I remember being a college student....many years ago....

I was really into computer science, and also philosophy. I took those classes with great eagerness. Oh and foreign language too.

I couldn't care less about the other crap they required me to take in order to make my education well-rounded. Physics just didn't do it for me. I was a native English speaker already and learned nothing from the lit and creative writing classes. There was Art appreciation, mythology, some phys ed...all blow off classes that I took only because they were required. I am sure those professors found me unmotivated. Oh, economics was tolerable, but I never would have taken it without having been forced, and learned nothing useful beyond the high-school level economics I had already taken.

It's all different now. I read up on all kinds of brainy topics just for fun, including the stuff I blew off in college. I realize I am just one data point, but it seems consistent with available evidence: college-age kids are, by and large, sick of school and only motivated to chase their specific passions. Forcing well-roundedness on them is mostly just a way of forcing them to spend more money on elements of an education that they won't retain or use in their chosen career paths. Offer well-rounded educations only to those who seek it, and we will see engagement increase across the board.

If we are truly worried about people being unprepared to face the adult world, we should be teaching classes in investing and personal finance management, nutrition, only the most basic phys ed (how to jog and lift weights), maybe some household maintenance. These are all practical skills that we are supposed to learn from our parents, but often don't. Maybe some schools teach some of this these days, but they didn't when I was in school. Well they did teach phys ed but way over did it. Forcing kids who don't like sports to play sports is not helping them. Teaching people why aerobic exercise is good and how to lift weights with proper form absolutely is helping them.

80 to 90 percent of small businesses fail in the first year (depending on the type of business).

That means that I have pretty good odds of being right, no matter who reads the post.

I suppose we could look at this another way: owning stock means owning part of a business. Something like 60% of Americans own stock (I don't know about other parts of the world), so in that sense any random reader of my post might be at least a partial owner of a business. But you have to own a lot of stock for the income to be significant.

The idea that AI will replace upper management, instead of the working class, is popular here on slashdot.

I just want to rain on that parade by pointing out that companies will still have owners, and they still won't be you. The money the owners save by not having to pay executive salaries won't flow down into your coffers, but up into the coffers of the owners. And, most importantly of all, whatever authority the owners delegate to an AI is authority for which they will still be responsible. If the AI starts directing the company to break the law, the owners are going to be the ones on the hook. So, there will still be a need for top level executive positions, though their role might change to include a lot more "AI watchdog" and a lot less "decision maker."

It surely spies on you and your browsing habits. So, that's bad.
It also bypasses ads to summarize content for you. So, that's good.
Unless you are hosting a site and rely on add revenue. Then its bad. Especially if it is successful at answering captchas.

Microsoft never bought into the whole "no means no" idea.

Your final line is relevant "Quality of life matters."

And for some people, "quality of life" is maximized by avoiding exercise (because they dislike it and so doing it lowers their quality of life) and instead doing computer stuff and eating tasty food. It is true that they will have health issues, but for most of their life those issues are minor inconveniences, and they are maxing out on quality.

Maybe they die at 85 from a heart attack or some other issue related to poor heath, and that's ok with them. The years they gave up were worth the enjoyment they got from the years they had.

Obviously, you have different values. Which is just as valid. We must all make that "existential trade off" for ourselves, and each person is going to wind up somewhere unique on the spectrum. Someone else's conclusions might seem stupid to you, but that is not because the conclusions are ill-informed or unwise, but because their values are different than yours.

The only stupidity is in failing to recognize that.

"Chinese style communism" is just capitalism with the intention of converting over to communism later, in direct accordance with the theories of Marx. He predicted that poor countries could not jump in as communist countries, because they just redistribute poverty (which is exactly how it played out each time it was tried). He stated that a country must embrace capitalism first, in order to generate great wealth, and then once the forces of production were great enough the workers would all realize they don't need bosses anymore and just naturally transition over to communism.

China is currently capitalist now as a temporary step to becoming communist once they have established enough material wealth.

And anyway, it's awful. They push their people to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, saying that everyone must compete and produce ferociously in order to build the material wealth they need so that some future generation can enjoy the communist utopia. Young people see clearly that they can work themselves to death and still won't be able to afford a house, car, family, etc., hence the whole "lying flat" trend that has the CCP all worried.

China has only been using this model for something like 50 years (before that it was pure communism and was responsible for mass starvation with death tolls in the tens of millions). So, it is very unclear whether or not this will work at all, and where it is right now looks pretty bad.

Incidentally, the only recorded event (that I know of) of a wealthy country attempting to convert to communism was Czechoslovakia, and it didn't produce the expected utopia. It just lead them straight into poverty.

I am more than happy to let China be the pioneers on this one, so we can watch and see how it goes from a safe distance.

But still far too much.

Buildings still need to be built, and its hard work. So is building and maintaining sewer lines, power lines, cell phone networks etc.

Food is still grown by human farmers. A few farmers can make a whole lot of food, but those farmers have to work hard to do it. The same goes for everything else farmed or derived from livestock.

The factories that produce all our consumer trinkets still need a lot of human operators.

The list goes on and on.

Even if we did cease all overproduction and re-organize labor to make only what we need (presumably with extra saved up for emergencies), there would be far too much human labor required for it to be accomplished without paying the laborers in proportion to their effort and the rarity of their skill set. Asking them to put up with that "for the greater good" will result in the exact same consequences we consistently see when we try this (which is to say, failure, starvation, and violence).

So long as having the things that everybody needs requires that a whole lot of people work hard, we can't have communism. It will just create widespread poverty like it has every other time it was tried, because it contradicts basic human psychology too strongly.

AFTER we have the level of labor automation that everyone is afraid of, where basically everything is done by robots and there are only enough jobs (of any kind) for only a tiny fraction of the population, something like communism might be sustainable. And even that is a maybe (we have zero examples of this from which to draw a conclusion, so all we can do is speculate).

85% of the meat packing industry in the US is owned by four multinational megacorps:

Tyson Foods (U.S.-owned)
Cargill (U.S.-owned)
JBS (Brazilian-owned)
National Beef (Brazilian-owned)

They are very obviously operating as a cartel. They have faced legal action to this effect, though nothing with real teeth.

I don't really see why McDonald's is relevant since they don't produce the beef, they are a buyer of it. Be that as it may, cartel behavior is harmful to the economy and is an inevitable result whenever the market is dominated by a small number of players like this. It is just outright obvious to all of them that collusion is more profitable than competition, at that point.

Any capitalist economy must rely on government intervention to break these up and/or regulate them. Capitalism collapses under the weight of anti competitive forces otherwise.
 

Testing can be done under conditions that make cheating impractically hard. It just takes a little effort on the part of those giving the tests.

What's the alternative? Completely subjective grades that are assigned to the students by their teachers?

(That was meant to be rhetorical, since that is obviously even more worthless).

Given the economic opportunities that grades open up, I don't think it is fair to say "they are only cheating themselves." They are cheating others out of work and/or scholarship money, too.

Microsoft should be sued into oblivion for the amount of e-waste it created from perfectly good machines that were not compatible with its latest OS, after it ended official support for its prior OS.

So, why DO people buy Apple? They know it is more expensive. Clearly, they believe they are getting something that is worth that price.

Apple goes to great efforts to protect user privacy. Some of what they do might just be promises and/or lies, but that is still better than the alternatives available, that openly spy on everything they can and sell it to whoever wants to buy it. For people who have the money to afford Apple products, it's worth it.

Of course there are free open source solutions that protect privacy, but they require greater tech knowledge to use and have more compatibility issues (there are always a group of Linux users that get all bent out of shape when someone says this. Too bad. I use Linux a lot and I am very familiar with the issues that crop up that the Linux community likes to pretend don't crop up).

There's also the matter of user experience. When I use windows 11, I fell pushed-around and limited. When I use MacOS, I feel obeyed and empowered. Your mileage may vary, but this was enough for me to buy Apple.

I hate windows enough that my gaming rig runs Linux. I love Apple enough that my "everything serious" machine runs MacOS. Even with these price hikes, I will still go Apple over Windows any day of the week, should I need another machine for any purpose other than gaming.

I suppose the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a reason to posit something similar to "alternate realities." Published physicists who have studied the evidence in much greater depth than I have, and understand the math much better than I do, take this seriously. Were it not for them, I would dismiss it as junk science.

But even if we posit many worlds, the theory doesn't predict any means by which taking drugs would cause one to see things that reside in these completely decohered branches, let alone ones that decohered so long ago that evolution took a completely different path, producing tiny people.

I also suspect that humans bodies that are as small as rats wouldn't actually function properly, as the design would produce mechanical failures given normal human proportions. The brain wouldn't be able to contain nearly as many neurons either, meaning that these "people" would not be capable of speech or abstract thought (or really much more than rats or similar-sized animals are capable of).

The idea continues to be wildly implausible, even under the many-worlds hypothesis.