more of a throw it down, test it quick, and ship it off, piece-work industry. I've written programs in those environments, and hated every minute of it. I had an old boss get really annoyed, red-faced, anger, that I added a commented in a PHP script. He claimed it destroyed the readability, then told me to rewrite the code using single line chained statements. He said, paraphrased: "Everything in PHP can be done in a single line, and that's how you need to write your code.". They ended up laying me off because I refused to write unreadable code. This was ~10 years ago, I remember in a meeting, one of the other Sr Devs (I was a Jr Dev), said something like: "I'd review the code for a couple of days to understand it, before making my change.", why...?

I'm a big fan of "flow chart" style program design. If you can't flow chart it, do you understand it? I would argue no, but I can also see where a simple chart might get so complicated that understanding the flow chart requires a flow chart. If you were to look at my requirement documentation, they always have flow charts in them, and as I work through the implementation I work the flow chart into the program. It's not uncommon for 60%+ of my code base to be comments, and that's because everything is explained, outside simple triviality.

I use a paraphrased form of the saying: "With no knowledge of what my code does, and no knowledge of the requirements, you should be able to understand what, why and how of the code, with little effort.". Maybe I did something idiotic, but, there's a comment pointing out what I meant to do, and why, usually broken down into steps, with explanations at each stage and step. If the code has to link back to another area, I'll include documentation for it. If you need to know about gotcha's, guess what's listed! This is effectively flow chart programming, down in code, where you have full insight, or close to full insight, into what I'm doing. You can follow the arrow from box 1 to N, and back.

Eventually I think this is where programming is going to move to. You design the flow chart, and you have an AI walk through with you, and build the code base, as you provide corrections and commentary. The commentary, which in my opinion is important, gets saved into the code base, with annotations, and links to the flow chart, so you always have insight. From there the AI can proceed to compile down to machine code, I don't care, but you leave a developer with enough points of understanding they maintain insight and knowledge, while being about navigate the code, well, still having the AI do the bulky standard syntax fill out, the stuff we all hate, but spend 90% of our time doing.

This is a lot of what I use AI for now! I don't have to sit here and write HTML or write "forEach" loops and "find" statements, the AI can do that, I'll write the comments and review the code, adjusting where I need to.

~32 million live in Texas: https://worldpopulationreview.....

$85 million + $178 million = $263 million.

Who could possible see this as a useful allocation of funds? Is there noting else Texas could do with $85, $178, or $263 million? I can't imagine Texas is so well-off that none of its residence could find a better utilization of these funds.

What's the point on spending 2+ hours debugging a stupid error, where your math is off slightly, or you misused a pointer? Of course the flip on that is what if the AI does the same problem, and now you can't debug it?

I like how you ignored the complete incompetence of the schools. My kids are going to have their phones at school because the school doesn't know how to use phones, technology, or even assure its staff are educated. When you tell children that THC is the activate chemical in cannabis that gets you "high", you need help, and not an advanced deep dive into cannabinoids, the dumbest high school stoner, knows that's wrong. When kids are hitting their heads hard enough to get concussions, and you can't call the parents to alert them, you need help. FFS, for the last 5-years, at the start of every year, I get an email that has every parent and child email in the CC line. Think about that, teachers / schools / boards can't even send an email properly, email.... This is the level of incompetence we have dealt with, so don't be telling my kids they can't have a phone in the class.

Our schools can't call the parents, they lack the knowledge of how to do that. I know that sounds like I'm drunk, or joking, but I'm not. For 8-years, every year the girls bring home forms where we fill our contact information, and contact order (the order you call each contact). In all but one, literally one case, has the school / high school, ever, called the right number and the right person in the list.

We have called both schools, plenty of times. We have called the board plenty of times. I've had the principals read back the information, confirming it. After all of that, in one, literally one case, has either school got it right. Why does the order matter? Well, I work from home, I'm ~500m from the primary school, and 6 km from the high school, available all day. My wife works in a job she can't randomly up and leave, or answer the phone, it could be life or death, I'm not joking, and there are real sanitation / hygiene issues with her answering the phone. My in-laws can't drive, anymore, so they are only used as a last resort to play phone tag. This is not a tricky system, 4 people, 3 numbers, in the order, Dad, Mom, Grandparents. They can not get it right!

Moreover, the schools don't report things correctly. My younger daughter had back surgery in April, in June a kid threw a ball at her back. Do you think the school went into alert mode? No, they didn't even bother to email us, let alone call us, and no incident report was filled out. We only found out, once my younger daughter got home, and explained it to us. One off, meh, but it's been trips, falls, head bangs (concussion level), and nothing ever gets relaid properly. They will call my wife, except she can't answer the phone, and won't, and they know that, but they never call me.

Ignoring that shit show, should we bring up the fact you can look up information? My older daughter gets in trouble for using her phone, to look up information, why? There was recently a cannabis talk at the high school, it was offensive to the concept of truth. They didn't just make a few easy mistakes, they incorrectly defined everything, and I mean everything. I honestly think they got the material from the CBC, that's how delusional it was, and my daughter knew that, and used her phone to show the teachers, but got in trouble... why? As an example, they kept using the term THC, when they meant THCd9, they're not the same thing. I understand Health Canada makes that's error, but as an educator you have to better, they're wholly different chemicals. That's one example of many, but why not let the kids check and verify? Are you so scared you might be wrong, you have to silence information?

Outside of school, my girls still need a way to communicate with everyone, why would we limit that? You can't call us for help, because you might be on a social media? ... Okay, but social media exists regardless if you use it, so instead of hand waving and instilling pointless fear, lets understand reality still exists.