If they connect to the national grid they've got to bring their grid up to the higher standards of safety and reliability the rest of the nation has. That way they're not just taking power they're giving it too when the other side has an issue.

The privately run power companies don't want to do that of course, because they want that money for themselves and they don't care that the grid goes down periodically. The way they run them they target marginalized communities that don't have the political capital to demand better. During the rolling blackouts they literally kept the power on in the finance districts while shutting it off to some hospitals. Had lots of excuses why and they were all bunk.

Wages were still substantially higher with the unions. And the corruption from the unions came almost entirely from their ties to the mafia which existed primarily because they need it muscle to defend themselves against violent attacks from upper management. We can have unions without corruption because they will be without the mafia and all it takes is the public not turning a blind eye when strike breakers come in with guns and clubs and start beating and shooting working Americans.

It really is that fucking simple. The unions don't need the mafia when they aren't trying to protect themselves from other violent thugs.

People think they're not replaceable. There is a very very very very tiny group of people who are not replaceable. But everybody thinks they're in that group. If you're not doing cutting edge mathematics or engineering you are replaceable. And the majority of those people are working in public universities as professors. There is then an even smaller handful of people who work in the private sector doing that kind of work. And you will not last forever. You will have a specialty and they will come a time when you're specialty is not as valuable as it once was.

And finally your CEO is painfully aware that you are not replaceable and they are constantly working on ways to replace you. One of the reasons there are so few people who are irreplaceable is because the CEOs have spent decades building systems to make the vast majority of us replaceable.

The stupid thing is every single person who reads this comment or looks at this thread even is going to be absolutely convinced they're part of the 2% of irreplaceable employees and not the 98% of replaceable employees. If you had the math chops to be irreplaceable you would understand that that's not possible...

That's where the Glee comes from. That said as far as I can tell it hasn't done anything that they haven't been able to do for 20 years and without invasive surgery.

What this looks like to me is more hype from Elon Musk. Sort of like he bought that episode of The Simpsons and paid extra to have Lisa Simpson claim he's the greatest inventor of our age when in fact he literally has never invented anything in his life...

Doing stuff like that just rubs me the wrong way even without all his other problems

Until interest rates drop. Companies will hold off on hiring until then because they want to appease the Federal reserve who has repeatedly said that they want layoffs, ostensibly to lower inflation though every single economist worth a damn will tell you that inflation right now is caused by price gouging. Greedflation is what they're calling it right now but honestly I think the price gouging is a fine term.

Our banking system is too unstable and weak to go a protracted period of time with higher interest rates. So the Federal reserve is going to have to cut rates at some point. From what I can tell they're planning to do it shortly after the election.

but somehow they'll blame this on the Democrats. The Texas Republican party has been in charge with an iron grip for 14 years now and every year they run on "anti-establishment" campaign as though they "fight the system". It's batshit insane to watch in progress. Like those adverts Trump ran showing how scary things'll be in Biden's America... using footage taken during Trump's presidency.

In any case, the beatings will continue until moral improves. Or more to the point until sensible leadership and they stop wasting billions on the governor's photo ops and bring their grid into the 20th century.

these are stealth layoffs. Butts in seats isn't the metric, getting headcount down w/o paying unemployment & severance is.

And is the law in most jurisdictions. You normally have to post a bond before appealing.

It's not that Donald Trump didn't get special treatment it's that she did. And the reason Trump didn't get the special treatment is that there's too many eyes on the case and it would look bad to give Trump the special treatment members of the ruling class normally get.

at least it'd be a relatively quick death for the kids, instead of living the world after boomers are done setting it on fire so they can putz around in RVs (excuse me, "Luxury Motor Coach").

This forum is full of old farts though, and the last thing boomers want is to be reminded of the mess they made. Boomers demand unearned respect at all times.

they're just trying to do stealth layoffs. The tech companies are colluding to bring us to heel. And we're too dumb to use collective bargaining to stop it.

I blame stupid end users. We here in IT get a *massive* big head because we talk to idiot end users all day. We think we're fucking geniuses because of it. So we think we can somehow negotiate with a multi-billion dollar corporation run by ivy league grads trained at Goldman Sach's and Mckinsey consulting. Literal members of the ruling class. Because Karen in accounting doesn't know how to change her password on the network....

And a long time ago when baby boomers were growing up as productivity Rose wages Rose to. Then the Boomer is decided to pull the ladder up behind them. The funny thing is a little more than half of those boomers haven't finished climbing the ladder there pulling up. And they're going to come tumbling down.

There's a phrase for it. Face eating leopards. I never thought the leopards would eat my face SOB's woman who voted for the leopards eating faces party....

But by the time you're a 55 and living out of a car that doesn't run anymore it's too late. It's the kind of thing you have to see coming but after decades of being told that fighting tooth and nail for every little scrap of everything is the way things should be it's too hard to let that go. So the number of senior citizens sleeping rough as it were keeps growing...

Because of baby boom means that they will outnumber young people until 2030. At least the young people who are allowed to vote. Texas for example has a wide variety of voter suppression laws that make it difficult for young people to vote but if you're over 65 you can vote by mail all day long. And the Supreme Court just upheld that.

Assuming we are still a democracy in 6 years I think the kids will fix this. But there is a very real possibility that the baby boomers are going to give up democracy on the way out because... Fuck I don't know why. I just know that there's a very real chance especially in 2028 that America's great experiment is going to end in failure. Whatever the reasons if it happens they're going to be incredibly stupid.

we can call it AI if we want but whatever the case every CEO on the planet is trying to kill your job. Maybe you'll retire or die or strike it rich before they do, but don't pretend they're not gunning for you.

And guess what, they've been doing it for 40 years now. If you didn't notice, well, that's called survivor's bias.

And while I haven't read newly as much as I used to I can tell you that is way the fuck more scathing than you realize. That is the bureaucratic equivalent of the FCC saying we ain't going to do nothing just yet but y'all better watch yourselves fuckers.

You are the product.