...are, this morning, still curled up in a fetal position and whimpering.

Not true. Copper is no less vulnerable than fiber to a backhoe. It fails just as completely when the circuit has no juice. The days are long gone when all copper lived on a resilient infrastructure with batteries and generators. An awful lot of it leads back to a "hut" with minimal battery power and a fiber backhaul to the CO.

Not at all. I'm certainly realistic enough to admit that I am as susceptible as the next person to the heady seduction of a media stream of "things I want to hear". The one thing that sets me apart is that I had the good fortune to have teachers who taught me to question authority. If employing that lesson in the way I judge the veracity of things I read "on the Internet" is "full of myself" so be it, but that so many lack such discernment is beyond dispute.

First of all... [citation needed].
Second, and more to the point, this isn't about email. No one ever said it was. It is about trust and risk management. Even if it was demonstrated that U.S. intelligence agencies had compromised Symantec (or whomwever), there is just a little bit of a difference in that scenario than the now solidly attributed one where Russian intelligence (not to mention Israeli) had thoroughly compromised Kaspersky. How the fuck are those two scenarios equal in any way when it comes to judging which vendor to chose for an extremely critical role in your organization's security? My U.S.-centric point of view is noted. The rest of you may be excused.

Just in case there's somebody who didn't get the brilliantly subtle comment that parent made, FOSS software does exactly this (distributing the cost of development among multiple customers/contributors).

Really? So you think that an unsubstantiated bullshit opinion piece is "well thought out"? OK, not that I think you'll have the guts to reply, but do tell. Where is this idiot's support the the following assertion...
"...conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness..."
No shit? Really? In my experience, just the opposite is true, but the difference between me and a conservative jagoff like that (and you, apparently) is that I am willing to admit that I'm just talking about my own experience, and that that experience inevitably colors my view to a certain extent. If I were actually writing a scholarly piece, I'd support my assertions with, you know, facts. This guy's screed reads like the whining of butt-hurt, immature asshole who has never learned the first thing about sexism.

[citation needed]

Spoken like a typical, entitled, sexist, racist jagoff.
No. Those things don't happen if you aren't a racist, mysoginist, or xyz-ist asshole. If you treat your employees fairly, and in a manner that makes it clear that you value them, word gets around. People want to work for you. Hell, they'll even go to bat for you because they value being treated fairly.

Huge wast of space. Stop letting "designers" do UI.

This. It is neither exploding nor AI. What's widely being called AI is nothing more than "machine learning". Not the same thing. At. All.

That notion holds that the "invisible hand" only works where customers are adequately informed about the marketplace and the things of interest to them in that marketplace. It really does not apply here. Amazon is perfectly within their rights to say, "My WiFi. My rules. Go get informed on somebody else's network."

Yet another group is placing a bunch of motor/propellor units on an "airframe" and calling it a flying car. Bad design. Very bad. The loss of any one of those powerplant/propeller combinations means the thing now "flies" just slightly better than a grand piano. Jeezuz, even a helicopter gives it's pilot at least a shot at a good landing (defined as one you can walk away from) in an engine-out scenario. This design has been a horrible idea since Moller came up with it, what, fifty years ago?

...it's the product. You turn out unimaginative shit, and expect people to pay ever increasing amounts of money to sit in a theater where the management doesn't give a shit about "the experience" (Alamo Drafthouse and McMenamin's, you're off the hook for that part), and then you wonder why people stop paying? You might want to spend little more money on effective market research. And no, home theater isn't the cause either.

Your question betrays either an inability to appreciate critical nuance, and/or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the practical truth - that too much CO2 in the atmosphere is bad. The list to which you assign CO2, pollutant or non-pollutant, does not matter. See if you can wrap your small brain around that.

Our "leaders" will tell you that the economy is in good shape. And they can do that, because they changed yardsticks during the Reagan years. All the economic conditions that virtually created a middle class that could reasonably expect to do things like graduate from college debt free, or work in a trade that paid a living wage, buy a home, put kids through college, etc., no longer exist.