Same on macos and linux, it's not a windows specific fault.
In fact there is a lot of legitimate software which provides "paste this into terminal" instructions, for instance homebrew on macos (https://brew.sh). This then goes and retrieves a shellscript and executes it with no validation.

This is a general purpose computer fault. The fact is general purpose computers are not a suitable tool for the masses, they are highly complex tools only suitable for those who know how to use them safely. Most people would be much better off with an appliance.

No they don't know what it is, so when given instructions explaining how to invoke it they don't question them.

The problem here is that many legitimate companies do in fact send unexpected emails containing links, or make unexpected calls without proving their identity (and even asking you to).
All of this trains users to expect such actions, and makes them more susceptible to the scams.

If you do practice basic precautions and question these companies for their poor practices they will often push back and call you paranoid.

So what will happen is that they will start developing a curriculum based on the state of the art AI models of 2025.
By the time this curriculum is ready it will be 2026 or even 2027, add another year for it to get rolled out to schools and for teachers to get up to speed on it and you will have kids in 2028 learning about 2025 AI tech.

By the time those kids graduate it will be 2033, so you will have a whole bunch of kids leaving school in 2033 who know all about 2025 AI tech, none of which will still be in use by 2033.

The same thing always happens when you try to teach about a fast moving field. The technology moves faster than the teaching, so a lot of what they learn is obsolete by the time they leave school.

Home computers did use magnetic tape storage, see the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum series.
The problem with any educational material is that the time it takes for it to get written, approved into a curriculum, distributed to all schools and the teachers trained how to deliver the material - it's already obsolete.
The teaching curriculum is set up to teach things that do not change - like history, rules of mathematics and physics etc. For a fast moving technology it doesn't fit.

You might get lucky and have a teacher who's an enthusiast and keeps up with technology himself, but chances are you'll get a teacher who has no personal interest in the subject and just follows the supplied material.

Just a few years ago the schools were only teaching basic use of word processors and spreadsheets.

Because they've grown accustomed to that, just like people grow accustomed to other unpleasant conditions if they persist for long enough. Anything new gets pushback, even if it's better than what it replaced.

Get rid of unnecessary journeys and you massively reduce energy consumption irrespective of the source of that energy.
If freed from the drudgery of having to attend a physical office every day a lot of people could do without a car at all.

Yes, and those workers would be able to prove it quite easily so there wouldn't be any problem there. They would also experience higher pay for the commuting time, and less congestion.
Besides, roughnecks typically stay aboard for the duration of their contract so they're not commuting every day.

The most congested cities are full of office workers who have no actual need to work in the office. Grocery stores are far more spread out, and mines tend to be located away from population centers with workers often residing nearby too.

Your work environment at home is under your control, and you have greater flexibility here if your living location is not dictated by having to travel daily to a workplace.
If you get a full remote position you can go live somewhere cheaper, so that for the same price you get a larger house and dedicate a room for work. Buy a decent comfortable chair that suits your body size and shape, a decent desk and a high quality monitor.

Most offices have standardised equipment and won't buy equipment that suits you, they might not even buy decent quality equipment. I've worked in many offices that bought the cheapest possible desks/chairs which were horribly uncomfortable and frequently broken. They also had the cheapest possible monitors which had a poor resolution, poor contrast and caused eyestrain. Typically also they skimp out on connectivity, so simple online operations are slower than necessary - and this is made worse if a lot of infra is moved to cloud instead of being on-prem at the same location.
Yes most offices suck, you can do a lot better at home.

Whoever set up that policy gets warm fuzzies by having it, rather than doing other things that could actually mitigate the risks should a single employee workstation (root or not) become compromised.

Actually if you have a standalone workstation that you setup and manage yourself this will often be significantly lower risk, as there will be no shared credentials on it that could be used for lateral movement. The typical AD model of shared authentication provides plenty of options for lateral movement, and there are many commonly deployed "security processes" that claim to be beneficial while actually providing additional lateral movement opportunities.

Several companies i audited ran nightly scans of every device that logged in remotely as a privileged user to do the scan. Once you compromised a single workstation you just had to wait for the nightly scan and steal its token, then you had access to pretty much everything.

If you're physically in the office then you can prove your arrival time based on the time you swipe through the entrance door.

And as for the rest, you underestimate how slow some machines can be. Corporate desktops tend to be the cheapest available hardware purchased in bulk, and then loaded up with lots of bloatware that slows it down. Those in IT tend to have more powerful hardware so they don't notice or care about the time consumed by other employees.
Plus the servers that people interact with during this time were probably idle overnight or performing some sort of backup/maintenance tasks, the software used when people log in will likely have been swapped out. When lots of users are all trying to log in at the same time it not only has to reload these swapped out processes, it also has to process a large number of logins simultaneously. But since this only happens once a day the overall load on the server isn't high when averaged over the whole day, so the server isnt considered underspecced or upgraded.

You get a lot of junk on most corporate laptops - AV, EDR, spyware, remote management, monitoring etc.
I had a personal laptop which was an identical model to the company supplied work laptop (in this case a macbook pro so no windows involved) and it booted noticeably quicker, although sleep is reliable on macs so most of us just put it to sleep instead of shutting down at the end of the day.

For others i see with windows laptops the problem tends to be even worse.

Unnecessary commuting is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions, and covid proved that with significant drops in co2 emissions when people were working from home.
There needs to be regulations to prevent employers from forcing unnecessary commuting, such as:

Right to work remotely unless it can be proven that your job absolutely requires presence in a specific location.
Make commuting time work time, requiring employees to be paid for it.
Tax employers based on the number of commuting hours across their employee base.
Require employers to offer relocation assistance for permanent employees who absolutely need to be in a specific location.
Flexible/staggered hours so employees can avoid peak travel times.

The one possible upside is that it could set a precedent, and prevent other companies from pulling the same crap in future.

Although it should be obvious, if you're carrying out tasks that your employer has instructed you to perform then you're working and should be paid for the time. If those processes are time consuming it's the employer's fault and their own time they're wasting. Once they can no longer pass the costs of that inefficiency onto employees they might actually do something about it.

There are plenty of places that will take your exposed film, develop, and scan and/or print for you, by mail, or in-person, at least around here. If there's a Hunt's Photo near you, they do a great job.

If you only want digital photos printed, then there are many, many places that will print pro-grade photos for cheap, and the results will be a damn sight better than what you get at the local drug store.