I guess the focus is going to be on getting stuff up, rather than back down. Thus the Starlink and data center plays, not human space exploration.

This "space datacenters is more important than colonizing the universe" thing is just to deflect from what would be an inevitable failure because if they do this pivot, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot.

Correct, they are paying for work done by people in other roles, who's title isn't UI or UX designer. It's on the backend person for velocity, it's for business development for leverage, it's on data scientists for insight, it's on logistics for convenience. Those people will be paid for solving those problems, not for tweaking CSS. My team, who falls into this category of more invisible work, has not hired UI or UX person at all. Which by mathematically speaking by default, is simply below the average rate for that work. Meanwhile Apple will pay easily mid six figures for someone in a more flashy role.

Standardized interfaces are as exciting as kettle thermal switches or physical knobs in cars. Useful, probably optimal and will be around for decades to come. Also nobody talks about it, treats it with interest, or pays above market rate to work on it.

The value becomes the architecture of the value of the tool, not the interface. There is still value being generated, but the need for a highly paid UX designer evaporates, and is ultimately replaced by the above.

mRNA research, first discovered in the 1960s, couldn't get much funding for years/decades and had to scrimp through what they had. And then it got a burst in funding and was publicly available in a year.

PC, Web and Smartphone hype was based on "we can now do [thing] never done before".

This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"

It all feels much more like a wealth grab for the corporations than a promise of improving a standard of living for end customers. Much closer to a Cloud or Server (replacing Mainframes) cycle.

It feels like something that even in 1996 would have been a bit eye-raisingly overdue.

Per exhibit 5 of your first link: The US still to be as bad as Europe and Japan you disparage as "old" and that is based on 2024 analyses. A few more years of these events if sustained will drop that further.

And per Exhibit 1 of that same link, sure India will be at 1.9. And the US was at 1.6 two years ago, which is worse.

Old and still accessible beats inaccessible. BTW the source of the USAs demographic resistance to aging has been the sheer fact it was that immigration melting pot of bringing in young talent to offset its local aging population. A few decades of this path and the US can be just as dismissed as Japan who have taken this path decades in advance.

The US as a feature of it geography and population (Japan, UK and the Philippines) can choose isolationism as a policy. But the rest don't have it as an option due to direct contact to neighbors or economics too small to sustain. Most of the world will not follow the on-shoring path, because they cannot.

In development, working on completely other problem spaces to mobile development at all. It's not 2012 anymore and there are other noteworthy growth areas to spend time on.

But one think in the short term was tonight I just spent some hours migrating registered accounts away using a Gmail account to Proton.