As if anyone here isn't old enough to know about Eliza...

It's simple economics.

Degrees, undergrad or grad, have to be measured in terms of:

1. Raw cost
2. Opportunity cost during the time you go for the degree
3. Time left in your working life in order to recoup #1 and #2.

Once upon a time, for the cost of a few summers working, and a part time job during the school year, you could afford to get a college degree at a public university. The cost was reasonable, and the boost in career opportunities outweighed the lost income during the 4(ish) years you spent in school. If school suited you, this was a slam dunk.

Then at a certain point you needed loans in addition to working to get through undergrad. Rather expensive ones too. However, if you were in state, you'd get a discount. The cost went up, but the boost in career opportunities outweighed the higher cost and the lost income during the time you spent in school. Again, if school suited you, it would take longer for the benefit to show in your life, but if you expected to work for a few decades, the difference in earning power and job opportunity (especially during an era where the US was hollowing out alternatives to white collar jobs), would pay off.

At some point, the raw cost and the opportunity cost reached an equilibrium point with your ability to recoup the cost over your working life... and people started noticing that the bet that they were taking - that they'd remain employed long enough post-higher education, at a rate of pay better than what they would have had without the degree, was not as solid as they would have liked.

One wonders if during this time period, if there had been a competitive alternative to higher education tracked in US schools, such as apprenticeships (normally starting at the start of high school), whether we would have hit this "crisis" of higher education. I think with viable non-college career paths, which would have paid from the onset, and provided an applied pathway for schooling (you still need an education even as a plumber or welder, it's just not credentialed as a college degree), there would have been checks against runaway college costs. The lack of competition, coupled with railroading students K-12 onto a college track, allowed colleges and universities to respond to increased demand by... raising prices.

Looked up details on the wording, and it may not be just a logistical nightmare but a legal impossibility. The law appears to only apply to specific platforms, and no Mastodon servers appear on the list. New instances wouldn't either, so there'd be no legal basis for trying to force them to ban teens.

I bet a large enough number of those kids know enough to know about Fediverse-based services like Mastodon to start spreading the word. Instead of a dozen large social media platforms, the government will be faced with thousands of bulletin-board-sized "services" networked together into a platform that has no single place you can go to deactivate accounts. Controlling that would be a logistical nightmare.

...will spring up and brake windows ... twice!

Most devs at Amazon are probably not working on AI engines.

...24%

This might be GoatseGPT, don't click!

There are tools designed for such financial work that use idioms and formulas finance people know. These people outgrew Excel but don't want the usual frustration of converting.

Science is a system of checks and balances, but doing checks and balances has no glory, so too many skip that. It's like playing defense roles in sports, nobody gets laid playing defense.

1. Amazon orders own devs to use their AI tool Foo
2. Devs reluctantly follow orders
3. Foo usage goes up
4. Amazon brags about high Foo usage in ad
5. Suckers see ad, buy Foo
6. Profit!

Bots will make MORE dupes, this is the Slashdot Way.

They are drunk off investor cash

It reminds me of all the freebies one could get during the dot-com bubble; once it popped ads became ever more frequent, then they required payment for service, then they died.

Put Wonder Woman in the room, they'll write better.