"Plenty of ocean" does not mean "plenty of hydroelectric". I'm not sure you even understand what hydroelectric power is. Maybe you're thinking wave/tidal. Our grid battery storage globally is under 1/100th of 1% of what what's we would need to level things out for even a day. To call it a rounding error is wildy overstating things and to scale it 10,000x would be a lot more expensive, in Euros and environmentally, than building reactors.

If they wanted to... they would. From where I see it, about 15% of Republicans in power really do want a faster track, sane, points-based system and will vote for it in Congress, about 50-60% of Dems would, but that together doesn't make a working coalition to get anything much accomplished.

So at the end of the day, we can blame a decent bit of this (like many other things) on Jack Welch and his "fire a quarter of the company every year" management strategy that has become pretty much the universal dogma of the last 40 years. Everyone Gen X and later grew up with the spectre that dad could get fired any given day, due to neither personal or corporate performance, and mom would probably divorce him about eight weeks later if he didn't luck into another job.

Make good money when you can. Save (and invest, and no I'm not talking fricking crypto) fully half of it. Move somewhere affordable but halfway nice (college towns are a good bet), keep your expenses low, and go semi-retired/semi-freelance by 45. Consider this as tech career advice from a 3-digit Slashdotter.

Came to say, I've used Free File Fillable Forms for years and years now. But then again, I sorta find doing my own taxes fun (not enough to want to make a living of it for others though!). At least two years where I've discovered some edge case they weren't handling and whoever was responding to their e-mail was appreciative and got fixed within days. But, oh yeah, it's for the nerds! When you get a 'rejected' and the help is an XPath address to an XML validation error... well, it helps to have been a nerd in 2001 sometimes!

Alternative A is directing 10% of your compensation (and umpteen hours) to constant burnout of reinvention.

Alternative B is chasing every paycheck you can when the getting is good, saving north of 50% of it, then retiring frugally to Bulgaria (or rural Indiana or what have you) by your early 40s, beyond which age you're "an old fart".

I took path B, now I get to sleep in and play guitar and disc golf all day. Highly recommended.

I find the best answer, and the only one that really saves money, is to churn. Disney+ has some unique content, totally give them that. So, over Christmas, when I'm parked on my butt and it's cold and dark outside, I pay for a month of it and binge. Then cancel. Some other month, I'll pick up a month of Netflix and catch up on six things. March, I like to watch the NCAA tourney, so I'll pick up Sling for a month. June? It's freaking nice outside and the days are long, why would I have any package?

I figure that's common enough that they're going to have to start charging connect/disconnect fees like the cable operators. Or "1 month is $50 but 6 months is $70".

A decent number of these cars are old enough that, if they had an OTA module, it'd be pre-LTE and thus not able to connect to crap in 2023. The same 'time marches on' issue is very likely to be true of 11-year-old Teslas in the next decade.

India is already at sub-replacement fertility as a whole. The states where Infosys is most active (Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh) have fertility rates about the same as Hungary and Romania. Really. You also have huge sex-selective gender imbalances and large-scale outward migration. I know, India and "not enough children" are boggling things to put in the same sentence, but we said that about China and they've reached the problem stage now. 70-hour working culture is a surefire way to speed up that process. But, hey, shareholder value.

People totally do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Until a few months ago, Hyundai and Kia dealers in most of the country couldn't put you on the order sheet for an EV6 or EV Ioniq if you begged and paid cash. When they're only sold in a few states, shockingly, those are the states where they sell.

The word 'mandate' has a definition in the dictionary, and "it's commonplace" isn't it.

FLSA doesn't work like that. There's absolutely no mandate that your employer has to make anyone hourly-pay exempt. Now, do most employers make most exempt-eligible positions exempt, thinking they'll get 50+ hour weeks without any overtime or on-call required pay? Yes. But they don't have to just because they can.

You're not alone in the sense that there are thousands and thousands of people (of various levels of competency) willing to work a lower-stress job for "not great, not terrible" wages. I'm with you. Where I am (public university IT), I know *very* competent people who haven't even gotten a nominal raise in eight years, so have lost 20% or so inflation-adjusted over that time. Yet they're more-or-less complacent about it. Basically nobody has actually kept up with inflation.

The problem comes when people do finally start leaving. Either for a pay bump they couldn't say no to or retirement. It's one thing to keep someone in a comfy sinecure. That can last for years and years. It's another thing entirely to hire someone when you need to go out and replace him or her. If you go to the market looking for $55k/year Linux admins, Oracle DBAs, Java programmers, even PHP/Drupal developers, you will get absolutely nothing in 2022. Crickets. All your "the culture is nice and we get good vacation and 403b match" intangibles don't hold much water when you pay literally half the market rate.

You and, by-and-large, everyone else. To me, that's a big problem with high automation, cloud, etc. How did I get started 20-plus years ago? Editing BIND zones. Manually configuring ifconfig settings. Editing Apache rules. Configuring sendmail (shudder). Eventually provisioning servers from "insert the RAM the right way" to production.

All those entry-level tasks are now no longer jobs. They're an API call, set up by some deeply experienced Linux admin, probably in Terraform or Ansible code. We don't hire a 20 year old kid and give them our Azure keys to the kingdom. And you don't either. You "hire only people who can demonstrate a clear and deep understanding of linux admin". Problem is, nobody is giving that first 3-5 years experience. That's what we mean when we say the pool of real experience is declining. Sure, you can watch free training and homelab for free all day long. Very different thing than being employed to do it.