"A lot of the reason why concrete structures have failed so quickly is that the material was still fairly new when most of the structures failing now were created."
MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad.
They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though.
A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.
It is heavily dependent on the history of your area.
I am near Lyon (12km away), I had 20mb then 100Mb coaxial cable very early because the "département" built a public network and eventually leased it to private companies.
I finally switched to fiber 3 years ago when it became available in my street.
The cell network is fairly bad however (even with 2 cell towers less than 1km from my place).
I personally think that the more appropriate quote from 1984 is this one, because the cruelty is the whole point :
“The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.” He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?[...]”"
Exactly, there is no need for nefarious intentions, when time constraint et mild incompetence suffice.
The OOXML format is likely a not very deeply thought out XML serialization of the in memory structure or of the old binary format, done under time pressure (there was legal pressure on Microsoft at the time).
The author has a VERY dim view of Sparta, and of the people who worship Sparta and of the quality of information the legend of Sparta is based upon (second hand roman information, from Romans, at a time where Sparta had become a sort of theme park for bored senators).
"(The fancy way of putting the influence of all of those factors, both the big structural ones and the little, subject-to-chance ones, is to say ‘history is contingent’ – that is, the outcomes are not inevitable but are subject to many forces large and small, many of which the lack of evidence render historically invisible.)"
The first risk with virtualized setups is DRMs, if your uni use any kind of "professional" software with student or university wide license that makes use of pain in the ass DRM, you will be hung dry. That's the most probable reason. Typical culprits are CAD software, electronic design software, Adobe, etc.
The second risk is if they want to control your setup in some way with some sort of fleet management software. Windows VM inside another OS should be fine with that, but you never know.
Your escape hatch may be a big windows machine 16G+, preferably 24G minimum, and run your linux env in WSL2, android in WSA, or use Hyper-V, etc.
Or the designer can get too creative :
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/15/style/432-park-avenue-sky...