I deal with Junior devs that don’t even actually understand how it works now. Much less how it worked in the 90s. Routing is sysops, HTML is designers, storage is for DBAs. All they learn in coding boot camp is how react works, and even then, they don’t actually understand what it’s doing.

If it’s artistic, sure. Even if it said “penis man” in an artful way. But this is as close to art as a adult still drawing stick figures. It’s almost embarrassing we don’t have better vandals in the neighborhood.

I feel you on a lot of that. Big FAANG and Covid lockdowns changed the landscape hard in the favor of the inexperienced. In late 2020, I had a junior position to fill with a 90k salary. The guy that has accepted called me back a few days later to inform me Disney+ just offered him 220k. I couldn’t even be mad he was taking their offer after he had already accepted mine. I’m sure a lot of that resulted in incompetent people with higher paying jobs and titles than they deserved. Note that it’s setting the other way, well, no one can afford to take a pay cut, so they’re of course applying to jobs they don’t qualify for. My current role clearly says PHP, but I’ve dumped maybe 10% of the candidates already for not even having the term PHP on their resume.

It’s not just grads. I have 1 open senior position, 100 applicants. A good 10% of them with 15+ years of experience have had no job in the last year, or have things like “Amazon fulfillment center” as their most recent job. Shits rough if you find yourself laid off or if the company you’re working for went out of business.

The no child left behind policy was intended to ensure that kids got extra help when needed. In reality schools determined it was way easier to lower the bar than to get some kids to learn. Kids and shitty parents have figured this out and will game the system as much as possible. Clear on it being a baby bush policy. FWIW I think the intent was good, but making more demands of the education without providing additional resources and no way of enforcing quality has reached an inevitable point.

Grade school: teacher fired for passing failing students so he wouldn’t have to deal with them next year. This was before “no child left behind” existed. At the end of one of the school years a girl tripped and fell and somehow got a metal tent spike through her neck. She was ok, just had a wicked scar.

Middle school: someone did the old flush the fireworks thing and somehow revealed a major flaw in the plumbing that required demolishing a whole building. We didn’t have water on campus for the last month. This was in Phoenix and it was getting stupid hot, so that whole month was half days.

High school: At the end of the year before I started a bunch of students got arrested for using an empty science lab to make meth. In my junior year there was a party that got a couple kids killed in a drive by.

By your content I’m going to discuss regional, not local service. For context I’m in one of the top 10 most populous cities in the country. There is no regional rail service. That’s how bad it is. In order to catch a train, it’s a 2 hour drive to a much smaller city.

But let’s look at a train trip I wanted to take. All west coast, Portland, OR to San Diego, CA. There is at least rail service that would do it. I think it took 48 ish hours with a middle of the night layover in Los Angeles. The drive is about 16 hours. The flight is about 2.

When it exists, it’s slow and super inconvenient.

I could have been that neighbor. For many years I was a WiFi communist and intentionally kept my AP open. I depended on free WiFi to get through college so I provided free WiFi. Then I got a cease and desist from my ISP for someone pirating a shit ton of porn. Like the list was about 10 full length pornos. Had to lock it down after that. I’ve considered making some deals with my neighbors to extend my mesh network into their house in exchange for space in their driveway, but haven’t gotten around to it.