Of course. The goal is to train dumb subjects who can be led by simple slogans. 1. Overload the kids, burn them out. 2. Chase away the good teachers. 2. Make it fashionable to be dumb and create distrust towards intelligent people. At first the elite sent their kids to elite schools, but now I suspect they are content with having access to somewhat better info than the rest, no need to take an effort.

I live in Europe. Had a look at automatics and thought "what a cool contraption, I want one". But every time I was buying a car, the automatic was the inferior option. Higher purchase price, higher maintenance cost, higher fuel cost, less reliability. After these, some difference in comfort or speed is irrelevant. Cars are already insanely overpriced, I am not paying extra for such bloat.

I have heard doomsday news about both growing and shrinking human population, depending on what the agenda is. But I have no problem believing these results. Even a smaller number of humans can make bigger harm to the environment if they "increase efficiency" enough.

Customers who seek simple, affordable cars are not served by any manufacturer. Mostly because the regulators do not allow it. "My luxury car is better than what those plebs are using, so let's ban those!" If a brand could sell a normal family car with current collision safety, a reasonable trunk and without those "assistants" at a reasonable price, it would utterly eat all others. So the manufacturers need price fixing and paid bureaucrats and are still in trouble. If people do not have more disposable income, they will not spend more on cars, no matter what.

Those who thrive in a community are not vilified. Those who force others into the office, costing time and money, reducing efficiency, ergonomy and work-life balance at the same time, are rightfully vilified.
You seem to be a pleasant person, so your colleagues surely are eager to be with you in the office.

I am 57 and have about 10 years to retirement age. But by the time I get there, it will be raised further.

Me too. I brought home maybe 4 boxes of 5.25 floppies with Softlanding Linux 0.9x and installed on my 386.
At first mainly command line, because X was a memory hog, with my 4 MB RAM it was paging heavily. It needed manual tweaking of the raster timing config. But DOS was command line too.
I felt immediately at home and still use Linux as my daily driver.

We should have no illusions that this is only done for the public good. And dictators may spend much of their country's resources to have better AI for themselves.

I remember the good, black Thinkpads, although the keyboard was poor, even if it spread out. The red mouse button was too slow or too inaccurate for normal use.
I seem to be alone that I use external monitor, keyboard and mouse, so these do not matter when I look for a machine to buy. I only use the battery as UPS, so that does not matter either. It must be Linux-friendly, have enough RAM, storage, and the thicker the better. If it is heavy, so what.

I thought inertia means the response when you suddenly add or remove load on the network.

How much more inertia does a 200 MW generator have than 200 MW of wind generators with their blades?
For solar, a capacitor or battery of any technology can act the same as inertia. Such storage is already a priority.

Walling off the street is secessary for your safety. Think of the children!

I too have a car with this in the EU but mine can be turned off permanently, thank God, even if I have no intention of speeding excessively.
On the highway it "recognizes" the sign on the exit and insists that instead of 130 km/h, I must go at 40 for the next hour. Imagine how dangerous it would be if it suddenly brakes down to that, in the middle lane, even if I can then override it somehow. Of course, if there is a junction, it does not reset the limit as it should, even if it knows about the junction from the map.

It seems logical that the media corporations have been using software for a while to data-mine existing successful songs to generate "new" ones. It gives more short-term profit than investing in random human singers.

I saw bad news for crypto in the last couple of days, value going way down. They are trying to prop up the value for a day or two until they can dump their assets.