HN user
Don't get discouraged. I found a good 100% remote role through HN by posting and reading monthly "who's hiring" and "who wants to get hired" threads. Unfortunately we don't have open heads right now.
SrSDE / Scala. Not normal. I used to do 37-38 hours as contractor. Little bit more as a fulltime, but there is some overlap with my hobbies.
Yeah, long term. Also, idk if that was the intention or if it will work. I just tried to think of any theoretical benefits.
Not shure what universities are doing. There are a lot of them. So far I've heard that Harvard will continue charging the same while pushing big chunk of students online.
You're right about benefits of foriegn capital flowing into US through international students. Net result can very well be negative.
Driving down aggregate demand for higher education can help bring down the cost (how effectively would depend on the elasticity of supply, which I'm not sure about). Fresh grads coming out of college with less debt should lead to higher aggregate spending in other sectors.
I switched to Manjaro 2 years ago after 12 years on Ubuntu (since Edgy Eft) and never looked back.
You can check distrowatch.com for most popular distros.