and make it worse, until it's enshittified to uselessness.

The college degree loan thing was already becoming a problem when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago. It was fine when one might be borrowing $5000 per year as even entry-level college grad jobs that actually used degrees paid enough to make repayment of those loans doable, but the trouble was that far too many truly entry-level jobs started preferring college degrees when they didn't really contribute, so more and more demand for college degrees among people drove up prices for the limited seats. Which led to a balloon in both traditional colleges increasing their programs and their tuition, and for-profit colleges springing up to try to get in on the act.

Funny, I got a good job in the late nineties doing just that. I was cold-calling and I got hired onto the quality assurance team for a specialized software product. Unfortunately despite the company not being a dotcom they were in investment-building mode and the investor got cold feet so they went under anyway, but it was a good job and the people who hired me did so based on or technical conversations when I cold-called.

My current job I got by having experience with this team when I was at a different employer. They liked me enough they asked me to interview when a prior teammate retired.

There was a crude joke back in the day, that Java was great because it worked on all computers exactly the same way that anal sex was great because it worked on all genders.

Little did we know exactly how prescient that crude joke was going to be as Oracle hadn't yet taken over.

I've seen some temp jobs work out well, but I've seen others where it was not so good.

Temp-to-hire where the employer actually really does intend to hire-on, and uses the temp-process to get to know candidates before making offers is fine. It's actually not a bad idea if basically everyone is on the same page. Temp agency needs to be ready to move people around if various employers do or don't like candidates, and temp-employees need to understand that there could be periods of downtime, and might themselves need to ask the agency for alternate placement if they don't like where they're temping.

On the other hand I've seen temps that were abused very heavily, because regular employees didn't want to do shit-jobs or didn't really want to work at all, with no intent on actually hiring. I've also seen rather odd people working as temps because even in a temp-to-hire arrangement the business didn't like some of the temps but still needed work to be done so kept them around for longer than normal just to complete the task before releasing them.

That's all well and good to say, but that neither addresses what actually changes, versus how some changes have proven harmful and should be avoided if possible even if they're common.

...that a business whose name evokes a movie scene where a hostile alien entity forcibly envelops and implants its offspring into an unsuspecting space merchant-marine doctor would host nonconsensual sexual content?

Artificial Intelligence will never beat Real Stupidity

Since black holes are considered points in space, and a point can't spin, are they still considering spinning black holes (which is essentially all of them) "ringularities"?

And it would seem that angular momentum is likely to increase with each merger, since they're going to tend to orbit each other in the plane of their spinning? And when they merge, that will add to their angular momentum in that plane?

Lastly, I haven't read any discussions regarding "theoretical limits" to how fast a black hole can spin. Would anyone care to elaborate on that? Are we talking about the event horizon dragging approaching the speed of light? I thought there was nothing that said that SPACE can't move faster than c? (or was that the *expansion* of space?) And wouldn't it just be getting closer and closer to c and not ever getting there anyway? (a problem of limits)

F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2

Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge would have little or no measurable effect on a neighbouring galaxy as far away as Andromeda is from us (about 2.54 million light years away).

In fact, it's not until LIGO that we have even been able to detect the mergers of super dense and super massive objects like neutron stars and black holes, just to give you an idea of how the inverse square law limits the influences of gravity over very large distances.

..."Armagh," is what the forecaster said when he realized how miserable the weather was going to be that day.

I haven't seen it either, other than catching snippets of it on TV from time to time. I'm assuming that he's paying for exclusivity, so that she isn't working for other clients.

That said, that's an awful lot of money, better part of $400,000 per year. It seems ... unlikely that the client would directly pay that much. I would see a much more likely scenario where he's putting her up in accommodations and has lines of credit at various stores that she can use, but where she's otherwise on a short-ish lease. Similarly a distaff-counterpart in George Peppard's character as a struggling writer turned gigolo in Breakfast at Tiffany's where his benefactor is providing him with his apartment but he isn't getting a whole lot of actual money from her so that she can maintain control over him and can keep the arrangement somewhat secretive.

I didn't think I'd see Usenet's 'Eternal September' apply to scientific research.

If the number of scientists and doctoral-students increased then it would follow that the number of publications would need to increase, but it sounds like at some point the wheels came off and the rigor in evaluating research was left behind.

The problem here is that people cannot seem to understand that "private" and "privacy" are related but not the same thing. Private is what happens in my house that nobody outside should be privy to. Privacy is the illusion that everything we do is private. I liken this to being photographed and filmed in public and the Karen's crying "don't video me". No Karen, I can and WILL video you in public and there is nothing you can do to stop me.

One has no expectation of privacy in public. None. Social Media IS public. Everything on the internet is public. Some things offer more privacy than others, but if its on the internet, it can and likely WILL BE exposed.

Act accordingly.

One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.