graemep

I agree, but its happening.

Its the same in the UK. The government (specifically Tony Blair) decided a long time ago to greatly increase the number of school leavers going to tertiary education. Parents and teachers push university as they only way to get a good job - this is not even true given a trade will give you a better income than many degrees.

Funding this massive expansion has also spread government funds thin so it has made university more expensive, which pushes people to make a financial decision. At my daughters' sixth form college far fewer people are doing music or drama and far more doing maths at A level, as they want to do "useful" subjects at university.

The impact is even worse if you are male. The number of men doing subjects like archaeology (which my younger daughter is currently doing) has fallen sharply, and its becoming a "rich girl" subject. Its actually a secure career (there is a shortage!) if not well paid, but people do not know that. When people think about jobs they think STEM or business.

We even have a system here whereby you can do both for vocational subjects. My older daughter did a degree apprenticeship (in engineering in her case, but also available in law, accountancy, etc.) which means you work while doing a degree. Fees paid and you get a salary. People are waking up to this but it needs to expand.

As I said in another comment the cost of university in the US seems to vary a great deal. Can Americans explain how much is typical? It sounds like you start saving for it before you know what university they will go to and what they will do. How much do you typically aim to save?

Americans have told me in the past how much they personally are expecting to spend and its often a huge amount, but I have no feel for what it typical, or how much it varies.

Indoor lifestyles mean even people living in sunny climates can have vitamin D deficiency, as can light skinned people.

You seem to have a weirdly sexualised idea of what "exploring" means.

I think you have a point, but intellectuals as a class also played a role in opposing things like that.

I agree with you, but this varies between countries. Americans seem to pay a lot more which makes it hard to appreciate either the personal or social benefits. In the UK people have before more focused on subjects as its become more expensive over the decades.

In England (Scotland, Wales and NI are a bit different) its £10k/year for fees (except three or four universities), plus living costs (which will vary depending where you are). Fees plus an amount for living costs (reduced as parental income rises, and you get more if studying in London) can be funded by a student loan, which has returned to interest at the rate of inflation (it was higher, and close to commercial rates for a few years, very unfairly on those in that scheme).

This is not as good as some European countries, but it seems to be a lot cheaper than the US. its hard to compare because fees vary a lot more and American universities are more generous with financial aid. What I can say is that parents in the UK do not spend a lot of time worrying about how to pay for university.

To me the ideal is that the colour of someone's skin is a minor and unimportant physical attribute - like the colour of their hair or their eyes.

A lot of liberal Americans argue against this.

I answered to the sibling comment. Saying it is one thing. Being consistent with that position is what seems to be missing.

I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.

For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".

Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.

I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.

The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".

I agree the browser monoculture is a huge problem, but I do not think its such a problem on the server because JS is not the only backend language.

I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.

I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.

There is a point to source code:

Lots of tools for analysing and debugging it

It can be cross platform - the same source code will run on x86 and ARM, and in many cases on Windows and Linux.

Changes have predictable consequences because compilers and interpreters are deterministic.

Because LLM's can do amazing things, but they can also make huge blunders. Claude constantly makes incorrect assumptions, or implements the wrong thing, or claims there is a bug when there is not.....

On the other hand its VERY fast at finding and fixing some bugs, and finding problems before they hit production. Very good at checking things like what API changes an upgrade brings or finding the right answer about a badly documented library, etc.