This isn't really news. It has been proven time and time again that hetero-female hypergamy and hetero-male patrimony exist and have real reproducable effects across cultures. It is instinctively understood by humans cross culturally that young healthy fertile women are the most valueable individual humans and that men need to be "managed" by society and civilisation in order to "exploit" them to build and maintain a culture. This is why women get more lenience when they commit crimes and this is why men are forced to use money or other indirect metrics like of value such as military or academic rank to gain a place in society. If those metrics no longer carry, men stear clear because "useless" (see contemporary US academia for details on that effect). People in currency-bound civilisations know that a man who's made himself decently useful "needs" more money than a woman to make his efforts worth while for him to establish his place in society. If we guys want lad(y/ies) _and_ offspring, kitesurfing and motorbiking all day won't really cut it for most of us if we can't establish a source of excess resources to offer up to the ladies.

This is also an evolutionary mechanism to keep men in check. If that doesn't happen, you get men organizing themselves and turning away and and eventually against society. Fascism is basically nothing other than the hetero-male tribe instinct going into survival-mode. If you don't want 15%+ of grown men going that route and _literally_ leveling the playing field for a hard "society reboot" you have to pay them and give them (a chance with) women and reproduction. ... Or sedate them with videogames and internet-porn, as the case may be. The latter will likely only work for so long. QED.

I consider anyone who thinks otherwise an amateur and don't trust their judgement.

I would give some leniance in very special situations where there is a clear, thoroughly planed migration path to FOSS and the problem has very good reasons to require a currently existing tried and true proprietary solution that is cohesive and losely coupled to everything else in the company. Something like that however requires deciders to know what they're doing and those joints usually have their systems under control and can tell a vendor to go and f*ck themselves with confidence if anyone gets pissy or turns up with a fresh absurd future pricing table. Organisations like these usually are 95% FOSS already and basically follow the same rule stated above, for obvious reasons.

Those who don't get 20+ years of this VMWare, Oracle, SAP, whatever sh*t we've been seeing ever since the dawn of time.

Bottom line: Mission critical? FOSS only. Break that rule and I'm getting ready to cash out of your gig ASAP.

... for "I want to program for a living.". CS is way more than that, but that was the reason many people chose it. Since AI now can code as good as humans and explain to a human what it's doing, studying CS to program is less of a thing now.
CS and it's"applied math"thing won't go away, but that was less people will study it sounds quite plausible IMHO.

... steam age but modern times turns out to be way more efficient and reliable.

Golly jeepers gee wizz - Who would've thunk?

It keeps the head warm and improves mental performance. A warm head performs at a better rate. Like a warmed up body or the people doing hot yoga. I'm a more or less bald ADHD candidate and I wear buffs as "spare hair" and observe a similar effect.

There's a reason we keep ill and injured people warm.

Bottom line:
This sounds plausible IMHO.

EOM

Since their whole shtick is blocking ads and trackers where they can it's likely that they get to first paint faster than other browsers. I use Brave as my daily driver and am reasonably happy with it. It has most of the blockage you need built right in.

The Web without a powerful stream buffer/blocker/anti track setup is basically unusable these days. I'm totally bedazzled whenever I see sorry ass normies using a regular browser without any of that. A nigh surreal experience.

Goes to show: Many (white collar bullshit) jobs are a social thing, not a productivity thing.
In ohter words: Using computer and AI is more and more a cultural technique rather than a job. Meaning we have more liberty when chosing what we want to do with our life and time.

Which, if you ask me, is actually a good thing. Let's hope this trend continues on a positive path.

... or not. What matters is, if it can replace the person with two non-trivial degrees at some highly qualified job. And to that I do believe we are closing in on. Seeing what current agents I ran install on my phone are capable of compared to just 6 months ago it pretty telling.

I'm getting ready to do something entirely different than senior web software development real soon now. Perhaps I will be needed as something like that until I retire, but I also won't be too surprised if my current type is positively obsolete in 2 years.

I'm surprised. ... Who on earth gives a flying f*ck about a new line of obsolete-on-arrival IoT audio trash by Sonos? Any fans here that care to enlighten me?
 

We're living in a crazy world.

We all know that politicians like any other human being are often out of their depth when society gets into a critical situation. They have blind spots, ignore trends with the regular people and fumble. And talk trash about people issues without even noticing.

But this Trump thing you USians have going on seems to be an entirely new level of malignant corruption. I mean, like some satire of a corrupt government with some man-child in charge asking for rockets to be more pointy because pointy is more dangerous.

Is anybody taking this seriously anymore over there? Wouldn't impeachment of this President be overdue by now?

An inquisitive European is curious to know, please enlighten me. Seriously.

... big fat hairy deal. This is news how?

Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.

3iob - its metal. it just won't be on mainstream radio, and metal is niche enough I'm not sure canada has dedicated metal fm radio stations?! They don't around here. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone listened to a lot of metal on spotify in canada that 3iob would be suggested in their discovery queues or whatever; thanks to cancon promotion.

French is an optional language credit to graduate in much of english speaking canada already, and many english language universities i've looked at don't require it.

As for your daughters reading assignments. Those artists aren't simply because "cancon + woke ideology" - oh a first nations person wrote it? Who cares what's in it. Its on the list! That's not quite it. (Although I'm sure you can find exceptions, people are people, and im sure someones on the reading list because they "know" somebody or some other nepotism/wokeism/or even plain old corruption.)

But in principle they are also chosen on the basis of the stories they actually tell. The school system explicitly wants to highlight and expose students to a variety of canadian perspectives and canadian experiences in canadian settings. That's an explicit goal. They want students to read about an immigrant from the middle east moving to thunderbay and navigating making friends and integrating in canada while maintaining their own cultural heritage, they want students to read about an inuit growing up in nunavut, or a small town in rural quebec overcoming lifes little challenges and celebrating its little victories. Even if they aren't subjectively "the best books", these are the types of stories and perspectives and ideas that they want students to be exposed to and to spend time thinking about. Then they include some of the more "important" works, like Animal Farm, the Hobbit, Romeo and Juliette, etc. Its a deliberate part of the breadth of the education.

To layer on top of that, of course its also a good use of public money to buy local, and circulate the money in the local economy; and for learning reading and comprehension, and thinking and writing about structure, plot, themes, allegory, etc, its all fine, and having as much "canadian subject matter" underneath it as possible, just makes sense.

I think you are perhaps a bit too cynical here.