Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Am I the only person on the planet who still opens the garage door with, you know, my hands? Is that completely crazy? Am *I* crazy?

What possible legal use does a "mixing service" provide?

Crypto transactions are already almost entirely comprised of cash flows to support illegal activities. Help me understand why we should give a crap about the shutdown of a mixing service.

Best,

You mean we won't have an army of these kids fresh out of school filling our inboxes with gigs of eye chart spreadsheets and powerpoints? How can we survive? Oh wait, we can get more or less the same tripe with feeding the same data to some fairly easy to recreate AI models?

Save yourself LOTS of time/cash and black hole the domains of these "big 4" firms at your border now.

the hunger by the 1% to remove as much humanity from the workplace is sickening.

they fully know they are destroying the middle and lower classes (even more than they already have).

they, like the R party, just dont care. they think they are rich and insulated enough. they never cared what their own people need. the 'let them eat cake' time has come back again, but even worse.

there will be no thought to social systems needed to support the unemployed (which will be many of us, given enough time).

I'm glad I'm retiring soon. I would not want to compete in a job market that bosses think can be done by computer, alone.

and I would not want to be the 'prompt meister' to try to coax answers from the machines that make sense.

some see a great future with AI. I see nothing but doom and gloom. the greed factor is strong in humans and the class disparity will cause rioting and civil wars.

maybe not wars. the US has created a special police force that is above the law, so any uprisings will EASILY be dealt with. they thought about that. ICE is not just for foreigners. its a general purpose police force answerable only to 1 person.

people, please show me I'm wrong. but all signs point to a very bad future for 95% of the 'thinks for a living' workforce.

The general dearth of atmosphere, is the main thing that would be holding Mars back from having any really substantial weather phenomena, including lightning like we see on Earth. But apparently there is just about enough atmosphere to support... this version of it.

A goodish portion of medicine is applying an algorithm to a set of circumstance. A large potion of the critical thinking has already been done for you. You just need to isolate which algorithm applies when.

The very best doctors (from a very, very good doctor), are interlocutors, teasing out what isn't obvious from what the patient is presenting an piecing out a narrative of what makes sense.

The critical thinking is much after.

You'd be surprised.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of how to do a thing, there is a fair bit of nuance and institutional knowledge that goes into any job, that isn't apparent from a set of directives.

Sometimes it takes the form of best practices. Sometimes it is knowing what wheel to grease to get something done.

Individually, they may not amount to much, but in totality they make the difference between something running smoothly and pulling your hair out.

And even in the face of this context matters, which is why LLMs make such obvious errors like putting glue on pizza and Carl generally doesn't.

Correct. Flawed as that plan is, moving their capital to a totally new location could cut the population of Jakarta by as much as 10 million people. That could make that city far more manageable.

As long as the vendor (Apple/Google/whoever) is continuing to release updates and patches, with very few exceptions, I don't bother upgrading the device. If there is a hardware fault or the battery is significantly degraded and it's a hassle to repair, that will also trigger an "upgrade" for me. Otherwise, I could care less about the latest whizzbang feature, "AI capabilities," etc.

I remember reading that the Finns started playing over radio frequencies the famous polka song "Säkkijärven polkka," which was found to be extremely effective in shutting down remote controlled land mines the Red Army placed on the ground and causing casualties for several months starting around September 1941. So much so that the Finnish Army ended its jamming practice by spring 1942 as the batteries on the Soviet mines lost its charge.

In many cases we ARE paying a lot for a good education, but we're also not getting the desired outcome in many cases. I took my kids out of public school (in one of the richest school districts in the country) for similar reasons to the OP above. They spent much of their time in class being bored and actively sandbagged by their teachers. On top of that was all the contrived "woke" indoctrination nonsense. They were already getting good grades, but now they are learning significantly faster and actually enjoy the process more.

Best thing we ever did.

The labels don't give a fuck. They have never been on the side of the artists. This is just another way they'll use to game the system to keep most of the profits in the system to themselves.

The same goes for much of the "data" driving their stock mark....er....casino.

Having lived there for years as an expat and seen entire sections of cities with many thousands of newly built flats that were vacant and stayed vacant, I think it's only a matter of time before that house of cards implodes.

The "nong min" don't take kindly to the apparatchiks that have been benefiting from the egregious corruption and self dealing. It's going to be ugly when it implodes.