It's good to be the King.

and lived happily ever after.

Zoning and developers followed the desires of our parents and grandparents. You may not like cars but they were seen as the embodiment of freedom for your ancestors - go anywhere you want, quickly, and on your own schedule.
The parts of cities that didn't support that attitude languished (inner cities) and areas that did flourished (suburbs).

TLDR: Infrastructure conformed to the culture.

High voltage, compact size, easy to make. I'm sure this will somehow be used in porn first (the 'how' eludes me but there seems to be a Rule 34 about tech) - yet "Everything that can be weaponized, will be weaponized..."

Sweden
Area: 450 sq km - Roughly the size of California
Population: 9.7 Million. 85% of which is Urban (8.2 million)
i.e. The city of New York (8.4 M) with a resource base equal to the state of California.

Yeah, that's an apples-to-apples comparison, for sure.

Because every time an HP leader breaks the law the employees must take the training.

HIV only kills ~5% of the T-cells.
Newly discovered pyroptosis pathway kills the other 95%
This is a radical departure from the accepted mechanisms of how HIV works. Pyroptosis can be triggered by a boatload of different inflammatory processes, I'll be looking forward to their smoking gun that HIV is the cause.
With all the research money poured into HIV research, it's taken them 20 years to notice this?

THAT'S NOT FUNNY!

The more MBAs in your organization the less innovation you will have.
They don't think in terms of success through better (or more diverse) products, only in squeezing maximum efficiency from everything - Marx would applaud them.

Nothing I hear about education fraud in India surprises me since one of my Indian coworkers explained how people "buy" degrees from Indian universities.
University employees can be bribed to create the records for an entire curriculum, spanning multiple years of attendance. This record is indistinguishable from a valid one and generates a real diploma. The University will confirm education because "it's in the system".
I think he said it cost about $3000 USD or so for a Masters degree.

He's right that there are opposing ideologies, but Liberal/Conservative just muddies the water.

Utopian believes:
1) Zero defects is achievable and support processes should assume that will be the case after release.
2) "Good code" is the result of using an "industry standard" language.
3) That full functionality specifications can be collected during design from the people who will be using the system.
4) Achieving 1-3 is more important than delivering the functionality requested by the users.
5) Considers that the delivered project will be "complete" and further modifications will be minimal.

Pragmatist believes:
1) That defects are inevitable and support processes need to allow for easy/quick recovery.
2) "Good code" should be inherently understandable by the majority of those who will be making changes to it.
3) That human memory is spotty and nobody is able to tell you 100% of what they know.
4) Delivering software that meets the needs of the user is more important than perfection of the code or processes.
5) Understands that the world changes and the software needs to make those changes easy.

As you can guess - I'm a pragmatist.

Also Hambly's "Dark" series (Time of the Dark, Walls of Air, Armies of Daylight + Mother of Winter) - for a mix of science and magic.

I second DeChancie and the Starrigger series - time travel via an interstellar road system. Gotta love it.

Also Roadmarks by Zelazny (well, pretty much anything by Zelazny)

Modern management philosophy depersonalizes employees into interchangeable resources. There is Management, Knowledge Experts and "Cogs".
They don't even care that it's more expensive using cheap programmers to get a job done - it's worth it to them to not have to depend on any individual contributor.

Old programmers can tell you that software has always been a type of art. An esoteric form of art perhaps, but a piece of well written code is a thing of beauty.