The good thing is hiring 9,000 H1Bs now could cost $900,000,000 in filing fees, and visas are weighted so that the highest wage H1Bs are given 4x the weight of the lowest wage H1Bs. I've noticed the number of H1B “entry-level openings" meaningfully decrease, which means it was never actually about talent "scarcity" and all about talent "cost". The H1B funnel is also getting a double whammy with AI consuming exactly the offshore-able, entry-level work the H-1B and offshore IT models were built around. The cost advantage that enabled both to work is at the point of economic unviability.

I spent 20 years working in K-12 in a suport role. The issues vary greatly across population densities and social and economic status. The large district I worked for (~55,000 students) featured everything from schools where every kid must be prepared to go to college, to trying to arrest the pregnancy and dropout rates.

The problem is when education is treated as a monolithic bloc. Issues vary incredibly widely from school to school, from neighborhood to neighborhood. An additional problem is the attack stemming from the anti-tax crowd on public education, eroding budgets and thus paychecks, generating disrespect for teachers, and causing many to leave the profession for something that pays better. That leads to erosion of the system and it starting to break down.

There is zero chance I'd go back to an ICE car. The maintenance, reliability, and fuel costs are not even comparable. The math behind driving an ICE car today only makes sense if you need to tow large loads for significant distances. The caveat is that you need a place to charge them for it to be stress-free. We calculated not long ago that it would take $0.25/gallon gas to make an ICE car break even with what we're spending on EVs.

I hope you find something good soon.

"Windows is more for power users and MacOS is more for people who want their hand held"

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Let me be blunt: macOS is an engineer's machine, Windows is for Susan in accounting. I spend 90% of my day in terminal windows on macOS, using make and compilers. I write code running on more machines, including Linux and Windows, on my Mac that you can even begin to imagine. I agree that Linux workstations tend to be used by more technical people. I have an ARM64 Ubuntu workstation myself, but to state that Windows is for "power users" shows that you have never worked in Silicon Valley circles. Virtually nobody in any form of advanced engineering uses Windows. The notable exception are a handful of terrible PCB design tools that are Windows only that everybody hates with a passion. Funny enough, most of them are now using AI agents to drive those tools ... from their Macs.

I remember that from the US automaker CEOs, so what possible harm could there be? We'll just ignore those Chinese EVs and keep buying ICE-powered vehicles, right? Ford stopped selling their F150 EV because nobody wanted them. GM is stopping production of the Bolt because nobody wants them. I mean who wouldn't want a $32K version of a $20K budget subcompact with zero amenities? So let BYD try to sell EVs nobody wants, it'll cost them a fortune, and they'll retreat having learned the lesson that internal combustion engines rule the day here. US automakers absolutely gave it their all by over-pricing and under-delivering on affordable EVs, it's all but certain BYD will fail the same way, right???

Yeah sweet, fits great on all those 40 bit architectures or chunks nicely into four 10 bit chunks for all those 10 bit ones.......

I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

*ow!*

uh, found it...