Re "I doubt anybody has ever said I per se I" (in the context of alphabet recitation) may I draw your attention to this article[0]:
> Up until as recently as the mid 1900s, it was standard practice when reciting the alphabet to use the Latin phrase per se (literally “by itself”) to differentiate between individual letters of the alphabet—like A, I, and O—and single-character homographic words—like a, I and O.
> So the letter A would be read as “A per se A”, to ensure it was distinguished from the indefinite article a. The letter I, similarly, would be “I per se I” to differentiate it from the pronoun I. And the letter O would be “O per se O” to differentiate it from the interjection O!
You're missing that "& per se &" would still have been called that even if it wasn't the last item in the list. If the order was "...y, & and z" you'd pronounce it "why and per se and and zed".
Taking the question at face value, the answer is: massive amounts of capital. And barriers to entry like that make the 'the free market will solve this' argument less convincing.
Do you think other cultures, who care less about work, care less about food and shelter? Or would you care to elaborate on why work is more necessary for food and shelter in America than in other cultures (bearing in mind that America is one of the more developed nations on earth)?
"Aquanauts". "Water sailors". Since the water is implied by the sailor bit (astronauts and aeronauts being effectively "sailors but in space"/"sailors but on the air"), couldn't we just say.... "Nauts"? Or, to stick more closely to the Greek, "Nautes"?
Being blunt, it sounds to me like you're using wildly inaccurate personality stereotypes to generalise horribly about both software engineers and artists. A software dev who is inclined to believe they have all the answers is a bad software dev. And the idea that artists all need to be intuitive, and flexible is, based on my experience of many artists, laughable.
Try finding a broader range of developers and artists to spend time around. Your world view may expand.
If you spent 20 mins looking, it's not their recommendation system that's failing. It's that you don't like their content (or how their content is portrayed).
The recommendation system is the thing that shows you stuff without you needing to browse for 20 mins.
Yes, specificially this article: http://haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/ampersand.html