Far too many people were told to go into debt and attend college and get that magic degree, only to find themselves in debt, and working jobs that either require no degree or do not line-up with the degree they got. Also, most people who went to college had the experience of being required to take a bunch of junk courses they had no interest in, and which were unrelated tho their majors, supposedly in the interest of becoming a "well-rounded" person - but are aware that many of these classes were more of a partisan indoctrination (politically or culturally) rather than being the traditional classical education stuff.

You can tell people all day long that they and their kids and grand kids all NEED those college degrees and all that debt, but as long as they see with their own eyes that this is not actually needed, large numbers of people will not buy-in.

Incidentally, before somebody replies critically, Yes I DID indeed serve my time in college, and I think it's highly important for people to do it IF THEY ARE TAKING THE RIGHT MAJOR FOR A GOOD CAREER. We NEED doctors and engineers and scientists etc with degrees, but we do NOT need carpenters, plumbers, store security people, baristas, etc with useless fluff degrees and so much debt they'll never be able to buy a house and live comfortably. If somebody is going to end-up in a blue collar career, they should not be wasting 4 years of their lives and going deeply into debt with college, and it's abusive to counsel them to the contrary. We sadly developed a system in which a lot of people have been told that blue collar jobs are awful and only stupid people do them, and this is wrong on both points.

They want the public to think it's OUR fault they keep shoveling out fake numbers with loud pronouncements, and then later try to slip-through huge corrections,and they don't want us to think this through. There's no need for them to get any data this way! Every single valid employer in the USA is required by law to file accurate job data with the IRS as they take part of every person's paycheck on a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly basis and send it in. Any increase or decrease in employment will be immediately reflected in tax payments tied to specific employee SSIDs the with the first filing of taxes to the IRS after an employee is hired/fired/layed-off. When the employees file their annual taxes, they are required to indicate what they do fr a living (plumber, doctor, engineer, teacher, etc). With the mountain of required-by-federal-law-to-be-accurate data constantly cascading into the government, the BLS does not need any phone surveys to get good data; in fact they probably should not EXIST as an agency (the IRS and the Social Security Administration ought to have very reliable labor data at all times).

The BLS has a LONG track record of reporting bad numbers, and the seemingly-partisan way they're always wrong and then later correct (seemingly always with numbers and updates (in magnitude, direction, and timing of release) that favor one political party) lead many people to be VERY suspicious. Random errors would be in random directions, not directions that conveniently line-up with partisan interests. This most-recent hugely positive data before the presidential election end then huge downward revision post-election is one of their largest ever and seems to have gotten the attention of this administration which was hurt both by the initial reporting (making their opponent look better during the campaign) and by the update (making them look bad now that they're in office). People who think humans become non-partisan saints when they land government jobs may see nothing wrong here, but they should at least understand why others "smell a rat".

The vast majority of "pollsters" calling are working for companies or politicians who are NOT trying to accurately obtain public opinions in order to change THEIR behavior and better serve the public, but instead are trying to generate data to help them figure out how to better mislead and manipulate the public. There's a HUGE difference between these things. We would all like a politician to poll us and find out what we want and then do his/her best to achieve what we want... but the politicians want their people to poll us in order to find out how to better "tailor their messaging" (i.e. lie to us in ways more likely to convince us to send money or vote) while they go ahead and do what their party leaders or biggest donors insist they do no matter what WE want.

Why on Earth should anybody help jerks figure out how to better lie to them?

YOU are not "coding" at all. You are asking a hacked-together-and-modified human language processing experiment to cut and paste random chunks of code from the internet into a blob that might well compile and even run, but which YOU neither understand nor can claim credit for "writing". You're not gonna know the code, not going to be able to fix it or maintain it, and you certainly are not a "coder" or a "programmer" or a "developer"... you started as a specifier, and then turned into a coach/critic for a dumb machine in a big sloppy feedback loop of "that was closer to what I want, let me be more specific".

I'd fire anybody I caught using AI on any of my projects.

These shortcuts/buzzwords/"new methods" that so-called developers keep wanting to use to supposedly go faster better and cheaper are just getting junkier and junkier...

Cats & dogs, living together! Oh, no! People are going to be DYING en masse, like never seen before!... well... ok... like not seen since 1970 [eyeroll]

Are we REALLY at a point where a president proposes an accounting change to a policy 90% of us will never notice that will return to a system that worked for many decades just 55 years ago deserves all sorts of bloviating about corruption and ulterior motives and conspiracies just because some people are just full of hate?

The change from bi-annual to quarterly was not noticed by most Americans. It created lots more busy work, and quite frankly it DID contribute (though it did not CREATE) to the shortening of the planning horizons for lots of bad executives. Instead of trying to make each semester of business look good, execs got fixated on the even shorter-term and needed good quarterlies. Switching from quarters back to semesters is not likely to be noticed by most, and [sadly] I doubt it'll do what some in this administration probably hope and get corporate America to stop being so short-sighted. Whatever the effect, most of us will not notice nor care, and people need to stop trying to turn every single damned policy proposal into a hyper-political argument and evidence that people we disagree with on other issues are incompetent, or evil. I think we've had enough of that recently.

the bleed air systems of airliners DO NOT use air that has gone [as implied] all the way through the engine.

Essentially, what's happening is that the cabin needs to be pressurized for the safety and comfort of the people on board, and the jet already has one or more air compressors on board (each engine effectively IS one) so to save weight and complexity the compressor PORTION of the engine is doing double-duty. A jet engine essentially sucks cold clean low pressure air in the front, runs it through a bunch of fan blades to compress it, (with a side-effect that it gets quite warm) then runs it into a cumbustor section where fuel and fire are introduced to drive the temp way up, thus driving the pressure way up, and then into the tailpipe where it exits the engine for thrust. The bleed air system taps into the warm compressed air BEFORE the combustor stage and routes some of that air to anti-icing systems and such, but also cools and routes some of that air into the cabin. Since outside air at high altitudes is generally quite clean, these systems are often unfiltered. The problems generally are tied to things like lubrication fluids contaminating, or engine/plane specific failure modes.

The AOPA has a nice page on it here for those interested.

The Nixon "Southern Strategy" is the excuse that liberal teachers and professors have sold to people as a supposed evidence that the Democrats and Republicans flipped sides in the South in the 1968-1976 window. It's provably false by simply looking at election results.

Yes, Nixon tried a "Southern Strategy"... but it failed. The South continued to elect Democrats all the way until Reagan in the 1980s, and even though the South supported the Reagan PRESIDENCY it kept sending Democrats to the House and Senate. In fact, Clinton/Gore got the Southern vote in 1992 and 1996.

Think it through further; it was Republican votes that pushed the civil rights bills over the finish line in the 1950s and 1960s (southern Dems voted "no" and the GOP voted in higher percentages for those bills than the Dems) and it was the Republican president Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was Democrat president Woodrow Wilson who segregated the federal government along racial lines. It was Republican President Eisenhower who, only a decade before this imaginary political flip, sent federal troops into the South to push back on racist Southern Democrat governors. With all that context, you truly believe that the warm-and-fuzzy bubbly [yeah, sarcasm] Nixon convinced southern racists to protest Democrats slipping toward moderation on racism, by moving en-masse to the Republican party (who most Southerners in the 1960s still hated for Sherman's march through the South)??? Really? In the 1960s in the South you still routinely heard Southerners refer to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression" and express hatred for Lincoln and his supposed war crimes against the South [eyeroll].

Ignore the fairy tales by biased educators and look at the raw data. You're on Slashdot, so I presume you know how to look at data and give it some weight. Use some common sense too.

The Elephant party has TONS of flaws, but history really is not on the side of the Jackass party in this area. Sorry.

You THINK those Pharma ads are (like normal ads) intended to get consumers to buy a thing... how innocent.

The ads cannot be for that purpose when the "consumer" is not allowed to buy the product. Like everybody else, I then assumed the fall-back position that these ads (which USED TO BE ILLEGAL) were designed to get little elderly people to pester their doctors into prescribing pills they did not need... BUT those sorts of pills are NOT where Pharma gets its money, AND while some doctors probably could get worn down and cave-in to such pestering, I suspect most would stand firm and not make such prescriptions.

Those ads for prescription drugs on TV are, I now believe, for an entirely different purpose: Blackmail. Old-school mafia style (not spoken openly, just implied).

A company spends MOUNTAINS of money running ads for a product consumers cannot buy on every TV channel that has news outlets. Then we have a health crisis in which the company will make BILLIONS by convincing government to buy very expensive experimental medications and pressure everybody to take them (hundreds of millions of doses to be made and sold in bulk quantities to governments, CHA-CHING!). In this scenario, what SHOULD happen - but does not? serious critical Investigative reporting. Why not? Why does not ONE broadcast news channel do ANY critical investigations of the company or its experimental product? Could it be because management of every TV station involved fears losing a vast amount future of ad revenue if it makes the advertiser mad by investigating that advertiser? I could well be wrong, but nothing else makes better sense to me...

As a general rule, I hate conspiracy theories. Stories like this one, therefore, make life rather difficult at times.

How do you tell the nuts to take off their foil hats and drop the rants about secret cabals of rich& powerful people trying to live forever by harvesting organs from young&healthy ordinary people, when the world's four nastiest dictators get together and age caught on a hot mike discussing living forever by taking transplanted organs from other people, AND when one of the snakes in the conversation has actually been harvesting organs from people?

The fact that they then get the video taken down is just the frosting on the cake.

I think I have lost the ability to argue against this one [sigh]

On a certain level, I'd have been tempted to agree with you on it being OK to "teach to the test", but I have three problems with it, one of which you caught and ack'd:

1. (the one you hit) if the tests get dumbed-down (the current strategy of the entire American educational establishment over the past 30 or so years) then the teaching auto-aligns to the dumber setting. Definitely more of a bug than a feature in my book...

2. Depending on how it's done, it does not get deeply into the "how" and "why" of math (not the "how do I do it?" but rather the "how does this WORK?") which I suspect leaves many kids with an insecure grip on math - not a good foundation for higher learning. As an example, let me highlight the idea of teaching kids "math shortcuts" (where the kid learns a method or scheme to get a fast answer but has no clue as to how and why the scheme works and may not know when to apply it (or NOT to apply it))

3. Some kids become VERY good at learning how to pass tests, but are nearly paralyzed when they need to apply the material that the test purports to show that they know. I have seen this up-close. Many years ago I had peers who took classes to learn to ace the SAT and some of them tested very highly (particularly on the math section) but, to my knowledge, nearly all of them switched away from science and engineering majors in college, and usually because of the math.

We seem to lack a good way to distinguish between the kids who really learn a subject well, and kids who learn to TEST well in that same subject, and while we'd all really love to presume that a kid's teacher will "just know" which kids are "getting it", the truth is that many teachers lack that skill, and while many others might be ABLE to, our current brick-and-mortar industrial age model of schools often puts too many kids in the class and there's simply not the one-on-one time needed.

As a matter of historical FACT the "crossburners" in the United States were all Democrats. The KKK was founded and run by Democrats, who celebrated Nathan Bedford Forrest at one of their national presidential conventions. The last well-known politician in the US who was a Klan leader was a "grand kleagle" in that organization and was Democrat US Senator Robert Byrd, who was voted into his position as US Senate Majority Leader by [among other Democrats] then-senators Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden, and Barack Obama. When the slimy toad died, Democrats all lined-up to give glowing eulogies at his funeral; they named buildings after him!

As for "valor stealing", which I as a vet take seriously (I served after Vietnam, but knew guys who served in that war, the Korean War, and WWII, in actual combat and so I care on multiple levels). I would point you at the moron your team put on the ticket as a VP candidate last year, and Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal AKA "Da Nang Dick" for starters. The Vietnam War was both very divisive and a personal dilemma for millions of young American men (we had a draft back then) which is why so many of our nation's elites who were young in that era found so many ways to either avoid service with minor medical issues, by staying in college with easy subjective majors (like education or journalism), or by jumping into the national guard before getting drafted and hoping for assignment to units unlikely to deploy. Girlie men like Blumenthal, however, could not let this be enough and mislead voters into thinking he was a combat veteran of Vietnam - THAT is "stolen valor" and you guys on the left give that dirtbag a complete pass, so just shut up about the subject.

After you finish removing the egg from your face, go read-up on your pals and heroes and spend a little time being embarrassed. Then get a bit of humility.

The reason there are pictures of drag queens in places where there are little kids is that there ARE drag queens in places where there are little kids.

The thing that is at the core of the Salem Witch Trials and the reason we see them as outrageous today is that there were NO witches in Salem; there was just a social contagion that was allowed to run amok. Same thing we still see today, only instead of people pointing and shrieking about witches they imagine to be present, they shriek about NAZIs they presume to be present.

people seem to be missing in these firings of federal government statistics people:

In the cases so far, we're talking about a YEAR of data, and not a year back from NOW, but rather going back a year from this past spring - so we're looking at a scenario in which the numbers produced made the nation's economic health look much better through the entire 2024 election cycle than it actually was, and then getting "corrected" (oopsie, an honest mistake, no politics here, move along...) after the new president took office. New administrations replacing the employees in the executive branch is nothing new (The Clintons, for example, took this to what was then an unprecedented extreme by even doing the White House Travel Office). To my knowledge, we've NEVER before however seen such a incredible cooking of the books on economic numbers by an incumbent president through an election cycle (which then necessitated the correction, no matter who was then sworn in after the election).

I don't care WHO you voted for, the thing that's alarming here is NOT the firings by the Bad Orange Man - it's the completely phony numbers that were cascading out of the supposedly non-partisan agencies in DC staffed by supposedly unbiased career employees. It's probably become inevitable, now that DC has become the very thing our founders did not want it to be: a large city of government people living in a bubble and isolated from the rest of the nation and as out of touch with the citizenry as the members of any royal court. The large centralized government we have grown is largely staffed by people who live in an area that reliably votes over 90% for one political party, and the cooked numbers ALWAYS favor that party. This is STRUCTURALLY bad, and leads to bad decision making even by the very party seemingly favored by the people manipulating the data. Oh, and for those who might say "if this is partisan, why would these partisan actors correct the data now?" I would point out that the numbers must meet reality at SOME point (and after the election was a useful point). It's a it like somebody siphoning money from a business; the numbers can be cooked to hide the theft for a while, but eventually the missing money will be discovered and so at some point an accountant will be forced to update the books; there's no escaping reality.

you flagged the all-too-clever dodge. The person who wrote that MIGHT have believed it, but it makes no sense given the paring of the OS with the hardware. If the phone comes with Android pre-installed, and it's basic function is essentially null-and-void if Android were removed, then there's no practical severability and restrictions of the OS become de-facto restrictions on the hardware.

It's a bit like saying you are free to sit on any seat in the plane while it's in flight, but then preventing you from boarding by not letting you have a ticket to board in the first place and saying "what's yer complaint? we promise you can have any seat you want when you're aboard the plane..we're not restricting THAT at all..."

If I want to write an app for my phone and stick it on my phone (which I own) I should have to "prove identity" and "provide proof of adequate insurance against liability, errors & omissions, etc."????

WTF?

How long before I have to do the same for code I write and run on my PC???

Do you believe in ANYTHING that even resembles freedom and liberty? What, pray tell, is the justification for this headlong plunge in the direction of totalitarianism where mega-corps in bed with big government can dictate what you do with your stuff and prevent you from writing and running your own code on your own hardware?