a big part of it is how prepared both the government and the people are. In fairbanks, alaska we recently had a much larger storm and although many people lost power for a couple of days and most of the town was stuck at home we recovered pretty much immediately after the snow stopped falling. For many town along the coast large winter storms are normal so they recover even quicker.
I personally think it is wishful thinking. At this facebook is rich enough that even if facebook.com completely imploded they could pivot to another social media platform they own such as instagram, and it is hard to imagine facebook.com imploding completely as it is used across the globe and I can see that even if facebook fell in the english speaking world other regions would still use it.
I would argue trust is a big part of it. My counter example:
Apple. Apple is a massive company that could collect massive
sums of valuable data. Althoguh they do act like a monopoly in many respects (cough cough T2) they do not abuse data that they could collect. I think the reason for that is they want some level of trust from consumers. They do abuse their position of power but they do not do very much 'creepy' things like google, MS, Amazon, or Facebook
I sort of get what you're saying. A lot of formerly-anti-Apple people have started looking at them with new eyes because of their welcome stance on privacy.
But even with the Apple example, aren't they the most valuable company on Earth? Despite having anti-consumer policies like removing the 3.5mm jack or making their laptops nigh-on irrepairable. Clearly the market shrugs at those 'tradeoffs' in exchange for Apple shifting more product more quickly. This is what I mean by the market not being the perfect device to self-regulate. Perhaps on a VERY long term scale, but not on human time scales.
At the same time people who are self taught typically have more time and energy to attack things in more depth. My cs classes are pretty 'standard' and on my free time I can go on long tangents where I really learn. I learned about assembly programming and the bacics of how cpu's work from self learning rather than getting a very simplified understanding from a class. There are many things in cs that can not be learned in 1 semester and people who are self taught have the ability to take things at their own pace and jump to different topics, something that busy college studens have little time to do
I got the dell precision 5520 with ubuntu preinstalled and I promptly installed arch. My experience (aside from nvidia) was pretty much as good as it gets with linux. I never had any issues with wifi etc. If one is spending 1k+ on a laptop I would recomend buying it with linux because 1. you know that all of the chips are compatible with linux and 2. it is usually $100 cheaper
UA is nothing like a corporation it is tied to the state. Yes it has quite a bit of waste but fundamentally the institutions goal is to do research and to educate
Fundamentally the goal of UA is to survive and grow, like all other organizations. If research and education furthers that goal, then that's what it'll attempt to do - but if bloat and cost disease further that goal expect to see those too.
Not always. UA is composed of many sub groups. They usually have little to do with each other. Some of these groups are very wastefull and just try to further their existance. But a large portion of the groups are actually concerned with doing things in the real world. I do not want to give specific examples but I have plenty of experience with people that actually want to do good things in the world at UA.
That is still a huge cut to UA. The quality of education and research will be severely hurt by that cut. Many of the education programs do not make money and that is fine because they provide an important service to the state. That is creating smart people who work in AK rather than leaving AK forever
