...on my PowerPC 620...

They wouldn't fit in the culture of insular, ultra-liberal, upper class Manhattanites that define The New York Times.

Indeed, the only attribute that engineers as a group share with NYT staffers is that they're both extremely white.

Some 7,000 of them, actually, the vast majority hardback first editions. And I'm an SF writer myself.

So I'm a little off the standard deviation.

While Pohl did frequently collaborate with C. M. Kornbluth, "The Marching Morons" is by Kornbluth alone.

Jack Vance
Fred Pohl
Iain Banks
Richard Matheson

I don't think we've seen this many giants in the field all pass away the same year before.

If no one else has mentioned it, read Pohl's story "Tunnel Under the World," which is still a great work.

With the way national governments keep piling up debt, it's unreasonable to assume any of those governments will be funding space exploration in 2030.

...will this "story" go away?

Mainly because it's labeled "skynet.exe".

Gun Transaction Laws (Fast and Furious)
IRS audit laws
The Corrupt Practices Act
Federal election guidelines (especially those to prevent foreign donations)
Not to mention widespread hostility to the 2nd and 10th Amendments.

Apple could do it, but it's a very expensive bet.

TSMC spent $9.4 billion on their latest 300mm fab, and it will be running pretty much 24/7/365 for many, many years. And if Apple broke ground tomorrow, it's still likely to be 3 years before the fab is fully built, equipped, staffed, qualified, and running at full speed. Unless Apple is sure it can get chip volume high enough to achieve real cost savings, it's probably not worth doing.

And by then the industry might have started transitioning to 450mm.

Apple is one of the few companies in the world who could drop that much out of actual cash-on-hand without blinking, but it's a very risky bet with potentially a lot more risk than reward.

One reason there aren't many jobs for older people there is that there aren't many new jobs in California, period. Companies are moving out of high tax, high cost states like California to low tax, low cost states like Texas.

Texas is still hiring people of all ages for high tech jobs. Austin has startups, giants, and government jobs (though you won't get the ridiculous, bankruptcy inducing pensions unionized California's state employees get), and Houston and Dallas have high tech and oil and gas (lots of hardware and software engineering jobs that pay very well). And the cost of living here is radically lower; someone who makes $50,000 a year here can easily afford a house.

If things suck where you are now, maybe you should move someplace things don't suck.

TSMC is a foundry; Apple contracts with TSMC to manufacturer their chips for them.

I found AlltheWeb.com to be the best search engine before the rise of Google. Sadly, they seem to have been acquired by Yahoo and folded into the Borg of Futility.