Seems to depend on location. In my home city in Europe, it was 3-4 times a day, even shortly after the war.

Numbers mean nothing once enough inflation is involved. But back in those same days, a mailman could support a family on his salary. Not a luxury life for sure, but enough to rent a place and put food on the table. Women working was still a somewhat new thing.

Yes, this stuff is moving digital as well. At different speeds in different countries.

We are not slow, we are just "bubble-aware".

> USENET was never this bad

Um, not sure I concur. I encountered nasty trolls and doxing there.

If we start losing a war we will resemble them.

...paid off. Our Bribeocracy in action.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Ay Ay...

Now I interview graduates who canâ(TM)t explain what a HAVING clause does in SQL

I avoid using HAVING when possible, it's screwy to troubleshoot, especially when dealing with nulls. Instead I break the query into multiple sub-queries (CTEs) via WITH statements.

That's DOGE's side of the story. Many employees found out they had to use their personal card for work travel and then file paperwork for reimbursement. That extra paperwork is created and processed on tax-payer's dime.

Cut-first-and-think-later...or quit.

If the crypto pop coincides with the AI pop, 1930's 2.0.

...cheap Russian oil. Profit!

"It looks like you are attempting grift, would you like help with that?"

At least customers asked for Xboxes.

It will be interesting to see how bad the AI bubble burst kicks MS.

But often it ends up the wrong tool for the job, used like a database or application. When the person who made the spaghetti-sheets leaves, everyone is left scratching their heads.

MS-Access would be a better fit, but it's often frowned upon because amateurs have also damaged its reputation. It's possible to write maintenance-friendly apps with MS-Access, it's just not tuned that way out of the box, and "maintain-ifying" an app is not taught.

(Web equivalents of MS-Access so far suck. The web ruins every CRUD/biz/data idea, I've come to conclude, probably because of the LSD-laced DOM.)