Given that most fast food stores are franchises, and that there's ~200k such stores in the USA, I would absolutely NOT put it past a fraction of them being asshole enough to attempt to do this, in order to keep their employees from quitting and seeking greener pastures elsewhere.

Somebody posted that Texas has "at will" employment, IE is "right to work", but that non-competes could be legal there. It read more like an opinion though.

https://www.texasnoncompetelaw...

"Supported by valid consideration (ie. something of value given to the employee)"

To me, that means something like, "they continue to pay you during the non-compete period."
There's also "need" - something like trade secrets. Which a fast food worker wouldn't have.

Indeed. QEMM was something of a hero in that department, but even memmaker was enormously helpful...

Every major shift WAS different from the one before.

What's DOUBLY different about this time is that this time we are not moving from skill to skill, we are moving from unskilled to something.

I truly despise the idea that there are no unskilled jobs because it is not just false, it's a counterproductive argument. All of us who have worked a variety of jobs know that some jobs require both talent and education, and others require mostly just a pulse and respiration. But people who work both kinds of jobs have essentially the same needs.

I, for one, cannot see the future and don't know when technological advances will put so many people out of work they cause major economic upheaval. But I think this makes little difference. We should want technological advancement anyway.

I don't think "it will put humans out of work" is a good reason to make tech illegal or to avoid researching it, mainly because "putting people out of work" means "eliminating the necessity of tasks that are so unpleasant we have to pay people to get them done." Eliminating labor is ultimately a good thing in-and-of itself.

When our economic model can no longer function within our technological landscape, then we will need to adapt our economic model. That's how we make life better for everyone. Maybe it is not an easy thing to do. Ok. It is still the right answer.

I don't think we have to get ahead of ourselves and start changing our modern system to accommodate the climate we imagine will result from new tech. It still makes sense to wait and see.

We DO have a homelessness problem right now. Some percentage of the homeless have mental diseases and/or drug addictions that prevent them from being able to get and hold a job, even though there are jobs that would be otherwise available to them. I don't know what that percentage is though. If it is high, then that suggests that there are enough jobs available to cover the populace, and as such tech is not putting everyone out of work. If that percentage is very low, then we may need to look at how many jobs are available and the reason why the homeless population isn't obtaining them. Is it some kind of educational failing, for example? Might there be things we can do to address that? Yes, and a serious effort at doing so is the logical next step, not some sort of alarmist panic reaction to every new tech that shows up.

Which word did you find unclear? I don't remember stuttering.

Hiding from the truth doesn't change it.

This is different in that the software will take the service jobs, and it's the same in that the people profiting from the switch don't give a fuck about you.

It's also true that those people have names and addresses, and we have lumber.

That was the joke alright, he doesn't think any of the action against Apple makes sense because he's in favor of anticompetitive behavior at the expense of customers for some sick reason, probably cognitive dissonance.

That's fine if you have an embarrassingly parallel problem which doesn't require a lot of data transfer between processors. There are jobs like that, of course, but those mac minis have pretty poor connectivity and having that many nodes means doing a lot of extra work to set up and maintain them. The EPYC processor (and to a lesser extent the Xeon) also offers very good price:performance. The minis come with a lot of extra case material that you have to pay for (including making it pretty) but don't really want.

Most people half-ass parenting. I see it every time I go out into the world, and not just from the results (but that too.)

Having children later increases the risk of defects and complications, and it's not just because of older genetic material so freezing it isn't a complete solution. And it's true for both men and women, for their respective parts. If we want more people to have more kids (which is something I question at a time when jobs are being eliminated by automation) and we want those children to be as health as possible, then we need to make it more feasible for young people to be able to afford to do it.

That is not only generally false, but this time IS different. Since there is NOT always more work to be done, we have moved over to a service economy, where we CREATE more work to be done. BUT the software is now able to do many of those service jobs, and there's no other sector to move to. ALSO, every major technological advance HAS destroyed jobs, and some of those workers were left behind at every step. A lot of people DID become destitute, starve and even die due to the economic upheaval of the industrial revolution. If you want to invoke history and be taken seriously, you have to account for the parts you don't like, not just the parts you remember fondly.

Those service jobs were only viable because people had money, so as the percentage of service jobs has increased (it's now about 80%) the system has become more unbalanced because those jobs don't pay as well as more skilled jobs. (There may or may not be "unskilled" labor depending on who you ask, but there are definitely jobs which require more skill[s] than others.)

What industry do YOU think the low-talent service job employees are going to move into when there are no longer jobs for humans to read scripts on phones? When there are 10% or fewer jobs in fast food compared to now, because the work truly can be done by a bunch of robots plus one guy who knows how to clear jams in the burger printer and replace parts occasionally?

I don't think making it smaller works yet. The focal depth problem is too serious. Until someone comes up with a way to solve it with holograms or something, we're stuck with bulky optics that still hurt most people's eyes. I further think you could use fiber, which would only make the device more expensive. Wasn't that supposed to be on the Firewire roadmap anyway? Hmm, I see they formally gave up on that back in 2013.

He must have had a strange LPT port and/or address then, because normally those wouldn't be in conflict. I've had cards with fairly huge numbers of dip switches, but as long as you could get your hands on some documentation you were OK. Even very cheap ATA multi-I/O cards usually had fairly generous I/O ranges. I had a 120MB Maxtor ATA disk in the 386DX25 on which I first ran Linux, on a $15 no-brand ATA card, and with a 1MB Trident VGA card. That $15 card had pretty decent UARTs, too.

I tried to significantly upgrade the CPU in an AMD-based netbook that I really, really liked... it was 64 bit, but it was single core, and I was just trying to get it into the prior era at the time really and just get it to be a dual-core. And in theory this was possible and I even did it, but it was unreliable AF and I stalled out at the BIOS hacking stage and just got some other used thing. And now I have a $300 HP (I know ugh) Ryzen 3 laptop which... I doubled the RAM and quadrupled the SSD in. Remarkably, it has a combo SATA/NVMe M.2 slot. It's been great with Devuan on it, it's still running version 4 even. We watch youtube on it while we eat dinner, high tech shit. But suspend/resume works reliably, so I've got that going for me.

That's terrible, it means if you buy very much RAM in the frist place you're basically getting reamed.