"one person I spoke to back in 2020 believed the ISS was dropping COVID over the world...."
you should have told him it was ISIS not ISS and he could have George Costanza'd his way to the front of the line for a jab

"I’d rather carry liberty than your strain of obedient, bed-wetting authoritarianism"
People with your attitude have spread both physical & mental disease for a very long time.
"you just admitted your entire belief system collapses the moment someone says ‘prove it.’ Enjoy your religion, comrade"
FYI not only am i quite an old guy but I have been atheist for so long i refused first communion as an adolescent despite growing in a devout household in a very observant community and attending a religious school which was very likely back when you were still bedwetting.
So when it comes to rejecting religion & asking for proof, you got nothing on me

Same with wolves where the whole idea of the "alpha" was a misunderstanding from one guy who even went back and corrected the observation since he initially made it watching captive animals, in the wild they're just families, the "leadership" observed was parents to children not the big dog in charge.

Windows Vista was probably still worse. It could take 14 days to delete a file.

best of luck to them sincerely

If a company goes under them yeah another company can come along and buy their assets sure but a dying company isn't really competing or innovating is it? Companies go under all the time, the success rate in America is like 30% of all businesses and less for some areas.

Aquisitions have just been plainly anti consumer and anti worker in their outcomes; folks get laid off, prices go up, products get worse or just shelved entirely so the parent just catch and kills.

  Let companies grow and compete if two companies want to cooperate they can but no more buying up your competition.

I run a few companies, more than 950 people are working with me, I have a few system administrator, it is a serious matter. Eventually there are people in any company that have access and control that really allows them to do damage that is massive enough that the very survival of a company is in question. This immediately has an effect on all of the clients, all of the people working for the company, partners, families, infrastructure contractors, quite a few things really. This type of behavior really compromises what people think about IT professionals everywhere.

schooling is used to control how kids think and act so they follow 'society values'. Governments who do this want to make sure that their political and religious beliefs are instilled in the next generation of voters for the rest of their lives.

This is true, a comment below here mentions at large companies like this that engineers don't innovate and a good case in point is Adobe.

Magento, Permia, Marketo, Allegorithmic, Workfront and if it wasn't for the EU they would have gone ahead and just bought Figma, an actual competitor that did something actual innovative. Once companies are big enough innovation is just buying your competition, particularly if you can get them before they can actually compete with you.

I've said it before but I am in favor of just stopping any and all acquisitions, at least for a 10 year timespan if not 20 or 30 years because IMO none of the aquisitions have done anything positive for the consumer or the employees. Think about any medium or large acquisition in the past 20 years, which have been positive to where the outcome of being purchased was better than letting these companies grow on their own?

has been created by humans?
milligrams?

Legit red teams find holes, they don't cause damage.

Too many schools are underfunded and too many teachers are overwhelmed with large class sizes, behavioral and disciplinary challenges, lack of administrative support and in-class assistance, and disinterested, unhelpful parents (who are working 2-3 jobs, often at night, and are themselves exhausted and burned out)

The US already pays more per student than just about any other country on the planet for education and we do not get the results.

No, the problem isn't money......

I think a lot of parents are home schooling to get their kids out of the classrooms filled with green/blue dyed hair teachers who are more concerned with indoctrination than education.

The pandemic opened A LOT of peoples' collective eyes as to what was really going on in classrooms that parents didn't have a clue about.

Encouragement of trans....grade school kids exposed to information on anal sex and how a boy can give a blow job were the most egregious examples....but just sets values that didn't set with what parents in general in the US want to impart to their kids.

the US population is generally middle of the road and you screeching green haired instructor is pushing stuff from the far left in many cases.

Parent's saw this and are putting a stop to it.

Frankly I can't blame them.

Smart. Instead of charging each customer an additional $0.04 per unit, or even eating those costs ($600k, in other word chump change), they use it as an excuse to upsell their product line.

Now that's market research you can take to the bank. The money bank.