I didn't need more tchotchkes. Putting a CD in the microwave for a few seconds is amusing the first time, possibly even the second or third, but the novelty wears off very quickly.

It's not just that, it's a problem of too many students compared to the positions in the workplace. For some occupations there are more graduates annually than there are jobs in the whole profession. Communications and Journalism immediately springs to mind.

For a lot of college students, they go to college because due to societal pressure they're supposed to go to college. That doesn't mean that they'll end up any better off in the workforce after college though. And more insidiously it causes employers to place requirements or preferences for college graduates on jobs that are not served by that educational experience.

...when many of the most over-exposed techbro billionaires didn't finish college?

What do they expect when the narrative that people have gone into deep debt in order to pay for college tuition for degrees that get them the same positions as those without college degrees have is so widespread and frankly, true?

What do they expect when so many states are basically violating their own public institution charters for affordable education and allowing tuition, or add-on fees in lieu of tuition hikes they aren't able to make, cause the cost of even a supposedly merit-based, public education has gotten to the point that someone can't earn enough to pay for school?

What do they expect when even having a college education doesn't provide a living wage to let one afford to buy a house or to have a decent apartment without requiring roommates in order to get by?

What do they expect when even with a degree and with experience, employers treat them only like liabilities and look to shed workers whenever possible, regardless of what sorts of ongoing contributions they make exceeding their salaries?

AOL was the catalyst but since the etiquette pre-Eternal-September was not codified and only enforced through browbeating new users into feeling uncomfortable to get them to comply shunning them if they did not, it was going to happen regardless of what service provider expanded offerings to the general public. It was just that AOL got there first.

I've moderated on forums before. It's a pain. It's thankless at-best, and at-worst one has to respond to schmucks that won't accept that they're out of line and will try to evade bans. And that's with moderation tools that make it possible, on a forum that's privately owned and tightly controlled.

I remember attempts to moderate on Usenet, and it really didn't work. It was too decentralized, there was insufficient central authority to enforce or to delegate to moderators, and then the volume of garbage got so bad that it simply wasn't worth it anymore.

yeah. I'm having a difficult time believing that, but then again I don't know what products or services are offered under the AOL brand either.

Last time I paid attention to AOL, it was being annoyed when they switched from 3.5" floppies to CDs for distributing software for their service, because the new medium was no longer reformattable for reuse for whatever I needed it for.

My supposition is that it would make it harder to hide when the cash-flow has exceeded the revenue and reserves. It would allow insolvent firms to remain operating for longer because it's harder to verify that they're out-of-whack. Entities they do business with that might well end up being creditors in a bankruptcy would possibly be deeper-in with failing firms because it wouldn't be so obvious that partners need to pull back against a firm that might not be able to make net-90 terms.

No. They tried that for OEM-licensed Windows on new computers where the purchasers wanted to run other operating systems. Didn't work then either.

The thing to keep in mind is that the march of technology has always been oriented toward reducing the number of people required to do something. Arguably the single most significant development that led to the modern 'digital age' was Guttenberg's movable type printing press, as it basically took the work of scribes painstakingly rewriting books by hand into new physical volumes and turned it into a process that could mass-produce (for the time period at least) the text of the same works in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the labor.

This had downstream effects on recordkeeping and led to the development of other tools like the typewriter, itself ultimately leading to digital records systems and the modern computing age. At each step along the way, the number of low-level clerks has reduced, and I've seen it firsthand in my own lifetime, where a department's office would have an executive secretary, an administrative secretary, and a receptionist, slowly eliminate to just a single person because so many of the clerical records duties or other secretarial duties were reduced or eliminated by technology.

Now, that said, these tasks were not typically oriented towards decision-making so much as following procedures. That's why these tasks were able to be automated or otherwise condensed or shifted to different personnel, because they were just performing rote steps that were able to be automated. AI could end up being different in that they're now trying to replace creative or conclusion-drawing tasks with it, something that may or may not work out in the end. Right now it's definitely not ready for it, and given how easy it seems to be to poison AI's fundamental dataset, I am left wondering if it ever will be, or if so many jobs will be needed to 'curate' that dataset that it draws upon that in the end it won't really save money. It'll just transfer that money to contractors instead of local staff.

And that's partly because there hasn't been a market for their services. It's difficult to justify costs when there's no use for the thing.

I could see airships being useful if they can deliver turbine blades without even requiring the local resources of that airstrip capable of handing this proposed plane. It could be especially handy if an airship could deliver more than one blade at a time. Undoubtedly a construction yard of sorts would be required for depositing the cargo, which itself is presumably going to be under-slung, but it could even be that the construction yard's mooring tower itself would eventually serve as a wind turbine pedestal, giving even more utility to the site once the rest of the construction is complete. Or if the construction yard is too far from the actual windfarm in order to be where the air is less challenging to aircraft, might well remain so that later lifecycle can use that infrastructure again.

Figures I found claim that 3000 wind turbines are built in the US each year. Even if only 5% of those would benefit from an airship providing delivery over road and rail, that's still 150 turbines, or 450 blades, per year. A small fleet of airships running regular deliveries from manufacturers to the field could probably handle that where enough of such vessels would be needed to amortize development costs across that fleet, but without producing such prolific numbers as to blot the sky with airships. Presuming delivery of two turbines a week one would need probably a fleet of four or five airships, but if it turns out that oversized blades are popular then it wouldn't be unreasonable to build more as demand grows.

I have seen native-USB-C keyboards, but they're typically mechanical keyboards with lighting effects or are intended for desks where the overall look and feel of the laptop connected to peripherals is important and when there's no docking station involved.

I haven't yet seen a USB-C mouse, nor have I seen a USB-C headset.

I have no idea where you got this notion from. Where I live, bicycles are not supposed to ride on sidewalks, because bicycles are classed as vehicles. They're supposed to be ridden on the street, and in the correct direction of travel for the side of the street that they're on. In some cities even vehicles as minimal as skateboards are supposed to be on the street, not on the sidewalk, and there may be requirements to dismount any 'vehicle' when using a crosswalk except on special-purpose multi-use paths like along the flood-irrigation canal system that runs through the greater city.

Special-purpose multi-use paths are actually marked as such. If they run adjacent to streets and are part of the sidewalk then said side walk is two to three times wider than normal. In other cases cities have chosen to reduce the widths of roads by one or two lanes, and have made what had been the outermost lane into a separated bike lane with barriers isolating it from the rest of the road, and they tend to mark directions for use on said paths if they're bidirectional, or else there's one path on each side of the road like an oversized bike lane intended to flow in the normal road direction of travel.

Kids are tolerated riding on sidewalks because kids are still learning to ride in most cases, but that's inconsistent from city to city in the metro area, some carve out specific exemptions for minors, some do not. Either way though, adults are expected to ride on the roads.

Rental bikes have always been heavy because they have to survive the rigors of users that will abuse them because they don't own them.

Throw the electric element in and they get far heavier yet.

It sounds like there's a need for regulation on bicycle weight as well as speed.

Perhaps. It has become common for multi-capability circuits like that ESP32 chipset to be used even when most of the interfaces on it aren't necessary. That was the first thing that came to mind actually.

Seems like this is a bit on the too-little, too-late side. Offshoring has been occurring for so long that the divisions set up in other countries are mature now. They're able to locally train local staff, not only for providing international support, but for providing local/regional support within their own countries or economic trade zones.

What makes you think that?

I have a 462.900MHz transmitter sitting on a shelf in my workshop. It was previously used by metro-area paging company here. It's just a transmitter. The pagers don't transmit anything to it. It will transmit anything that comes in via encoder/modulator, and anything within range tuned to 462.900MHz will detect that transmission. How the receivers act upon that transmission is another matter, but they will hear it. It doesn't matter if there's a paging company, or a pager system encoder/modulator, the receiving radios will hear it. This includes any remaining pagers that would be powered on, whether there would be the proper encoding and header to indicate that it should be stored or not.

Granted, in this thought-experiment it's UHF, it's comparatively short range, and in this particular case it's very unlikely that any such pagers are online. But at the same time, I could see the actor trying to use this sort of scenario managing to use otherwise-legitimate one-way traffic that must be broadcast to all but is only intended for a particular recipient being listened-for on a slew of devices. I expect that's how the attacks against Hezbollah happened even, the devices were listening for not only their own subscriber's recipient info, but for one for another recipient, one that is perfectly legitimately registered as a subscriber too, so that it could be paged-to with the right code and would cause all the other pagers listening for that subscriber and code to activate. Remember, it's multi-access, it's broadcast, and anything that is so-tuned will receive if it's in range.