This doesn’t make ARC a bad benchmark. Tech giants will have a significant advantage in any benchmark they are interested in, _especially_ if the benchmark correlates with true general intelligence.
Google isn't forcing anyone to use their services on the Android. Unlike the iPhone, the app API exposes all the device functionality used by the Google-made apps, so any other company could easily build a competing ecosystem for the Android. What's more, Google doesn't even control the Android OS itself; it's completely open source.
I understand some of the downfalls of postmodernism and I won't defend it, but I'm not going back to rationalism, which influenced the Nazis, or Platonic or Christian Essentialism, which has marked humanity in negative ways for too many centuries, etc.
Why assume that we have to choose among a small set of predetermined schools of thought? The beauty of the scientific approach is that it makes as few assumptions as possible while remaining sane -- it doesn't force us into any single dogma. Good science doesn't lead to Nazism; a racist agenda and the backing of a powerful nation does. Sure, science has been misused (social Darwinism), but why not examine those specific misuses instead of throwing out the entire rationalist agenda?
For those who are interested, I recommend E. O. Wilson's Consilience for an in-depth discussion of how to salvage rationalism in the modern world. Flip to the end of Chapter 3 for an excellent examination of postmodernism.
When you have those moments where you do actually get things done, are you still focusing on the mundane tasks? That might be why the inspiration isn't lasting. Set aside a small amount of time each day to work on some creative task. Don't obsess too much over picking something really impressive or useful; start small. Stick with it, and eventually you'll find yourself more energized toward everything else.
"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action." -Frank Tibolt
Sure, they get a job when they're 20, but what about ten years down the line when their language/framework-specific training is obsolete?
Also, it's hard to imagine that such narrow training is going to produce creative engineers. Although great schools like MIT may focus on science/tech, they have more than just CS as a major, and a lot of what comes out of these places is interdisciplinary.
Notice that Krugman provides very little hard evidence to completely discard the entire school of thought of the Austrian economists. He even sneers at them using blatant straw-man attacks: "some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors."
Regardless of whether all the Austrian school's claims turn out to be correct or not, they certainly deserve a seat at the table. Hayek, in particular, was a true polymath, contributing brilliant ideas to everything from philosophy of science to biologically-grounded psychology. Read the first several chapters of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, and decide for yourself if Krugman has any right to sneer at the "supposedly deep Austrian theorists".
Your suspicion is correct. I just got hired by Google as a new grad software engineer. New grads might have a better shot in situations like this, because they are cheaper. Many companies made the mistake of not hiring them during the last recession, and paid the price. Also, with companies like Google, it's always a crapshoot as to what kind of person they are looking for at a given time. A friend of mine who I thought had a better shot than myself didn't make it.