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If you haven't already, perhaps try applying for non-engineering positions with adequate pay and of such nature that your SWE experience is useful. I think soft skills / industry specific knowledge will become only more valuable on the long run, as AI will eventually reduce work required for writing basic CRUD apps.

I don't see how being trapped within 7 kilometers of a city office is much better. Rural life has transformed anyway to such an extent that none of your points, except being bound to your farm, are really relevant anymore if we're talking about modern farm owners.

Nowadays rural folk have cars, which means they can very much visit those libraries without need to actually live in a town.

If one happens to live in a big city, outside is not much better, and god forbid if you want to have a hobby like gardening. Just more concrete, traffic noise and people everywhere, no land that is your own. There's a reason why countryside villas remain popular among city dwellers who can afford it.

I don't feel like MS ecosystem is that attractive to consumers. In enterprise for sure, everyone uses Teams, Outlook and MS Office, and Azure is popular for hosting. But in most people's personal lives it's smartphones that are most utilized, which naturally draws people to Google's and Apple's ecosystems.

Only reasons I even bother to install Windows are gaming and MS Office provided by my university.

The Google staff responsible were clearly lacking imagination. I think next time Google should consider hiring a QA team consisting of teenagers from 4chan, I think they would excel at the job of figuring out ways to generate offensive content with the app.

Of course even better would be utilizing more balanced training data, so you don't need silly and badly working prompt engineering to force more diversity.

Most people are passionate about things that require money, such as hobbies and family life. For such people the function of work is to bring money to support those things. Studying something for 5 years without economic benefit is basically a waste of time from such viewpoint.

But like others have pointed out, I don't think there's anything wrong with getting one master's degree, and then ending up working in some other field where a degree is beneficial. But people with master's degree working minimum wage jobs that don't require education and they don't like, now that is depressing.

Standardized nationwide tests, or entry exams that are the same for everyone are the only fair and equal ways of choosing who is admitted to study and who isn't. Anything else leads to corruption and discrimination.

Helping those who are disadvantaged to achieve better educational outcomes should happen already way earlier, starting from their childhood. Proper teacher training, social services and extra funding for schools in poorer areas (regardless of race/ethnicity of population) is a good way to do that. That's basically how Nordic welfare states work, and the results are pretty good in terms of social mobility.

Western countries should have paid more attetion on social media as a means of information warfare. It has been so easy for actors from Russia and China to polarize the political landscape. Both Trump supporters and the woke left are just useful idiots implementing their plans. In EU we similarly have both anti-EU "nationalists" and lefties who oppose nuclear and call for open borders, both groups most definitely working for Russia whether they know it or not.

Sometimes the big picture is enough, and it doesn't matter if some details are wrong. For such tasks ChatGPT and LLM's generally are a major improvement over googling, and reading a lot of text you don't really care about that much.

I recommend trying Yerba Mate as an alternative to coffee. At least for me it gives a way more balanced, long-lasting energy, rather than coffee which gives me a huge spike and then goes down fast & makes me anxious. Online I've seen lots of people have very similar experiences with it.

Yes, supply and demand matters a lot. In my country becoming a doctor is particularly lucrative even by Western world's standards, because a combination of our broken healthcare system (and doctor's association's successful lobbying to keep numbers of doctors being educated too low) creates an artificial shortage of doctors. Many of them choose to work 3-4 days a week in private sector and still live very, very well. The public sector is forced to buy services from private with very inflated prices, again allowing those companies offer excellent salaries.

At the same time professions like engineering are actually underpaid here, not to even mention nursing.

Most of those millions also have miserable lives in their new host country, and indeed do it simply out of necessity.

If IT goes that way, I would rather move to the countryside and grow my own food, than become an international wage slave who moves wherever our rich overlords want.

But after enough time passes, lots of people do get interested in their ancestors. That's why DNA ancestry services are a big business - people get curious about where their unknown farther relatives came from. I guess there's just less mystery about people you actually knew.

Most Android phones get updates only for few years compared to iPhones. That alone is a good reason to choose iPhone over most (but not all) androids.

I have a 2011 Thinkpad T520 which still works fine, upgraded it to 16GB of RAM. There are high quality Windows laptops out there, but of course they cost as much as a Macbook.

I'm okay with laptops being sold with 8GB of RAM, but I'm not okay with artifically shortened lifespan caused by lack of upgradability. Manufacturers should be regulated to force them offer upgradeable RAM. I don't care what new technological innovations that may require to offer same speeds as current soldered RAM does, it's simply the right thing to do.

I hope they do. There will soon be so much e-waste from entry-level devices with 8GB RAM that can't be upgraded.

Nobody prevents you from using Freedom in your free time as well. I have it blocking addicting sites 24/7 on all my smartphones, it has worked fairly well.

Yeah, and those Germans got their expensive energy bills because they believed in "Green" (like Soviet/Russian funded) propaganda about dangers of nuclear power, even though the risk of Chernobyl or Fukushima in Germany has always been extremely low.