Microsoft didn't fire its entire IT department. Disney did. They are a stark example of fuck-you-ism and the lie behind the H1B expansion, the fabrication that they can't find qualified workers so they need indentured labor from abroad. Here they are saying, we just don't want to pay local rates, so fuck you, America!.

Capital is so overwhelmingly victorious that they aren't bothering to pretend it's about worker shortages anymore. They don't give a flying fuck about their country; they believe their only responsibility is to make money. They are wrong; corporations are government creatures, not private entities. They've no existence other than governmental laws that grant them their superpowers. That existence comes with requirements, and one of those requirements is that they exist for the good of the country that was gracious enough to let them enjoy their legal immunity and ability to print money. The idea they have no other god but money is their own notion, brought into law by their own lobbying efforts, and it is wrong. They have obligations to their community to provide jobs, to obey laws about the effects of their pollution, and in other respects act like the human beings they bought laws to say that they are. You want power? You also get responsibility. Right now they get the former and dismiss the latter.

The seed was planted decades ago when we decided not to publically fund political campaigns and instead left it to private donations. Soooooo, corporations are people, money is speech, speech is unlimited, money is unlimited, congress and Presidents can't be elected without enormous private wealth donating to their elections, so inevitably rich corporations bought the country. Rather cheaply.

Fix? Eliminate private financing of elections. No PACs. No backdoor corporate campaigns. No money whatsoever necessary to run for office. Free access to the internet for speeches and such, but no cute games with fake personas and perception management. And oh, yes, set the computerized election counting machines on fire, because you ^&%(##s, there is NO WAY they will let the vote go so overwhelmingly against them if they can simply tweak the elections results. Canada manually counts paper ballots in less than four hours. An elections system you cannot understand, own, or deconstruct is a system that is designed to hide cheating.

Sounds like we have a consentus. Too bad it's about 15 years too late, but let's clean up the fragments of what we had and try to move on without the semi-slave labor.

Except that the problem already happened, and is happening. The wars, the pollution, the animal die-off, the climate change, ther rising oceans, even the srrveillance (why that is is too long to go into) is caused by reaction to: too damned many people. The slack off in population growth did not happen. China has dropped the ball and is now shooting towards three billion. The brakes will go on, one way or another, by the Four Horseman method or the by the new fifth Horseman named Intelligence riding his pink unicorn, but the catastrophe is ON and will be ongoing for a very, very long time.

Population growth always outgrows resources, if unchecked. That is mathematics.

I agree about resource management. Even Heinlein agreed that it was poor management that caused poverty, even during overpopulation emergencies. However, and this is important, the type of management necessary is 180 degrees opposed to the type of government and libertarian business philosophy we are committed to. The management would have to be absolute and need overwhelming power over private interests, so we can't. We can't even build trains overland because the people who own the land want too much cash to make it affordable. We can't make people stop taking long showers during a drought emergency. We're not capable of submitting to an authority that would require sacrifices from us.

"Once people get a little bit of education and the ability to enjoy leisure time, they funnily enough stop having kids."

A stunning example (to me) Mexico. Super Catholic. Yet their insane population growth has abruptly dropped to 2 kids a family, in one generation. Damn. All it took was a little more money than utter poverty wages, exposure to outside ideas, and people fixed their own problem (in Mexico, that problem is overpopulation, over and out).

Creativity is self-learned, I find. But I'd never put my kid in anything other than a Montessori.

Now, the empires (corporations) want a factory system for creating creative people. Hence the coding intitiatives and STEM programs that governments are suddenly shoving down schools' throats all over the world. They aren't doing it to make wealthy citizens. They are demanding it so they can drive down creative costs to a commodity level. A billion Montessori kids are a billion paper-hatted geniuses working 29 hours a week for minimum wage (or capped management salary for 50+ hours a week). Rare creativity is valuable; abundant creativity will create poverty among the brilliant. A free market of force-fed STEM students (all in debt to banks and schools profiting enormously from them for the rest of their lives) wandering from joe-job to joe-job just as crappy as any deep-fryer position. If you don't have 1) rare skills or 2) collective bargaining power to demand more than the utter minimum possible pocket of change, the armies of the ingenious will be corporate compost.

Hell, why not. While we're at it, why don't we automate the student process. Dump the students and educate AIs instead. Computing solutions always work, just ask any nerd about self-driving cars.

At some point, and it seems that that point is arriving now, people will realize that the driving force behind technological change, as far as money people are concerned, is to eliminate jobs, and that the good jobs are not realy being replaced, and cannot be replaced. AIs grading papers gets rid of more pesky teachers who make a living wage. A self-driving car doesn't fit the picture until you realize that millions of people make a living *driving trucks*, and self-driving trucks will eliminate their jobs (in theory, if it works, and I don't see it working) and make oodles of money for capital and kick millions of truck drivers, along with all the taxi and Uber car drivers, out without a dime. (Uber is VERY interested in self-driving cars. Guess why).

Some jobs are being made. And capital is desperately trying to commodify and cheapen such labor, to the point of demanding governments force coding classes on all kids. There are such jobs, but no where near enough, and those are mostly dropped onto cheaper kids, not newly dumped middle-aged workers.

Asimov was on point, decades ago, when he wrote that inevitably automation would eliminate most jobs, and that the biggest problem - in his view, opportunity -- would be finding something for people to do. I would say that people without purpose are the most dangerous force for destruction and stupidity on the planet - worse than global climate change.

Capital and people who work for capital, and neoliberals and business conservatives who support capital, tend to have well-paying white collar jobs and live among other people of their class, and don't see anything amiss. They're fine. Step outside into the vast middle grounds of the world, and you'll see a growing sense of we're-being-fucked that will require an endless army of pepper-spraying drones and surveillance to keep from erupting into riots someday soon.

You already have them. The white people left the cities and formed their own little planets, complete with nearly-total white schools. By default, the cities became nearly all black and, since the money and employment ran away, poor.

To your point (sorry!) There is no "fault". Girls tend not to care about STEM subjects. It's that simple. STEM requires endless hours studying alone, about subjects that would bore an anvil to tears. We literally drug our children to hold still and have the stuff poured into them. It isn't for everyone; that's why so many antisocial types gravitate towards it. You either like it, or you don't.

Teachers don't "fail" - students fail. And "failure" is not the right word. You can't force interest into a human child like some personality-altering enema. A teacher can instill the basics of how to be a human being, like history, and arithmetic, and reading. The rest comes from the child and the matrix the child lives in. You can't manufacture Alan Turings, and God help us if you could - the world does NOT need to be composed of semi-autistic math prodigies. We need the other types as well.

Let the DAMNED children become what they want to become. Here's a poser: has any one of these STEM-pushers asked the kids what they think about their "failure" to become good corporate tech fodder?

The whole "privatize schools into moneymaking ventures to raise test scores and thus provide cheaper, better labor for corporations" IS the experiment. But finding failure in the experimental results will not be tolerated. The schools will be turned into corporate labor factories, and we've no mechanism to stop them.

What are we losing? Imagination. The overworked, no-time-for-play lab mice have no damned imaginations. They will not be able to grow their minds that way. That requires free time, and freedom to wander around and do nothing but dream. That is no longer tolerated. Damaged mice. And eventually, a damaged culture, a passive, corporatized citizenry that can't even perceive what it has lost.

And oh yeah: this is being done because employers want more job applicants and thus will be able, over time. to turn STEM jobs into a paper hat minimum wage paradise - for them. They are sick at the idea of all that money flowing out of their platinum parachute accounts and into the pockets of mere laborers. It has to stop!