. . . it remains a staunch reality.

It might be a reality, but I don't think "staunch" is the right term for it.

Lightning doesn't have to travel to the ground, it can travel cloud-to-cloud or within the same cloud ithout reaching the ground. Cloud-to-cloud lightning is more common than cloud-to-ground.

I did the same, for a year and a half. I looked at it as a step towards retirement, but I was a little surprised just how much of a difference that extra day off made.

Looked it up and the one-lane road is closer to 600 feet, but that's mostly public road, so, no I can't just put a shack at the end of it, it wouldn't be on my property.
Also, when I first moved here I had cable with Comcast, or whatever they were calling themselves 20+ years ago, and lost the signal. They said it was a problem on our end, and I'd have to pay for a new underground cable, routed around the garage and into the back rather than under the driveway. Along with other problems with Comcast, that was going to be very expensive. So I got Direct TV installed for free, instead. (Not the best, but fine for cable at the time)

Rural could mean 1/4 mile from the road to the house. That was a case for a friend of mine, for phone and electric before the internet was common. And for me, in a small town, it's about 1,000 feet from the main road with fiber down the 1-lane street to my house, to which they won't install fiber.
Also, trenching isn't done that much, directional drilling is the efficient thing nowadays.

Everybody who bought Bitcoin and didn't subsequently sell has made a profit.

If they didn't sell, they haven't yet made a profit.

It's 2025 - where is my edit button?

It's right there after you hit the "Preview" button. Then you have the choice of clicking on the "Submit" button or the "Continue Editing" button.

XX Engineering is processes, best practices and quality control so you don't go to jail for screwing up. And you can go to jail for screwing up.

"Screwing up" can get a PE a hefty lawsuit and possibly a loss of their license, but going to jail would not happen except in cases of wilful misconduct / fraud / etc, at least in the US.
One of my bosses was originally from the USSR and he did know of engineers there going to jail for making mistakes that caused fatalities.

The US is 36 trillion dollars in debt, mostly to Communist China.

No. Most of that debt is owed to Americans. 23% is held by the Federal Reserve, 22% by mutual funds, 9% by state and local governments, 8% pensions, and 5% insurance companies. 30% is held by foreign investors and most of those are not China.
We're not bankrupt, since we're still able to make our payments, but at 125% of GDP or so, it is getting worrisome.

Better planning is always an option. Like pooling a rainy day fund, which should be in addition to investing, say dropping $100/month into an index ETF, and only using the latter when your rainy day fund is exhausted.

You should know that there are a lot of people who can't afford a rainy day fund let alone also dropping $100/month into any investment (and yes, there are a lot people who could afford to do that but don't.)

And being a professor is increasingly a shitty job (from a pretty great starting point, to be sure). Average salary hasn't gone up since the 1970s. (Seriously, look it up.) Culture war bullshit is poisoning the academy, and the MBA-infested administration has decided to replace you with adjuncts who don't even get minimum wage (from that pool of doomed Ph.Ds, remember the big about them working against student interests?). Outside a few schools, it just isn't a good job any more and will keep getting worse.

My brother retired a couple of years ago from being a professor in a small private college, and none of that was true for his situation.

I may be out of touch, but the general idea (back when I was working on my Ph.D.) was that if you were paying for grad school you were doing it wrong.

Yeah, when my oldest was in graduate school his tuition was fully covered and the university got him a part-time job as a teaching assistant to cover his living expenses.
My daughter definitely had to pay for her DDS, though, and it wasn't cheap. Still, she was able to pay it off easily once she started working.

Let me tell you something....even when I offered a steeply discounted price of $20 for the service call (down from my usual $85 to walk in the door)....people got pissed. All I did was press a button...so therefore I shouldn't charge them.

Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about justifying engineering fees. A worker was called in to fix a problem with the HVAC. After looking for a while, he took a screwdriver and adjusted a screw. This fixed the problem and he charged $100 (this was in the 80s). The owner balked at the price and asked for am itemized bill. The bill read: Adjusting a screw - $1; Knowing what to do - $99.

The thing that gets me is almost all of the streaming apps I've used have something like "Since you watched that show, you might like this one", then half the shows they recommend I've already watched using that app. I know the app is aware of what I've already watched, since they sometimes suggest I "watch it again".

We hit some record colds in the 70s and 80s. The Milankovitch cycles were just beginning to be understood and popularized. There was speculation about the timing of starting a new glacial period in the next few thousand years, and questions about how fast that could occur. Of course the popular press sensationalized that with headline questions about "Have We Started a New Ice Age?".
Yet I remember hearing about global warming due to CO2 in the classrooms as early as the 60s (though it wasn't necessarily seen as a sure thing then) and the early 70s. And in the 70s and 80s the scientific consensus was that CO2 would cause global warming if we didn't do anything about it (and we have done very little since).