Abundance and comfort only makes stupid people miserable.

The smart ones recognize that it is natural for our minds to be discontented (contentment does not motivate, whereas discontent does). We naturally crave drama and will create it if necessary, even when we don't like it. We can get addicted to anything. And we absolutely take even the most amazing of pleasures for granted once we have easy access to it.

Knowing this kind of thing lends itself to overcoming the problems. We can practice counting-of-blessings to remind ourselves how privileged we are, empathy and compassion to avoid creating drama, moderation to avoid addiction, gratitude where it is due, relaxation/meditation to attain equanimity, and so on. Absolutely none of these strategies are new; they have been written-of in our oldest recovered documents from every part of the world, and confirmed many times over by psychological experiment and social observation.

The path to a peaceful and fulfilling life is clear; those of us who live in abundance just choose not to walk it due to willful ignorance or lack of discipline.

a mechanical crane could beat any weightlifter you care to name...

Clark Kent.

In some cases, a carefully-crafted prompt can reproduce raw sections of training data. Or sections with only minor modifications. I think the original authors of that training data would have a reasonable claim of ownership, in that case.

Its quite a muddy situation, especially when the copyright holders of the training didn't give consent.

Well here's the thing: an over-educated population is just as economically problematic as an under-educated one.

No need to draw your weapons, I am not saying that education is bad. But the economy doesn't moralize. There are only so many jobs available for educated people, and when there are way more educated people than education-requiring jobs, it causes serious problems. Salaries crash. People refuse to take jobs that they now think are beneath them, even though the need for those jobs is now very high. Unemployment rises along with depression, and economic needs don't get met. We have seen this in many countries and some specific industries.

So what do you do? There is no solution that is both morally correct and acceptable to the majority of voters. So what winds up happening is just a matter of which bad actor gets the upper hand. You can let the economy languish in this state until there is so much widespread poverty that nobody can afford an education anymore and the cycle resets. Or you can just let the quality of education deteriorate, with actually-valuable education available only to the very wealthy. That more quickly restores an economically-functional balance of skills, but of course it does so by oppressing the poor.

There are some other options too but they are outright evil and I won't bother mentioning them, lest I be wrongly accused of endorsing them.

But it seems clear that the option we are choosing is to let our education system get greatly watered-down such that public education is largely worthless, and only people whose families could spring for an expensive ivory-league education will wind up with any real economic advantages in the future economy.

This is our "lesser evil," I suppose.

advertise honestly?

And improve quality control?

You know, reduce the reasons why people return things so much.

Encouraging me to use a passkey is one thing. Pestering me about it forever, with no option to turn that pestering off, is quite another.

I don't like being treated like that, which is why my home devices are all Mac or Linux. Microsoft's bullying chased me away from their products a while ago, though, so this is just more reinforcement for me.

How "into their job" they are doesn't matter.

What matters is how much you need their skills, and how much money you can make off their skills.

These high-talent people who are leaving due to RTO mandates are still working....for other companies. The money that can be made off their skills is still being made, just not by the companies with the mandates.

So, RTO mandate means missing out on high profit potential from high talent individuals. The businesses that stick with this mentality will flounder, while the business that allow work-from-home where appropriate will snap up all the best talent, and succeed.

You said "If you ever have to interact with a rich person, you'll frequently hear "oh, you own stock?...that's "cute."....you know the real money is in real estate!!!""

Where are you getting that? Are you aware that The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks?

There is tremendous money in owning stocks, all rich people do it, and in fact they tend to have most of their wealth in that form.

Real-estate can be in investment too, especially when there is a housing crisis driving the value up. As it stands, there is plenty of land in the USA on which people could build houses, including land that the owners would sell for a reasonable price for this purpose. The housing crisis is not caused by a shortage of available land, but rather, a shortage of houses built on that land. And the reason for that is also simple: construction companies aren't building houses right now. They got burned pretty badly not too long ago from a housing market crash due to over-construction, so many of them just exited the house market and others are waiting for a nice development of incentives.

The law that you are proposing is not needed and won't solve the problem, because the problem you are trying to solve (too many people "hoarding real estate") is not the problem we actually have. The problem we actually have is "nobody is building houses." Some is due to zoning and some is due to hesitancy as I mentioned before. And from what I have read recently, the construction companies that ARE building houses are all building high-end houses due to an expected higher profit margin, which doesn't really help because most of the people who need houses now won't be able to afford them. The resulting lack-of-profit will just engender more hesitancy.

Of course, those who already own houses (including those who live in them) do NOT want more houses built, because that will pull the value of their houses down, which will make them unhappy. They are a voting demographic, so they can and do push to keep the shortage in place. It's on us to push back and force the issue of new housing construction, including low-end starter homes, if we want to see prices come back down to affordable levels.

...but what I do on my one windows computer...

Why not use a mac for that?

Remember, every time you use Windows, the terrorists win.

Thanks to Proton, Linux plays most popular games well. So does the PS5, for that matter. And the new Switch coming out next year.

For whatever you need that Linux can't do, there is Mac. Apple makes it easy to disable "Apple Intelligence" (their version of AI), and gives you privacy guarantees that Microsoft does not (even if you keep AI on).

Between Linux and Mac, all your personal needs should be met.

Apart from work requirements, what's the incentive to use Windows? This relationship is clearly toxic. So, I recommend exiting it.

God already has a plan, right? And God already knows all about their suffering and needs, right?

So God will already do what needs to be done, right?

When we ask God for something in prayer, either what we are asking for is already what God planned to do, or it is requesting God to change His plans.

If it was already what God planned to do, then there is no reason to ask for it. God will do it anyway. And if it is asking God to change His plans, then God will just ignore the prayer, because God's plans will serve the greater good better than anything us lowly and fallible humans might ask for.

So, praying doesn't actually accomplish anything.

That's an interesting idea. But, I personally am not a CPA, so I have no idea what they spend most of their time actually doing in order to deliver value.

Are you a CPA?

Colleges want tuition money from everybody, including potential CPAs. If the licensing requirements (which happen outside of the college courses anyway) are causing discouragement and hence lower enrollment, then colleges have a direct financial incentive to want that adjusted.

This doesn't make it a good reason, but it absolutely makes it a motivating reason.

We have seen the exact same thing happen to computer science courses, where they have been significantly watered-down in order to cash in on the high level of interest from students. The fact that many of these students wound up totally unprepared for the working world and never got or held a job in the field is not the college's concern.

One good way to increase interest would be to pay CPAs more. But of course, none of the powers-that-be want that!

This is what they want us to want, because they can make more money this way.

Maybe the tech will get there someday, but it is clearly not there today. I have done a few browser searches and gotten AI summary results at the top that said the exact opposite of what the top four search result hits were saying. It was really quite bad.

It needs to be reliable before people will rely on it.

In that case, I have some good news! Here you go!