From the context, it's supposed to be read as "it's not a bad business model for the companies doing it", what with the mention of revenue streams.

Most of the younger people in the Brexit referendum had voted "Remain" while the older 60+ voters were predominantly "Leave". So you Canadians might want to watch out: never underestimate the power of a cranky voting bloc with plenty of free time.

Ahem... let's continue that hypothetical conversation a bit further.
"We delivered x votes to put you over the top, you owe us, here's what we want you to sup-"
"No."
"But-"
"No."
"We-"
"No."

It's unlikely. Big, powerful, nearly-unaccountable organizations like the NSA would prefer someone a little more... politically entrenched. Trump, unlike a career politician, would actually be capable of saying "fuck these three-letter agencies, tear them all down". Don't take that as me saying he actually would, but he's capable of doing it, and the NSA knows it.

... I can't believe I just said something positive about Trump. Ugh. Our political climate is a fecal monsoon.

I know SpaceX rockets are much more interesting, but Elon Musk really needs to pay more attention to Tesla. A disgusting NDA attempt like this never originates from engineers; it could only have come from corporate businessweasels that have infiltrated his engineering company.

I'm sure Visual Studio works quite well for you. But, to counter one anecdote with another, I found Visual Studio to be lackluster and irritating in a thousand little ways, and its marginally-better code completion isn't enough to make me prefer it over either Eclipse or QT Creator.

As for a 64-bit Visual Studio, my guess is that the code problems of porting to 64-bit are dwarfed by the bureaucratic maze involved in releasing a new edition of a product.

Also, while the situation is slowly getting better, there's still far more commercial software that supports Mac than supports Linux.

"hipster"
"SJW"

You have no idea what those terms actually mean, do you? You just heard them used in negative contexts and know people don't like being called them and, without any further research, decided to apply them to everything you don't like.
The businesspeople complaining about this forced intrusion on their workflows are neither hipsters, nor are they SJWs.

Can you imagine if this attitude was taken by any other company?

"Keurig agents have been sneaking into people's houses and replacing their Keurig coffeemakers with the new, fancy Keurig 10.0. However, the Keurig 10.0 is incompatible with all old 3rd party k-cups. To avoid being 'upgraded', you should leave a sign saying 'do not steal and replace' by your coffeemaker, but the Keurig agents will remove the sign sometimes so you need to make sure to keep replacing the sign if it disappears overnight. Reports have also surfaced of the Keurig agents occasionally ignoring the sign altogether, so some people recommend having someone in the house stay awake by the Keurig at all times to decline the upgrade."

"Tesla owners are facing a forced upgrade to the Tesla Model FU, which now runs on diesel. Tesla officials say that, to decline the upgrade, simply park your car facing towards Redmond when the upgrade agents come by to check. The upgrade agents can come by to check at any time, including when you're in the middle of driving."

I could go on, but do you get my point? People should not be required to be actively vigilant about keeping their equipment from suddenly having massive (and potentially ruinous) changes forced on them.

"David hired an Accounting and Financial Consulting firm to assist in the management of Peachy Printer's finances."
And I'll bet that David just so happens to be the sole employee of said consulting firm.

Woah, there. Don't mock a person for asking a question and trying to educate themselves, even if you think they should already know the answer.

Hah, one of the URLs is "choice.microsoft.com". That's a lovely bit of doublethink from the people trying to force their software down everyone's throat.

"Hey, there's still not enough people signing up for YouTube Red"
"OK, hit the button marked 'Make Regular YouTube Slightly Shittier' once or twice"

No comment on points 2-4, but concerning your first point:
It's true that nobody out-and-out forces young people to take on huge debt, but let's look at their surroundings. Everyone is telling them that a college education is mandatory now if they want to get a good job. All of their peers are taking on student loans, as did all the adults around them that went to college. Their entire environment is screaming "you must take on loans to go to college, and if you don't go to college you will die penniless in a gutter". It isn't fair to hold it against them when they do what every authority figure they know is telling them to do.

I think a possible answer to student debt is to (somehow) put more emphasis on trade schools. Many people going to college right now don't really know why they're there, and just pick the easiest classes and majors to coast through. That takes up slots that could be filled by more driven students, and that allows the colleges to continue raising prices. Find a way to funnel the unmotivated away from college and into learning a trade they find interesting, instead, and we'd get better results all around: more skilled workers with less debt weighing them down.

I doubt it, because both developers I know who own Macbooks have installed Linux on them.