It's not an education if you only assign stuff "relevant to their lives" (which is a crapshoot decision in any case; what books are really going be relevant to modern teenagers?). Part of what you're supposed to be getting in school is knowledge of the foundations of your civilization, which is why colleges have a Great Books program in the first place. High Schools typically don't burden students with all that many difficult old books anyway. I had to suffer through Wuthering Heights but I also got to discover Lord of the Flies.

Might it be that the Beeb relies on groups like the Spectator for guests as an opposite to it's own party line, and thus drive the outrage demo to boost ratings? A' La the old CNN crossfire route? What else would they do? Bring on, say, the Guardian every night and basically just agree on everything?

The daily format, yes. The Internet has killed that.

But I think there's still some room for print journalism under certain conditions, and profitably so as well, if done right.

Many moons ago, I used to get the Washington Post's Weekly Edition. I don't know if they do it anymore, but it was a newspaper, mailed to your home once a week, that had longer, more in-depth investigative stories and analysis on the issues of the day than you'd find in the daily papers, as well as an opinion and editorial section. I think something along these lines, combined with certain elements of the old Sunday paper format... cartoons, ads, local events and notices, arts coverage.... could sell as part of a larger digital subscription that gives you daily access.

The notion of an Islamic State would never be accepted

Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen just asked "What about us?"

Right, you did say ethnicity, and not religion (which ethnicity is 'Islamic'?)... and admittedly it is a bit tricker because Jewish is often an ethnic group and religion, while much of the Islamic world, complete with state religions have countries more based on a dominant ethnic group going back some time.

Heck, with Somaliland in the news this week (and it's recognition by Isreal), it's flag contains the Shahada, which is also on the Saudi flag.

More to the point, dating apps already suck for young men. It's hard enough for them to get a match of any kind, and the apps are notorious for women ghosting men or going out with men just to get a free meal or monetary favor of some kind. Now imagine finding out that the only reason a woman goes out with you was to use you for your work connections. How is this not a kind of catfishing or fraud?

I tell my sons to avoid these apps like the plague. This kind of stuff only reinforces that.

I don't disagree, but all that ignores the fact the the problem with schools is the student body itself: there are too many walking the halls that belong in reform school instead of real school.

We've had "easy access to guns" for 250 years. High Schools used to have firing ranges and shooting teams (including girls shooting teams). It was not uncommon to see rifle racks in the back windows of trucks in my high school parking lot. Somehow we managed to not shoot anyone. What's changed is the introduction of ghetto thug culture into schools. If you had a problem with a guy when I was in school, you arranged to meet out back after 3 PM and settle it with fists. Now kids "pop a cap" into students and teachers for "dissing" them. Then there's the constant, roving gang fights in schools, typically with a bunch of kids cornering one kid and beating him bloody, all while recording it on their phones and bragging.

It's ironic, because in the 1970's, French philosopher Michel Foucault kicked up a storm when he wrote that, architecturally, schools looked like prisons because they served a similar function. Modern school systems are buying mass surveillance systems precisely because modern students act like prison gangs, and have to be managed the same way.

It'll be a dying market in 20 years. AI doesn't need Christmas gifts.

Maybe geek nostalgia gifts will replace it. Shirts with a pic of a Bash script with "This used to be my job".

Screen Culture in particular was spamming YT with fake trailers years before AI really blew up, and labeled them very, very deceptively ("Official Trailer Release", and such). YouTube should have banned them years ago, and the studios should have sued. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Yep. Similar to aircraft. There's a reason why planes that perform a specific function at specific performance parameters tend to look alike. Because the parameters demands certain shapes, airflow, capacity, etc, and you end up with planes doing the same mission but designed by different teams yet look alike. See the DC-10/L-1011 airliner situation.

Oh FFS. Trump is the most pro-nuclear president in four decades, including supporting fusion research and exploring new reactor designs: Trump Bets Big on Nuclear

"United States President Donald Trump is putting his money where his mouth is as he doubles down on efforts to accelerate the expansion of the country’s nuclear energy sector. The government will spend billions in public funding to reinvigorate U.S. nuclear power, following decades of underinvestment. Unlike renewable energy, Trump views nuclear power as key to expanding the U.S. electricity generation capacity and recently announced the target of quadrupling nuclear capacity by 2050.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the U.S. to develop 10 new large nuclear reactors by the end of the decade. In addition, several tech companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft, are providing billions in private funding to restart old nuclear plants, upgrade existing ones, and deploy new reactor technology to meet the growing demands from the data centres powering advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) loan office will dedicate significant funds to the nuclear energy industry to support the development of new reactors. This week, the Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “We have significant lending authority at the loan programme office By far the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants — to get those first plants built.”

It wouldn't do jack shit, because no one watches CNN. Travelers used to be stuck with their network, as CNN used to pay airports to display their network, but that ended in 2021 as mobile devices took away that information monopoly, and CNN lost that ad revenue. CNN has half the viewers of MS Now, and only a quarter the viewers of Fox. CNN is way past their glory days, and essentially has become an Also Ran. And cable news doesn't have nearly the reach that the traditional US Big 3 news networks does. All the major cable news players combined still make up less viewers than the lowest rated Big 3 player, CBS, with 4+ million viewers. Which, btw, pales in comparison to ABC, with 8+ million viewers, and NBC with 6+ million. The idea that the Ellisons would "take over" American media is laughable on its face, even if they got Warner Bros. They'd still be a distant third in broadcast reach behind Disney and Comcast, hysterical wailing to the contrary.

OK. When? Because I've been hearing worst case scenarios all my adult life, and most of them are now past their predicted dates. Beginning with Paul Erlich's infamous predictions of mass-starvation in the 60's and 70's, nearly every year the press is filled with credentialed experts that tell us the end is nigh and that the point of no return is almost here. If you want to know why most of the public is so Meh about these doomsday predictions, it's because we've been inundated with the Boy Crying Wolf all of our lives. Would you like a timeline of all the point of no return predictions over the years? It's readily available.

Uh, no, it isn't. Post COVID, some companies are trying to guilt trip customers into tipping all employees in every job... I'm looking at you, fancy-pantsy coffee shops like Starbucks, Dutch Brothers, 7-Brew, etc.... but the vast majority of employees do not ask for nor receive tips as part of their jobs in America. And in jobs where I'd like to tip them for extra service.... grocery pickup, for instance... they're generally not allowed to ask for or receive tips.

Tipping is fine for waitressing, because if the service is good they can make considerably more money. But the post-COVID attempt by some companies to normalize tipping in their industries never took off in the US. Americans resented the push and saw it for what it was.

A Plymouth Voyager. Being rather tall, being able to sit upright comfortably is important, rather than trying to lay in something smaller and less safe for my legs/head.