What a useless article, typical msmash no-effort space filler.

We get it. AGW bad.

Nothing is accomplished by cluttering a tech site with redundant low-information threads where the audience in no way benefit from yet another piece of space filler.

Office jobs are not the only jobs, but they're the easiest to outsource.

Consider doing something whole nations worth of other humans aren't competing to do. I've never lacked job offers even in retirement because I don't seek to compete with everyone else. I avoid them instead, doing things which require me onsite to personally interact with the systems (aircraft, industrial equipment maintenance etc). Experience matters when ones interactions are more demanding than just a keyboard and mouse.

I get that physically effortless office work is desirable but the point of work is reasonably secure income including resistance to outsourcing. If you're not getting hired at what you wish you were great at, consider a job with less desperate competition.

Why do assume they will pay for anything instead of going bankrupt?

Hard time breaking rocks into gravel is real punishment. Confinement under lax modern conditions is not.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

The New Hampshire Constitution guarantees that the only purpose of prison is reform.

I know, in some self-proclaimed "Christian" states they love to talk about gay rape as a purpose of prison.

Those are psychopaths, Donnie.

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

The first thing that ages in all laptops is the thermal interface material between heatsink(s) and processor(s). Once the TIM begins to dry / age / pump out / degrade, it sets off a positive feedback loop where the chip gets hotter with TIM aging, which in turn gets the chip hotter still and aging the TIM even faster and so on. A little lint and dust in the heatsink will kickstart this even higher.

LCDs didn't have a CCFL backlight prone to aging in a while, and they also mostly avoided OLED so far, so they don't have the other age-prone display technology.

If the laptop is of any value whatsoever, it is built in a way that allows the heatsink / fan to be replaced by a service tech in one hour or less. Most gaming laptops are built that way and many business line models, too. Business laptops have enough spare parts available for cheap, so they win in that regard.

The published MTBF for a part are rarely relevant for laptops and you shouldn't rely on that. Since laptops are carried and used in the full variety of human behavior through the full variety of human environments, their wear levels are varying wildly. For a server HDD, you can assume server room environments with controlled temperature and vibration. For laptops? No way. Some were used stationary in air-conditioned offices, never moved and not even typed directly on them and some were trotted around every day on construction sites in the desert.

Temperature matters a lot for components and laptops usually max out their component temperature limits quite a bit.

If I had two identical laptops with a similar age and wear, I would immediately choose the one that has seen more hours at higher temperatures, although it would be difficult to formulate this in such a way that it can be used mathematically or algorithmically. Laptop A has operated 1 hour at or above the allowable CPU temp of 100 degrees Celsius and 9799 hours at idle with barely higher CPU temps than ambient - vs. laptop B that has never been above allowable CPU temp, but logged 9800 hours above 70 degrees Celsius. Who knows which one is the better deal?

But on a qualitative level, "operating hours x temperature ~ wear" and thus the usage history of the device is relevant for its used value.

> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.

Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

Has to be the USA government, I mean 30 billion yearly... serious money.

Ahh, yes...because it was *top* priority for the Biden administration..or even got a mention on Harris's "four years of JOY!!!11" campaign trail that followed her four years of being VP where she could have attempted to get a subcommittee together in the Senate.

Or because Gavin Newsom or Kathy Hochul or Maura Healey have made it any level of a priority for businesses in their respective deep-blue states.

The Republicans certainly couldn't care less about the issue at all...but let's not pretend that the CFPB cracked the top 20 of priorities for Democrats.