It should be possible for some recipients to donate plasma after they recover. So if pfas levels are a real concern, there’s an easy solution for at least some of the recipients.
I can only imagine how upsetting this must be for you and your family. I just hope that after you’ve had some time to process, that your son finds a way forward that brings him closer to the future he wants for himself. Just a bit of unsolicited advice from an internet stranger, but describing the situation as a “complete disaster for his future”, even if not expressed directly to your son, runs the risk of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. Transfers, grad school, good job placements/pivots, a gap year, are all options.
I don’t know, we’ve had staged content presented as reality for a long time(ie almost all “reality” tv) and we seem to be doing ok. The TikTok content you’re describing doesn’t feel terribly different from that.
I've always felt a connection to this story in my professional life. I've been in enough rooms full of "ideas people" who will spend an entire meeting talking about tools that should exist or processes that need to be changed, if only "someone" would implement it. It's about work that everyone agrees someone else should do. Everyone wants the cat belled, no one wants to do the belling.
Outside of gaslighting's original context in a relationship, I often see it used to refer to a form of strawman argument. I read the gaslighting comment as saying that the person knows that virtualization in the form before Kubernetes was not sufficient, but tries to make people who express that thought feel like they're wrong at a fundamental level. So the implication is that the author knowingly constructs a strawman argument and then tries to make it sound like anyone who recognizes it for what it is, is "crazy".
I think the RPA is way overhyped, especially the "ML" features of the big players. But from what I've seen, it does have it's place in the enterprise.
There are two primary types of RPA, attended and unattended. Unattended automations make for good candidates for replacement with systems that have proper API's. The issue I've seen is that most of the underlying back office systems have a weird division of business logic between the view layer, the server and the database such that no one wants to risk trying to detangle the systems. In theory RPA can act as a bridging technology that lets you first create something closer to a proper API. Then if new apps built on top of those API's provide value, it becomes easier to justify a re-write of the underlying systems. So it kind of helps build the political will in larger organizations by making the value of the future state of sunsetting the legacy systems more real to those outside of the tech org.
Attended automations, when done right, function as a window orchestration tool for multivendor workflows where the end user needs to be in the loop, maybe for compliance reasons, or because they need to use some professional judgement like underwriters. Even when platforms have solid API's, they rarely have deep linking with enough sophistication to take the user to the proper screen for a multi-application flow. In a perfect world you'd map out relevant workflows, and write some simple glue apps that are built on top of multiple APIs, which is what Power apps is kind of trying to do. The reality is that SME's can be really attached to certain systems and ways of doing things, that the cost of retraining on a new flow is often not politically viable. So it becomes easier to augment the workflows, pulling up SharePoint docs when certain conditions are met, partially filling out forms in some webapps, etc... than search for a global maximum.
I guess in short, I think there are pragmatic ways to use RPA without resigning yourself to never doing the necessary work of rearchitecting the systems that made RPA necessary in the first place.