There is a lot of UFO reference in the media lately so people are looking up more, noticing things more and reporting them. Plus everyone has a camera with them, if you record something and show it around it lodges in your head more, you are more likely to report it and be on the lookout for more.
Miller
I wonder if some of those critics are by an odd coincidence funded by phone related entities.
The US placed troops in Germany for its own influence not to aid Germany but that is joined up thinking. Let's destroy all our bases that will show them.
A quivering glistening mass.
They are as good as their Word™
Official cutting off your nose to spite your face policy.
You are catching it now too, but such is the way of it. People do not want levelled counter views and debate they want to scream bloody villainy and evil doings and then disappear into the crowd when everything turns out fine. And do it all in the name of free speech, as long as its only their speech of course.
You mention Windows Me and Vista as low points but Windows 8 was such a donkey that your memory must have blocked it so you could go on with your life. And you just know this wonderful new streamlined and privacy conscious version is going to look suspiciously like Windows 7 which most users wanted to stick with anyway.
The machines becoming stronger and smarter than us and starting to wonder if they needed the monkeys around was always a fly in the ointment of that particular utopia. Not to mention the monkeys themselves feeling a bit like a fifth wheel and getting demoralised.
Microsoft adds the bloat themselves, and ever increasing telemetry reporting back, promises to update W10 for the lifetime of the device, reneges on it with W11 quoting security as its rationale but leaving 400 million users without security updates. Does all this at a time Linux is becoming very friendly and android phones have a desktop mode so they can be plugged into a keyboard and monitor and bypass the need for Windows. Microsoft has a bit of a think about the market value of its idiot direction and decides to remove a lot of the crap slowing the OS and give people back a little privacy, touts it as a new way of thinking about personal computing.
Why a quarter
The inverse correlation with income is unsurprising because in many countries public healthcare has a cost in money or time at the point of use. The statistics likely indicate an avoidance of this cost rather than any intellectual preference for AI diagnosis.