Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

“Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.

Most people are on multiple platforms. Find them now, while you still can. Save whatever contact info you can for them. You don’t know when you’ll need it, nor why.

In the US, completely unpaid internships are rare. Most are paid, but fairly poorly. There are a few major reasons for this:

You have to meet a lot of requirements for unpaid to be legal, and it all has to be documented.

Internships are a “farm” program- many interns are offered and accept a full time position afterwards. If they were unpaid, they are unlikely to accept.

Minimum wage is an absolute joke everywhere in the country. Why bother fighting it when you can pay as little as $7.25/hour? Even doubling or tripling that makes it appealing to poor college students and the farm program, and won’t cost much.

(Your example would be illegal in the US, and possibly even enforced)

My point was, where do you draw the line? Any answer is equally arbitrary. MS drew it at 8th Gen Intel Core. Would 6th Gen have been the right answer? 3rd? Core 2 Duo? All of them can run Win 10 just fine, and can (at least technically, and for today) run Win11.

I’m only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn’t that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.

The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can’t or don’t, the code will be more compatible.

There also isn’t “any” computer; it’s simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?

While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there’s definitely a line to be drawn.

Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don’t even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should’ve hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I’m also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc

This really isn’t dangerous unless you already screwed up badly. If it wipes, you just restore from backup/DR.

You do have backups and a DR plan for your prod servers, right?

Don’t reply at all unless you talk to a lawyer. Seriously, no good can come from it. Quietly disable/delete whatever they list, and never mention it again.