And even if you fire most 35 year olds, there is always a need for someone to train the next generation of layoffs.

But like with coaches and trainers, you need far fewer than you need players.

You think?

Tell me one good reason why I would not put such a clause in a burger flipper job contract to ensure my burger flipper will think twice before bailing from the horrible boss I am, knowing he will never flip a burger again if he does, and he already has a non-compete from his time at Target.

There are only so many no-skill jobs in a town, and once you're barred from all of them by ridiculous non-compete clauses, you have to stay with that last one that gang-pressed you into indentured service, because you have no way out anymore.

What exactly is sensible about that? You're punishing someone for creating a successful business by disallowing him to compete with the company that was stupid enough to buy it from him.

The idea of the EU, and one of the few ideas hatched by politicians that actually worked out 100% perfectly, was to intertwine and mix the economies of European countries so deeply that it would be economic suicide for anyone to go to war with a neighbor.

Germany and France have been at war, on and off, since the partition of the Frankish Empire into an eastern and western part, somewhere in the 9th century. Those (almost) 80 years of peace between these two countries that we had for the past (almost) 80 years are unprecedented in recorded history.

That "dirt cheap medical care" is paid for by about 5-10% of your income.

That's quite a bit of money, but I still think I'm somehow better off losing money in that deal because making a net profit on this would mean my body is really fucked up.

That's pretty much the point, they can NOT get a "regular job" because, like everyone else, they get fired when they're 35.

Did you even read the original story? Or do you just browse comments based on the comment's content without bothering with the story that's being commented on?

Ok, let's phrase that differently, of course the planet will survive us, but my hope is more along the lines of it staying habitable for humans for about 30 years.

Want to pick up the phone? I think it's the 1950s, wanting to thank you that at least one person still exists that didn't forget its attitude towards gender roles.

Security consulting in Abu Dhabi.

Trust me, you don't want to work there. Not for any money.

So what may be my issues?

Pretty much this.

The internet has been turned into a cesspool of rubbish. If anything, something that "changes the internet as we know it" can't really make it much worse anymore.

Or rather, if it does, maybe even the muggles finally realize it.

Google has access to one of the biggest data pools, if they're not the biggest aggregators of data altogether. They also have a bunch of incredibly talented statisticians and pattern recognition systems in place.

If there is a way to detect AI generated bullshit, they have the means to do it.

And another set of professions, this time astroturfers and SEO bullshitters, losing their job to AI.

This time around, though, it's hard to feel sorry.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.