The graph at the top shows that there was a steady decline between 2010 and 2020. At first I thought a decent amount of that decline may be related to COVID, but the numbers further down show that enrollment in 2015 was about halfway between the values for 2010 and 2020. After 2020, the data shows that the numbers are relatively stagnant and have not "increased consistently".

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bachelor's degrees in 2023, up from 1.6 million in 2010

This data is more than 2 years old. While it tells us about the past, the sentiment that is measured is a better indicator of the future. After all, home sales were pretty strong right before the crash of 2008. Showing the recent popularity of a good or service doesn't disprove the existence of a bubble.

and the fraction of 25-year-olds holding a bachelor's degree has steadily increased for the past 15 years

They claim it's "steady", but there's definitely some subjectivity to that term and they don't provide yearly numbers to allow the reader to make his or her own determination.

Even after accounting for student-debt payments, college graduates net about $8,000 more annually than those without degrees.

The yearly difference doesn't tell the entire story. If the current cost of loans takes more years to be paid back than historically, then the ratio of additional salary over the course of your career versus the total cost of the degree can be significantly reduced. This reminds me of car dealers framing everything in terms of monthly payments instead of total cost of ownership.

Part of the disconnect may stem from misunderstanding how college pricing works. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe everyone pays the same tuition, though fewer than 20% of families actually pay the published sticker price.

The effects of compound interest on the loans contribute far more to the total cost of college than the difference in perception of the base rate. Of course, the two are not independent of each other.

The simple fact is that colleges have become perceived as greedy diploma mills and they haven't done a single thing to change that perception because they took it for granted that society would keep pushing for college education for everyone, regardless of how much they raised tuition. Getting an extra $8,000 per year for having a degree is not chump change, but that number could decline before you graduate in four years. Besides, the number to really look at is the break-even age for salaries of the average person with and without a college degree while factoring in student loan payments. I saw an article over ten years ago that compared that number using a truck driver as an example and the break-even age was in the low forties back then. I can only imagine with the large increases in tuition and the compound interest on top of that, it could be approaching the age of 50 at this point.

They aren't even trying...

They don't have to try because:

• - MAGA is a cult and its member are incapable of finding any faults with their leader
• - Trump doesn't need votes anymore, so he no longer has to pretend like he's some sort of populist

The band I'm in is from the east coast. We recently played some shows in the middle of the country and while waiting in line for the bathroom at a gas station, one of my bandmates noticed that the shopkeeper asked every single customer "What kinda Zyn do you like?" in what he described as a repetitive, NPC-style behavior. Despite the fact that none of the customers had previously shown interest in a tobacco product, almost every customer purchased a pack of Zyn. This shocked us and became a running gag throughout our trip as we were amazed to see how many people in that part of the country chose to chew.

The highest birthrates in the world are in countries like Chad

It would figure that Chad has the most children!

tells you all you need to know

Yes, Apple's questionable decisions inevitably spread to other manufacturers like a virus.

True, and yet a human would likely still be liable for making the false statement and a defense of "I heard it somewhere" will likely not get the person very far in court.

In the past, search delivered a list of links and excerpts from web sites that are related to the user-generated query and contained no unique materials generated by the search provider. However, an AI-generated summary contains information gathered by the search provider's algorithms and is published as a statement of fact by the search provider. It may be possible that they have a claim in the ToS that they have no liability for the veracity of that information, but simply making a claim doesn't mean it's true in the eyes of the law. I believe a statement like this may not qualify for the protections offered by Section 230 of the CDA because I believe that applies to user-generated content, not content generated by an employee or algorithm of the publisher. I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will shake out, but I think Google, and all other providers of AI content, should be at least a bit worried that they could be liable for content generated by their AI algorithms.

If that is the complete list of monitors for CES 2026, that means it will be three straight years without updates to the ultrawide lineup. When the hell can I get a QD-OLED version of the 57" dual-4K ultrawide? FFS, I'll sign my bank account over to Samsung if you just make the damned thing.

If I need to look up the definition of a word, I do what everyone else does and go to urbandictionary.com.

Agreed. That is why I hesitate to recommend Linux to people. I realize that a part of the reason Linux seems to work so well for me is that my extensive experience with it allows me to resolve issues much more easily than new users and for any issues that don't have an easy solution, I've learned to work around those issues. I'm just pointing out that it goes both ways, as I discovered when attempting to use Windows for the first time after fifteen years of avoiding it.

Both siding Linux and Windows does absolutely nothing for Linux

My intent was to show that Windows has many warts as well. When people use a tool for a very long time, as Windows users have, they tend to look past many of the drawbacks of that tool because they've changed their behavior to avoid those deficiencies. In many cases they do this to a degree that they sometimes forget the deficiencies even exist. This was my attempt to shine a light on at least one of those deficiencies.

Burying our heads in the sand while chanting "proprietary software has problems too" is how we got to this point

Gotten to what point? Linux is better than ever and has a higher desktop share than ever. It's not dominating, but who says that it has to? It's continuing to gain hardware support, it can play games better than ever, and it has far more familiarity and favorable attention than it has in the past.

Where Microsoft makes the best IDE for Linux, but being open source and cross platform, why use it on a Linux system?

That's certainly debatable. However, it is interesting that VSCode is more reminiscent of old-school OSS software than anything else MS has ever released: it's highly modular, it comes barebones but is customizable and extensible enough to allow users to complete it the way they want, and its early versions had no way to configure the UI other than editing a text file. No wonder Linux users took to it so easily!

The point where most "Linux" systems don't actually have Linux, they're OSS utilities in a WSL terminal on a Windows desktop

In many cases, this is because people are either complacent or want to use their computers to run software that only works in Windows. Both are understandable and if Windows works well enough, why would they look elsewhere?

or Brew on a Mac

Most people using Macs are doing so because they like the hardware. Unless System76, Tuxedo, or a new entrant suddenly makes hardware that rivals Macbooks, Linux will not entice these users one bit and it has little to do with the OS itself.

because Linux software distribution not being "desktop scale" is the understatement of the decade

I'm assuming "desktop scale" means having a single package management system. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be a major hurdle at all for the many games and apps that have native versions for Linux.

The whole idea of a Linux OS, as in a unix-like OS built with Linux and free software, it's a fantasy on desktop

Apparently I've been living a fantasy for nearly three decades.

its best days were behind it on server

Thanks to native containerization, there's never been a better time to run a Linux server. Besides, what else would you run on a server other than maybe BSD?

I know Linux still has tons of room for improvement, but I refuse to see it as a failure because it never became an overnight sensation. In many ways, I like its niche status because I feel like it provides some insulation from enshittification. If everyone was using Linux, companies would be far more tempted to inject it full of ads and dumb things too far down to avoid overwhelming new users. At the moment, it's actually in a bit of a sweet spot between having really good support but not being over-commercialized.

My point isn't meant to imply that Linux never has these issues because I've never encountered them. Instead, it was meant to show that Windows isn't immune from these types of problems either.

I don't disagree. I was just pointing out that it took both sides of the aisle to come together and fuck us.

That's funny because coworkers in my office were always complaining that the office printer would disappear from the list of configured printers in Windows. That never happened on my Linux laptop.