Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"

No point in letting a good crisis go to waste.

I guess a lot of people weren't around to see civil libertarians screaming about the effect of the USA Patriot act in 2001.

> Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

Oh, come on, Jay, this should have been on your radar for 25 years.

> Jacobin

Oh, you can go way further to the left of Jacobin.

There are other areas that a STEM minded student could be interested in. Biology for example could benefit from a programming background. Knowing how to collect and groom data, analyze it, then export it as JSON or CSV is something you could pick up in a couple of classes and be useful to you for an entire career.

Yes, CS is a great program if you have a passion for computers, tech, and programming. If you truly have that passion, I suspect that you'd be targeting CS programs without concern for whether or not there are jobs for grads and would be willing to figure it out when you get a degree. If you don't have that passion for CS above all else, however, you might want to consider another degree with a CS minor.

If you're not headed directly into a 4 year bachelor's degree program after high school, I see that the local community colleges around me have maker programs where you learn a little programming, a little electronics, and a little 3D printing. That might be enough of a skillset to augment a degree in another field and let you differentiate yourself. You might check to see if you can get a certificate or AA in that if the market still looks uncertain after you graduate. Taking entry level courses in calculus, physics, and chem alongside a maker program for a couple of years might allow you to see the future of programming more clearly.

> Personally, I do not yet have a definitive answer

I don't think any of us do. Much of what I'm reading on this subject seems to be shifting so fast. Three months ago taste was going to be the big differentiator. Six months ago, OpenClaw was going to be the future. I'm afraid to say that my best advice is to wait and see like the rest of us.

Don't stop taking CS classes in high school, but be ready to pivot into a CS minor and a science or engineering major if you encounter headwinds either with the CS curriculum or you see that two or three successive graduating classes of CS majors are finding employment to be difficult or impossible.

The reason we don't do these things is because the jets would come crashing down onto someone's home or place of work. That UPS jet that crashed last year when the engine detached on takeoff killed a dozen on the ground. Nobody is going to drone attack a private jet because the innocent would get killed by the dozen.

If you review Nixon's CHIP proposal (https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2015/11/the-nixon-comprehens...), you'll find a proposal that maps pretty closely onto the ACA marketplace that we now have available.

"Mostly shaped by Democrats with major proposals cribbed from Republicans" would be a more accurate assessment.

I don't know when it stopped being fun, I don't recall hating Facebook in 2008, but I do know that it had pissed me off on more than one occasion by 2012.

I think community building is what's been missing or done badly for the last 15+ years. I can find a few subreddits where I like the community, but Discord and similar have never worked for me. I don't think that live chat suits my temperament. I also suspect that up and down votes have been corrosive for social media in general.

I don't know that you can get the feeling back without either building and maintaining your own communities using the tools the corporatized Internet makes available to you, or finding and participating in the communities that you like. I do know that five years ago when the fediverse was a topic of conversation that there was a thread that content moderation and curation was going to be the only valuable work to be done in social media.

tl;dr: I suspect it's a community building and maintenance problem, not a coding problem.