This is correct, the education world has known this was coming. The same cohort has already had to enroll in high school and earlier, so there's already plenty of data about their population.

Of course there is a broader trend of declining birth rates, but a gradual reduction in population is easier to cope with. The Great Recession baby bust is probably going to be a little more acute for a few years, so we can expect the rate of closures to increase temporarily.

Personally I'm a lot more concerned about the ongoing effort to destroy the federal Department of Education. Losing federal financial aid (including interest-subsidized loans) in particular would price a huge portion of the public right out of higher education. It'll be a bloodbath for the institutions if that comes to pass. Maybe some states could step in and attempt to cover some of that gap for their residents, but I'd expect that to be the exception and not the rule.

I assume most users don't do it on purpose. They log in to Gmail or whatever and Chrome (by default) grabs that and logs the browser in along with it.

Some users probably like being able to sync browsing sessions from one device to another. I found it more annoying than helpful. Also creepy, so that was about the time I stopped daily-driving vanilla Chrome on my personal devices.

The size arms race was more of a mainstream consumer thing in the late 1990s and early aughts. It ended when gas got expensive.

SUVs and pickups do still rule in terms of US market sales, but the best sellers are mostly smaller crossovers- passenger car platforms with taller bodies. These days, the attribute of perceived safety isn't size as an end-all; it's just an upright seating position. Even in a large, heavy sedan, consumers feel less safe because they're sitting down low and taller vehicles around them impede visibility. They'll feel more confident in a tiny compact crossover, just from sitting upright.

Pickup trucks are status symbols now, replacing the landbarge full-sized sedans of yesteryear. The blue-collar stigma from pickups has disappeared, suspensions are nicer, interiors are plush- and so forth. They're roomy as hell inside, and can be optioned well into 6-figure territory. Few care about actual utility/capacity, it's just comfort.

I don't use LinkedIn. I assume there's some sort of functionality for end users to report or flag prohibited content? 50-centers have been known to abuse these features to censor criticism of the CCP on large platforms. A "noted" critic would absolutely be targeted in this manner.

So, it may not be Microsoft bending to China so much as not having enough human moderators looking at content. Any kind of automated removal (remove posts that get X reports in Y amount of time) is likely to be exploited by anyone with enough goons to throw at it.

Facilitating an attempted coup against the US federal government is one thing, but you'd have to be crazy to step on Disney's IP like that.

Slashdotters don't like products that lock users in, anyway.

Well, I would hope not. With the size of the defense budget, they should be able to at least use Helvetica.

A remarkable thing about the pandemic is how well it has distracted the general public from all of the other problems with Chinese manufacturing for Western companies. The tinfoil crowd would probably call it "convenient".

Businesses were already seeing the value diversification, or even full divestment from China-based supply chains before covid-19 shut everything down. Unfortunately, it's easier said than done. The alternatives don't yet have the developed manufacturing sectors to match China's, and there are a lot of growing pains involved with getting the raw materials, equipment, and tooling in place. But, the pressure is definitely there. Average consumers are slowly catching on to the ever-worsening human rights issues in China (Hong Kong, the expanding Uyghur forced labor program, other prisoner labor, the massive domestic surveillance apparatus) and the CCP's efforts to exert cultural influence beyond China's borders. Admittedly President Hamfist's trade war has also been a factor in pushing some commerce out of China, but it's not going into the US. The tide is shifting to Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, and so forth.

It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next decade or so.

Arm-based? That sounds ethically questionable. Are they harvested from Chinese prisoners or something?

I know no one watches it for the plot, but come on. TFS doesn't sound hot at all. And that title, WTF?

Also, submitter forgot the link to the video. Meh.

Granted, I'm not an iPhone person. In 10 years (late to the party, I know), I've never broken a screen. I'm pretty good about not dropping my phone.

My current smartphone is my 5th, a Pixel 3 XL. It's my first phone that is very "iPhone-like", thin and glass-backed. It's also the first for which I've bought a case.

For me, it wasn't a rationale of "in case I drop it". It was more a feeling that I never had a great grip on the naked phone. With so little bezel around the screen, I had to hold it sort of daintily to keep my fingers clear of the display, and I found the backing to be a bit slick (and perhaps scratch-prone) for my liking. The case gives me a larger, rubberized grip area around the outside that makes holding my phone a lot more comfortable. The kickstand is handy too.

Ah, yes, the disingenuous insistence that speech is purely literal and any any implications therein should be ignored (when it's convenient). All the rage in politics these days.

I don't disagree with your premise about the questionable validity of stochastic terrorism, but it's worth pointing out that invoking the possibility of civil war is a significant escalation over typical hyperbolic rhetoric. The examples you cited may have been overblown, but they did not allude to potential acts of violence. FWIW, I'm also not sure I'd even classify "people will die" as hyperbole in the context of those people losing health care coverage.

Trump's standing with respect to Twitter's TOS is of course at Twitter's discretion. Independent of that, I would consider some of his more recent tweets shamefully irresponsible discourse for a head of state in the first world.

If the demand for human labor does begin to shrink because of automation, the cost of living should decrease in kind, such that the average human can get by on less work. That could mean fewer hours per week, or an earlier retirement age.

A tax on efficiency isn't the right approach for this. The intervention that will likely be necessary is more of what we already have: regulation to ensure competition and prevent cartel-like behavior or other price gouging.

Obviously it's not nearly as simple as I'm making it sound, and the transition may not be all that smooth as individual industries make the jump.

I can understand De Blasio's intent in trying to prevent automation from being yet another mechanism of weath accretion for an ever-shrinking slice of humanity. Taxation just isn't a practical or sustainable means to achieve that objective.

Of course it wouldn't. While not glamorous, a douchenozzle still serves a useful purpose. I've not yet met a vapist of whom I can say the same.