Actually, people in general are a lot more comfortable depending on large corporations as their sole source of food than they ought to be. The problem is, at an urban population density there isn't any alternative. (O, and most people lack both hunting and farming skills sufficient to survive on.)
He's not. He doesn't want to depend on someone else being willing to drop by his place and pick him up. He wants an automated vehicle that will pick him up, drop him off at his destination, and return itself. And that's just one use case.
I'm not sure that an automated service would fully satisfy his desires, but it's quite certain that Lyft and Uber wouldn't. They work fine if there's a lot of people going nearby who are headed pretty much where you want to go, but don't work so well in other (less common) circumstances. As long as regular taxis exist these "less common" circumstances won't be obtrusive. If they vanish... it's my guess that Lyft, Uber, etc. will handle at best about 90% of the business that taxis handle. If they drive the taxi companies under, these remaining needs will be totally unserved.
And there are other use cases. Delivering kids to a destination and picking them up, e.g.
There are a lot of reasons why a totally automated vehicle would serve needs that a partially automated vehicle would not address. This doesn't make them a good idea, but it means that they would fill a niche that nothing else fills.
OTOH, *most* of the economic upset that fully automated vehicles would cause would also be caused by nearly automated vehicles. I truck driving is de-skilled, then there will no longer be a need for specially qualified drivers, so truck driving will be a minimum wage job...and currently minimum wage means not enough to live on. Not quite the same as not having a driver, but close. It will mean the loaders and unloaders will become more important, but they'll be using automated machinery themselves, so there wouldn't need to be many of them.
That said, there are good reasons to consider automated vehicles to be threats. Bomb delivery systems is only one reason. Also, maintenance on public service automated vehicles would need to consider vandalism. So it might well not be particularly cheap. Or might be quite intrusive about the individual paying for the service. (So identity theft would have a new expensive sideline.)
You don't need to believe that most of the mistakes are malicious to believe that there are a lot of mistakes. The very idea that their model would be developed and presented as an Excel spreadsheet says to me that they don't have a reasonable mathematical model. Excel was intentionally designed to hide the complexities that are used in a way that inherently makes it difficult to validate. You should never trust ANY model that is implemented in Excel (or any other spreadsheet, as far as I know) until it has been validated extensively. Spreadsheets aren't designed like Mathematica or R or any decent programming language. They are designed to hide your mistakes. They call it "being user friendly". (Perhaps I'm being a touch too cynical, but I may also be cutting them too much slack.)
P.S.: I'd say the same thing about MSAccess, but I haven't as much as looked at it in the last two decades. The last time I used it became the last time when I proved that it was making a simple arithmetic error. I had thought it was one of the periodic code corruption problems that MSAccess was subject to, but it was much worse than that. Perhaps in the last couple of decades they've fixed the thing.
Study the iterated prisoner's dilemma. That can easily be mapped onto parts of economics. Cut away the parts that don't work and you have a sound piece of economics.
Just because there are hard problems that can't be solved doesn't mean that no problems can be solved. Unfortunately, in the case of economics it seems to repeately mean that the most important problems can't be solved.
Of course, we don't really know what problems economics could solve if it tried, because politics always gets mixed up in things, and that usually tries to run things for the benefit of a small group of people who maintain power by lying to everyone else. So economic theories are tested not because there's any reason to believe they are good things, but because the benefit those who are selling them, and benefit those who currently hold power. Often the theories that are tried bear little resemblance to the theories that are claimed to be being tried.
That's not clear, but if it both requires a Nobel prize winner to explain, and he's still poor enough that the money in the prize is significant, in that case it probably doesn't work.
But it *is* predictive, about certain things, even though not predictive about others. E.g., it can predict that people will continue to get rich off of get rich quick schemes that don't work.
I suppose you could consider economics to be a sort of blend between statistics and psychology, and it doesn't work where the psychology is fuzzy, and its predictions are statistical in nature.
Mind you, if you consider it this way it become immediately obvious that most of what's sold as economics is a pack of lies. And actual economics is more restricted in domain that this definition implies, so it's not clear that many pure-economic theories *can* work. You don't just buy bread, you buy bread for a reason which is as much, or more, physiological as psychological. But psychology may determine which brand of bread you buy...so that could be economics.
They may be rare, but they have happened to politically destroy individuals. It's generally impossible to prove that the scenario was set up by an opponent. One recent example that I think was probably of this variety was Julian Assange. The evidence is not complete, but is persuasive.
It is often abused even without any sexual overtures.
Let me rephrase that.
The power of graduate advisors over graduate students is extremely often abused in ways that would be illegal in most other circumstances. E.g. demanding unpaid labor for over 40 hours/week.
That is would also be abused in other ways shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's because a lot of men have internalized the cultural bias that anyone who is easily discouraged is unmanly, and that women do (and should) deny interest even when they are interested. Try figuring out how to act with those beliefs if sexual harassment is penalized.
No. But the guy who was maintaining the software originally wrote it in assembler, and then fixed bugs by doing binary patches. Not me, I never worked for the company, or met the guy who wrote the software. I understand the company was a shoe seller, but I don't even know whether it was a manufacturer or a vendor.
Yes, however, this was on an OLD computer. But the software was kept as a deck of punched cards, not panel switches. (It's not THAT old.)
Actually, that's not always true. I've heard of companies that used software they only had in binary. I suppose you could turn that into assembler easily enough, though you might end up with some of your data being rendered as code.
(The case I heard of was back in the 1970's and the programmer who originally built the software fixed it with binary patches, so the code didn't mean anything...but it had been lost anyway by this point.
They used this software as a part of how they figured their profits, which they then reported to the IRS. At some point the IRS decided to audit them.... WHOOPS! And the guy who wrote the code was no longer working there.)
Unfortunately, accusations of sexual harassment are often easy to create to punish politically incorrect beliefs or actions.
It's a real problem, and I don't see any easy solution. There is a strong cultural tradition that says that women are supposed to protest against pursuit, even when that's what they really want, and there's no easy way to tell.
Clearly the only safe procedure is to immediately desist upon request, but there's also a strong cultural tradition that says this is "unmanly". Whoops!
We seem to be groping towards a tradition where honesty is demanded on both sides, but getting there is causing a lot of people a lot of problems. For a minor example of the kind of problem from a few decades ago "Should a man hold a door open for a woman?". For awhile you would receive abuse no matter HOW you answered that. (From different groups, but still abuse.) For that matter just last week I heard a woman saying (as a compliment) to a man that it had been years since the last time a man held a door open for her. She still saw that the the proper polite behavior.
Now note that the question of holding a door open never had the degree of seriousness attached to it that "inappropriate advances" had. OTOH, under the old standard the professor would be forbidden to approach the female student no matter how provocative she was. So (as reported) he was following neither the old standard nor the developing standard.
In this case the only answer I see is "life logs". If either was wearing a life log, then the situation would not be in doubt, and in *THAT* case I think that there should be the ability to remove tenure. But there should also be a right of appeal, though to who? The administration or the faculty? Whichever of those two groups wasn't running the prior proceedings would be my first cut at an answer, but one might also consider whether the students should have a say in this.
No, the political process is the problem. This is a systemic problem, not the problem of a few corrupt politicians. The design of the system ensures that only the corrupt can be successful at the highest levels. So this breaks down into three problems: 1) How long should this be endured before it's worthwhile engaging in the risk of changing the system. (Perhaps it will get better on it's own. There have been periods when this has happened before.) 2) What should it be replaced with. 3) What is the most efficient (i.e. least traumatic && most effective && least likely to go hideously wrong) way to get from here to there.
These problems are made worse because corruption in government is becoming endemic world wide. The reason is clear. Easy communications easily intercepted give excessive power to a centralized group of people. What to do about it is much less clear. Public key systems should solve the problem, but how do you get those with whom you wish to communicate to encrypt their communications to you? How to you keep the implementing software and hardware from being penetrated? Etc. But if all communications were encrypted with a public key system, then the concentration of power would be considerably less. So then we come to the secondary basis of power, fast transmission of orders from the central site to remote sites, and messages in return. This one I don't think CAN be solved, and I also don't think it SHOULD be solved. Then we come to the third factor facilitating centralization of power, and that's rapid transportation. Again something that shouldn't be prevented.
The upshot is there needs to be a drastic redesign of the system causing limitations in the benefit of centralized power. One possibility is requiring all representatives of a population to live in the area being represented and to regularly (twice a week, two 5.5 hour sessions uninterrupted) hold open office hours. Appointments are forbidden. I don't like that approach. I'd rather replace elections by a draft lottery, where the representative are drafter. (I'd allow them to decline the ballot on payment of a hefty fine. Say $20,000 indexed by inflation.) Qualification would be similar to the current requirements for voting. I.e., you have to register, you need to be adult, and you need to be able to read and write. (I *would* require English, as some common language would appear to be necessary.) As I see it this selection method has three benefits: 1) You don't get the office by being power hungry or a demagogue. 2) You can't be bribed ahead of time. 3) You get a good representative sample of the population. There's a fourth virtue which is indirect, but is 4) There's no incentive to create centralizations of power. (You can't "run for re-election", so it's of no benefit to do so for most representatives.) I would hope that there would be strictly enforced laws against bribing representatives while they were in office, including against promises of benefits that they would get after leaving office, but that's an "implementation detail".
OK. But what's being discussed sounds more like the French Revolution...you know, the one that started with the storming of the Bastille and lead to something better through the reign of terror.
Sorry, but there are slow growing cancers as well as aggressive ones. Just because your doctor decides not to treat your prostate cancer doesn't mean that it's not cancer, it just means that it's not an aggressive one, and you'll likely die of something else before it causes problems. (Well, and treating it is, itself, likely to cause problems.)
So the cancer not being an aggressive cancer wouldn't mean it wasn't a cancer. Benign tumors are different, and inherently limited (until, of course, they mutate). Most people have several benign tumors and just don't know it.
I have complained to my representative. If you haven't, please do so now.
OTOH, don't expect it to make any difference. I expect my representative to vote in the way I would approve of, but I expect that would have happened even without my comment. I don't expect either of my senators to be as virtuous. Only one of them to I give any chance. The other would be willing to lie about the position taken to get my support (I've caught that happening before), but wouldn't actually change position.
So what government should be tried next time? Something that doesn't centralize power in power hungry people, please.
No, it's not cancer. It's an indication of possible cancer. What is the rate of false positives? I don't know, you don't know, the article didn't say. It also didn't name the test, so you can't easily look it up.
You can't accurately tell whether this is normally expectable or horrendous. The information to decide that isn't present.
It may well be several years, but I'd be surprised if it were several decades.
The problem is, what is the false positive rate? I don't know the test at all, but there are rates of false positives that would make this not in the slightest alarming, and there are also rates that would make this horrendous. (And lets not forget that there are also false negatives, to complicate the matter.)
FWIW, skimming the article did not reveal either the name of the test or the expected rate of false positives, making it impossible to evaluate.
Well, it hasn't driven me back to LILO *yet*. But I sure don't understand why they replaced something reasonably easy to understand with something hopelessly opaque.
I actually preferred Grub over LILO once I got used to it. But that is not clearly true of Grub2.
But the real question is can it R/W ext4 filesystems? If it can't handle my filesystems then no gradual transition is possible, and I'm certainly not going to commit myself until I test that all the tools I need are present and working. Which means my actual working system files are going to be in ext4 until after the transition. (Also the backups are in ext4.)
The last time I checked I couldn't find a BSD that could R/W ext4, though, IIRC, there was one that claimed to read it. (Probably by ignoring the journal files...which would explain why writing was out.)
Look guys, I couldn't switch to Linux until Linux could read my MSWind files. (Fortunately I didn't need to wait for NTFS.) Switching to anything else is going to have the same kind of requirement.
It's on so many distros because it's on both Red Hat and Debian. It's on Red Hat because it's a good system for sysadmins who are maintaining many systems out of easy reach. I'm not sure WHY it's on Debian. There appears to have been some finagling of the voting process, but others have denied that, so I'm left unsure...but suspicious.
Anyway, Red Hat and Debian are the systems off of which most Linux distributions are built, and systemd is so constructed that independent software packages that are built to use it's facilities are incompatible with sysvinit without lots of work. So there's a network effect.
I've heard no sign that systemd is of any benefit to individual computer users. I've heard lots of reports that it is a severe disadvantage. Most of the reports, admitttedly, are more than 6 months old, but given that systemd is becoming so prevasive, upgrades to systemd have probably become rare. So people won't be noticing what's causing the problem. (And, of course, the problems may have been fixed.)
I'm not pleased with the way that systemd has been insinuated into the Linux ecosystem, and I'm not convinced that unscrupulous tactics weren't used. But it *may* not be any worse than sysvinit outside of binary logs, etc.
Well... I took Latin in high school, and while I read Caesar's Gallic War, I can't say I learned much about the Roman culture. There were a couple of nods in that direction, but I learned more about it when I learned about "The Golden Ass" (and read an English translation) than I did in Latin class.
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Actually, people in general are a lot more comfortable depending on large corporations as their sole source of food than they ought to be. The problem is, at an urban population density there isn't any alternative. (O, and most people lack both hunting and farming skills sufficient to survive on.)
He's not. He doesn't want to depend on someone else being willing to drop by his place and pick him up. He wants an automated vehicle that will pick him up, drop him off at his destination, and return itself. And that's just one use case.
I'm not sure that an automated service would fully satisfy his desires, but it's quite certain that Lyft and Uber wouldn't. They work fine if there's a lot of people going nearby who are headed pretty much where you want to go, but don't work so well in other (less common) circumstances. As long as regular taxis exist these "less common" circumstances won't be obtrusive. If they vanish... it's my guess that Lyft, Uber, etc. will handle at best about 90% of the business that taxis handle. If they drive the taxi companies under, these remaining needs will be totally unserved.
And there are other use cases. Delivering kids to a destination and picking them up, e.g.
There are a lot of reasons why a totally automated vehicle would serve needs that a partially automated vehicle would not address. This doesn't make them a good idea, but it means that they would fill a niche that nothing else fills.
OTOH, *most* of the economic upset that fully automated vehicles would cause would also be caused by nearly automated vehicles. I truck driving is de-skilled, then there will no longer be a need for specially qualified drivers, so truck driving will be a minimum wage job...and currently minimum wage means not enough to live on. Not quite the same as not having a driver, but close. It will mean the loaders and unloaders will become more important, but they'll be using automated machinery themselves, so there wouldn't need to be many of them.
That said, there are good reasons to consider automated vehicles to be threats. Bomb delivery systems is only one reason. Also, maintenance on public service automated vehicles would need to consider vandalism. So it might well not be particularly cheap. Or might be quite intrusive about the individual paying for the service. (So identity theft would have a new expensive sideline.)
You don't need to believe that most of the mistakes are malicious to believe that there are a lot of mistakes. The very idea that their model would be developed and presented as an Excel spreadsheet says to me that they don't have a reasonable mathematical model. Excel was intentionally designed to hide the complexities that are used in a way that inherently makes it difficult to validate. You should never trust ANY model that is implemented in Excel (or any other spreadsheet, as far as I know) until it has been validated extensively. Spreadsheets aren't designed like Mathematica or R or any decent programming language. They are designed to hide your mistakes. They call it "being user friendly". (Perhaps I'm being a touch too cynical, but I may also be cutting them too much slack.)
P.S.: I'd say the same thing about MSAccess, but I haven't as much as looked at it in the last two decades. The last time I used it became the last time when I proved that it was making a simple arithmetic error. I had thought it was one of the periodic code corruption problems that MSAccess was subject to, but it was much worse than that. Perhaps in the last couple of decades they've fixed the thing.
Well, one that was in the news just yesterday is not validating the excel spreadsheet that was used to run the economics model.
Study the iterated prisoner's dilemma. That can easily be mapped onto parts of economics. Cut away the parts that don't work and you have a sound piece of economics.
Just because there are hard problems that can't be solved doesn't mean that no problems can be solved. Unfortunately, in the case of economics it seems to repeately mean that the most important problems can't be solved.
Of course, we don't really know what problems economics could solve if it tried, because politics always gets mixed up in things, and that usually tries to run things for the benefit of a small group of people who maintain power by lying to everyone else. So economic theories are tested not because there's any reason to believe they are good things, but because the benefit those who are selling them, and benefit those who currently hold power. Often the theories that are tried bear little resemblance to the theories that are claimed to be being tried.
That's not clear, but if it both requires a Nobel prize winner to explain, and he's still poor enough that the money in the prize is significant, in that case it probably doesn't work.
But it *is* predictive, about certain things, even though not predictive about others. E.g., it can predict that people will continue to get rich off of get rich quick schemes that don't work.
I suppose you could consider economics to be a sort of blend between statistics and psychology, and it doesn't work where the psychology is fuzzy, and its predictions are statistical in nature.
Mind you, if you consider it this way it become immediately obvious that most of what's sold as economics is a pack of lies. And actual economics is more restricted in domain that this definition implies, so it's not clear that many pure-economic theories *can* work. You don't just buy bread, you buy bread for a reason which is as much, or more, physiological as psychological. But psychology may determine which brand of bread you buy...so that could be economics.
They may be rare, but they have happened to politically destroy individuals. It's generally impossible to prove that the scenario was set up by an opponent. One recent example that I think was probably of this variety was Julian Assange. The evidence is not complete, but is persuasive.
It is often abused even without any sexual overtures.
Let me rephrase that.
The power of graduate advisors over graduate students is extremely often abused in ways that would be illegal in most other circumstances. E.g. demanding unpaid labor for over 40 hours/week.
That is would also be abused in other ways shouldn't surprise anyone.
It's because a lot of men have internalized the cultural bias that anyone who is easily discouraged is unmanly, and that women do (and should) deny interest even when they are interested. Try figuring out how to act with those beliefs if sexual harassment is penalized.
No. But the guy who was maintaining the software originally wrote it in assembler, and then fixed bugs by doing binary patches. Not me, I never worked for the company, or met the guy who wrote the software. I understand the company was a shoe seller, but I don't even know whether it was a manufacturer or a vendor.
Yes, however, this was on an OLD computer. But the software was kept as a deck of punched cards, not panel switches. (It's not THAT old.)
Actually, that's not always true. I've heard of companies that used software they only had in binary. I suppose you could turn that into assembler easily enough, though you might end up with some of your data being rendered as code.
(The case I heard of was back in the 1970's and the programmer who originally built the software fixed it with binary patches, so the code didn't mean anything...but it had been lost anyway by this point.
They used this software as a part of how they figured their profits, which they then reported to the IRS. At some point the IRS decided to audit them.... WHOOPS! And the guy who wrote the code was no longer working there.)
Unfortunately, accusations of sexual harassment are often easy to create to punish politically incorrect beliefs or actions.
It's a real problem, and I don't see any easy solution. There is a strong cultural tradition that says that women are supposed to protest against pursuit, even when that's what they really want, and there's no easy way to tell.
Clearly the only safe procedure is to immediately desist upon request, but there's also a strong cultural tradition that says this is "unmanly". Whoops!
We seem to be groping towards a tradition where honesty is demanded on both sides, but getting there is causing a lot of people a lot of problems. For a minor example of the kind of problem from a few decades ago "Should a man hold a door open for a woman?". For awhile you would receive abuse no matter HOW you answered that. (From different groups, but still abuse.) For that matter just last week I heard a woman saying (as a compliment) to a man that it had been years since the last time a man held a door open for her. She still saw that the the proper polite behavior.
Now note that the question of holding a door open never had the degree of seriousness attached to it that "inappropriate advances" had. OTOH, under the old standard the professor would be forbidden to approach the female student no matter how provocative she was. So (as reported) he was following neither the old standard nor the developing standard.
In this case the only answer I see is "life logs". If either was wearing a life log, then the situation would not be in doubt, and in *THAT* case I think that there should be the ability to remove tenure. But there should also be a right of appeal, though to who? The administration or the faculty? Whichever of those two groups wasn't running the prior proceedings would be my first cut at an answer, but one might also consider whether the students should have a say in this.
No, the political process is the problem. This is a systemic problem, not the problem of a few corrupt politicians. The design of the system ensures that only the corrupt can be successful at the highest levels. So this breaks down into three problems:
1) How long should this be endured before it's worthwhile engaging in the risk of changing the system. (Perhaps it will get better on it's own. There have been periods when this has happened before.)
2) What should it be replaced with.
3) What is the most efficient (i.e. least traumatic && most effective && least likely to go hideously wrong) way to get from here to there.
These problems are made worse because corruption in government is becoming endemic world wide. The reason is clear. Easy communications easily intercepted give excessive power to a centralized group of people. What to do about it is much less clear. Public key systems should solve the problem, but how do you get those with whom you wish to communicate to encrypt their communications to you? How to you keep the implementing software and hardware from being penetrated? Etc. But if all communications were encrypted with a public key system, then the concentration of power would be considerably less. So then we come to the secondary basis of power, fast transmission of orders from the central site to remote sites, and messages in return. This one I don't think CAN be solved, and I also don't think it SHOULD be solved. Then we come to the third factor facilitating centralization of power, and that's rapid transportation. Again something that shouldn't be prevented.
The upshot is there needs to be a drastic redesign of the system causing limitations in the benefit of centralized power. One possibility is requiring all representatives of a population to live in the area being represented and to regularly (twice a week, two 5.5 hour sessions uninterrupted) hold open office hours. Appointments are forbidden. I don't like that approach. I'd rather replace elections by a draft lottery, where the representative are drafter. (I'd allow them to decline the ballot on payment of a hefty fine. Say $20,000 indexed by inflation.) Qualification would be similar to the current requirements for voting. I.e., you have to register, you need to be adult, and you need to be able to read and write. (I *would* require English, as some common language would appear to be necessary.) As I see it this selection method has three benefits:
1) You don't get the office by being power hungry or a demagogue.
2) You can't be bribed ahead of time.
3) You get a good representative sample of the population.
There's a fourth virtue which is indirect, but is
4) There's no incentive to create centralizations of power. (You can't "run for re-election", so it's of no benefit to do so for most representatives.)
I would hope that there would be strictly enforced laws against bribing representatives while they were in office, including against promises of benefits that they would get after leaving office, but that's an "implementation detail".
OK. But what's being discussed sounds more like the French Revolution...you know, the one that started with the storming of the Bastille and lead to something better through the reign of terror.
Sorry, but there are slow growing cancers as well as aggressive ones. Just because your doctor decides not to treat your prostate cancer doesn't mean that it's not cancer, it just means that it's not an aggressive one, and you'll likely die of something else before it causes problems. (Well, and treating it is, itself, likely to cause problems.)
So the cancer not being an aggressive cancer wouldn't mean it wasn't a cancer. Benign tumors are different, and inherently limited (until, of course, they mutate). Most people have several benign tumors and just don't know it.
I have complained to my representative. If you haven't, please do so now.
OTOH, don't expect it to make any difference. I expect my representative to vote in the way I would approve of, but I expect that would have happened even without my comment. I don't expect either of my senators to be as virtuous. Only one of them to I give any chance. The other would be willing to lie about the position taken to get my support (I've caught that happening before), but wouldn't actually change position.
So what government should be tried next time? Something that doesn't centralize power in power hungry people, please.
Don't look forwards to it. It *MAY* be better afterwards...eventually...but expect to be a part of the bloodbath while it's happening.
It would be better to avoid that event, but the government's behavior is making that look increasingly unlikely.
No, it's not cancer. It's an indication of possible cancer. What is the rate of false positives? I don't know, you don't know, the article didn't say. It also didn't name the test, so you can't easily look it up.
You can't accurately tell whether this is normally expectable or horrendous. The information to decide that isn't present.
It may well be several years, but I'd be surprised if it were several decades.
The problem is, what is the false positive rate? I don't know the test at all, but there are rates of false positives that would make this not in the slightest alarming, and there are also rates that would make this horrendous. (And lets not forget that there are also false negatives, to complicate the matter.)
FWIW, skimming the article did not reveal either the name of the test or the expected rate of false positives, making it impossible to evaluate.
Well, it hasn't driven me back to LILO *yet*. But I sure don't understand why they replaced something reasonably easy to understand with something hopelessly opaque.
I actually preferred Grub over LILO once I got used to it. But that is not clearly true of Grub2.
But the real question is can it R/W ext4 filesystems? If it can't handle my filesystems then no gradual transition is possible, and I'm certainly not going to commit myself until I test that all the tools I need are present and working. Which means my actual working system files are going to be in ext4 until after the transition. (Also the backups are in ext4.)
The last time I checked I couldn't find a BSD that could R/W ext4, though, IIRC, there was one that claimed to read it. (Probably by ignoring the journal files...which would explain why writing was out.)
Look guys, I couldn't switch to Linux until Linux could read my MSWind files. (Fortunately I didn't need to wait for NTFS.) Switching to anything else is going to have the same kind of requirement.
It's on so many distros because it's on both Red Hat and Debian. It's on Red Hat because it's a good system for sysadmins who are maintaining many systems out of easy reach. I'm not sure WHY it's on Debian. There appears to have been some finagling of the voting process, but others have denied that, so I'm left unsure...but suspicious.
Anyway, Red Hat and Debian are the systems off of which most Linux distributions are built, and systemd is so constructed that independent software packages that are built to use it's facilities are incompatible with sysvinit without lots of work. So there's a network effect.
I've heard no sign that systemd is of any benefit to individual computer users. I've heard lots of reports that it is a severe disadvantage. Most of the reports, admitttedly, are more than 6 months old, but given that systemd is becoming so prevasive, upgrades to systemd have probably become rare. So people won't be noticing what's causing the problem. (And, of course, the problems may have been fixed.)
I'm not pleased with the way that systemd has been insinuated into the Linux ecosystem, and I'm not convinced that unscrupulous tactics weren't used. But it *may* not be any worse than sysvinit outside of binary logs, etc.
Well... I took Latin in high school, and while I read Caesar's Gallic War, I can't say I learned much about the Roman culture. There were a couple of nods in that direction, but I learned more about it when I learned about "The Golden Ass" (and read an English translation) than I did in Latin class.
I remember a semester in high school when I got up at 4:30 AM. After around a semester medical problems and grade problems got my parents to stop me.
Well...maybe some kids can do it without ruining their health. But I'd bet rather heavily that most couldn't.