It's interesting how none of the top comments mentions capitalism as the reason for companies losing their original mission. It's the same force that causes enshittification: the (unachieavable) infinite pursuit of profit. Sooner or later all companies will fall into the "financial gravity". The ones the author mentioned just haven't gotten there yet.
In case you're not aware, Chinese cars have the same or even better quality than US, European and Japanese cars. Their electric vehicles are cheap and high quality, it's really impressive.
It's interesting that your feeling that "academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant", to me, is exactly what brought us here and to the status quo you're complaining about. Maybe return to academia and improve things there?
I wish Firefox had a good multi-account support like Chrome has. That, and the fact that iOS 14 might allow to set your default browser would make me move to use Firefox everywhere.
Why do you consider the time playing Everquest wasted? It was what you wanted to do, you did it and had fun. Now you want to do something else and that's fine.
I lost my mom this year to the same cancer and I get really excited with any advancements that are made in this area. I feel like we're still playing with sticks and stones in terms of pancreatic cancer treatment. The whole surgery plus chemotherapy is just barbaric.
I think that one business model that will never get old is information spread. Most (all?) of the problems we see in the world today could possibly be fixed if people were more knowledgeable. And I don't mean necessarily textbook knowledge, but common stuff as well.
For example, I live in a somewhat small city and it's not easy to know where can I go to have swimming classes. Google could help me with that, but usually these places aren't very tech-savvy (or they do have a certain presence, but they don't keep it updated).