Probably Q wormholed it into our galaxy just to mess with us!

It's clearly a biased example intended to make the white collar readers of the WSJ feel good.

In reality, another example of a non-internet job is NBA professional basketball player. Those guys make plenty of money, Internet is NOT required.

But then again, listing those examples would make some of the white collars question their life choices...

Yes, there are corridors and city pairs in the U.S. where high-speed rail could get people from one city to another quickly and efficiently. But what do they do when they get there? How do they get around?

...laura

They should standardize it. Then they'll have three!

The Grand Canal of China is 1776 km. California Aqueduct is 640 km. Los Angeles Aqueduct is 375 km. Rasht known as the "City of Rain" (Shahr-e BÄrÄn) is about 300 km from Tehran. Start digging the aqueduct!

Obviously, many people use Microsoft products, but not productively. You can't use them productively, the latency on their tools is so extreme, it's a fluke if you can get anything approaching “real-time”. Even if we ignored that major issue, the constant feature break, confusing circular portals, broken licensing, predatory licensing, lack of support, and everything else put together, you can't be a professional and a Microsoft user. At best, and I'm being generous, you could be an unwilling fraud posing as a professional, but that's as far as I'll go.

Not to mention, 85%+ of the computers on earth run a Linux / Unix variant. The vast majority of what you use or do, has to be done on Linux or Unix, which really poses the question, why does anyone hold out to be part of the 15%? If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly on preinstalls, I don't think they'd have any desktop share.

It's not the year of Linux on the desktop, that's been a meme for 20+ years. Providing the computer you buy comes preinstalled with Windows 11, Linux isn't going to become the new desktop king, but it already has every other market, so do we care?

Excel is a great example of a terrible and broken program. Contrast Excel against LibreOffice Calc, and it's striking the quality difference, and usability difference. Don't waste time learning Excel, learn Calc, and you'll be fine, then just tell everyone they have to use ODS, and you're off to the races.

If the feature count means 90% of the features are rushed, broken, nonsense, what use is it?

No they won't. Trump will simply move his Gold House to Aspen, CO. Problem solved.

I hate to say I told you so, but..... I told you so! The economics of capital and resource intensive AI services coupled with low demand needs somebody to step up and pay for it. It's not the users, who don't value AI enough to cough up real money and so must be tricked into using it for free. It's no longer the investors, who have put in real money for the last 3 years and are starting to ask for real returns on their investment, not a Ponzi scheme. The last resort to pay for AI are the advertisers. Like advertising in search, advertising in AI will cause the service to degrade and lose its value.

And that's why I use adblockers etc. Because, it's not my job to subsidise the free products with my eyeballs. If it's free, then it's free. If it's free, but you want something in return, then it's a seedy bait-and-switch tactic designed to bypass the normal pricing mechanism. Money is the normal mechanism used for regulating supply and demand.

Tut tut. I am not surprised anyone would say this if they have a very narrow exposure to human beings, and no children. Anyone who has children, or knows somebody who has children, would not be surprised that anyone expected that these things actually would work. In particular, your original impulse is spot on. You really should tut tut and say that these companies are predatory and lying about the capabilities of their products.

I'm fine with the repeated addition. My objection is the OR in your statement. Apparently not. The question was 5x3 and the kid wrote 5+5+5=15 and got marked wrong with no explanation because the teacher wanted 3+3+3+3+3=15. So I guess that you would have had a 50% chance of being marked wrong on a 2nd grade arithmatic worksheet as well, as absurd as that is. Correct answer notwithstanding.

BTW, that's not at all new. We covered multiplication that way in the 3rd grade back in 1975. Memorizing the table was just to make it quicker. I quickly "discovered" the commutative property while looking at the multiplication table and cut my memorization load in half. The part that confused the father was why is 5x3 = 5+5+5=15 "wrong".

As for 37+55, we decomposed that in the '70s as well, but I soon decided the easier decomposition was 37+55= 87+5 = 90+2=92. So I would say that meme was just someone wanting to complain. Of course the "old way" ends up in 30+50+10+2 anyway.

Shut up and memorize was not in practice during the education of the parents of today's students.