While you can self invest, you would not get the tax advantage of the 401k or other tax deferred things. You would also not be able to receive any employer match contributions which is free money and it would be silly not to have a 401k if your company offers one. 401k plans generally don't let you pick specific securities, instead the 401k provider has a set of funds to choose from. While with effort you can route your money into non-tech based funds, it does require research. Most providers have generic target retirement date funds that auto balance your money from more risky but better to return funds when you are along way from retirement to safe but lower performing things (like bonds) when you are close to retirement. A lot of folks use these "set and forget" methods and these folks would be impacted heavily by the market crash that is being fantasized about.

What does the underlying operating system have to do with phishing links that take unsuspecting users to lookalike websites where they are prompted to enter their credentials? A lot of (most?) of the phishing doesn't try to use a zero day, exploit a bug, or find some vulnerability in the browser or operating system, it attempts to get the user to cough up valid credentials which are then used by the attackers to perform operations on behalf of the user. The phishing tests that my company uses don't attempt any exploit (other than social engineering) and we still have lots of employees that fail. Getting off Microsoft doesn't solve this core issue - there may be other reasons to do so, but the knee jerk comment that it's all Microsoft's fault isn't really helpful here.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now? Their parents needs to have a sub account in their kid's name? Are brokerage firms going to be happy with all these accounts containing a single share? Will these accounts be free? If not brokerage accounts, is each kid going get a real paper share certificate, and is SpaceX or some transfer agent going to be able to handle and track that many single shares? How about the privacy aspects of this - to issue all of these shares, SpaceX would need the names, addresses, and Tax IDs for all the kids in the US? How in the heck would this actually work?

It's more than one tox person

Silence oh how I miss you. FU tinnitus.

With a couple of recent elections

Lyrion Music Server Enough said.

Testing is also about looking for things that you don't anticipate.

For me social media used to be a way that I could keep up with what my family, friends, and peers were doing. I saw what they posted and they saw what I posted. Now feeds are overrun with stuff I don't care about (the algorithm) and stuff that isn't real (AI), so it is becoming less and less worth my time to post stuff (my intended audience won't see it, and is also leaving the platforms) and likewise I don't see stuff my peers post. On top of this there is all the political crap and advertising.

This is news for nerds. I am saying that there are viable technical solutions, not that Meta would choose to use them.

The light wouldn't have to be a visible spectrum or one that is interfered with by normal lighting, the camera just needs to be sensitive to it. Even if it used normal spectrum, it wouldn't have to work in all lighting conditions, as it doesn't have to detect tampering immediately, it only needs to detect that tampering has happened at some point in the past. The algorithm could be to wait for testable conditions and then test, if a test hasn't completed in 24 hours, disable the camera and instruct the user to put the glasses somewhere dark, and maybe have a 3 strikes you are out rule before bricking the camera.

They could flicker the LED in some random pattern and then look for corresponding lighting level changes in the images captured. The flicker could be fast enough that it wouldn't appear to flicker to a human.

So we can now non-invasively mess with the pleasure areas of the brain? Has the pleasure (or on the dark side, pain) helmet been invented?

Bitlocker without a PIN is a setup where a normal boot of the machine decrypts the disk without any user interaction. Why would it be a surprise if it was possible to alternate boot from USB and also be able to automatically decrypt the disk? This would be true for any disk encryption software that doesn't require the user to enter a PIN or password at boot time. If you can boot from alternate boot media, pretty much any operating system would allow that alternate boot to have access to the underlying file system, while bypassing the original operating system accounts, logins, and permissions.