Dude nobody is standing in front of a home Depot you get deported if you do. And they could care less if you are a citizen anymore. They have quotas to meet.

Yeah but it's a Doomsday job. It's backbreaking work in the literal sense of the word. It's not something most people can do until retirement and even if they can it pays so little you can never afford to retire.

The reason we have to bring in a constant stream of immigrants to do that is that they are a resource we are consuming. Anyone taking those jobs knows that they're on borrowed time. And the sheer brutality of the work means that unless you're some sort of superhuman you aren't going to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and overcome it.

However you do get to wash your hands of all the misery that you've created by telling people to go work on a farm so there is that...

Every CEO in every single company on the planet is going top to bottom through their entire organization to find things they can automate.

Maybe they will do it with AI and maybe they will do it with nothing more than a simple Pearl script but there's a massive automation push going on right now because of it and that's going to be a lot of dead jobs.

Even if you think you're going to survive congratulations you now have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people gunning for your job.

Your boss knows this and it means best case scenario you're not going to get a raise and worst case scenario you're going to get a pay cut. Even without a direct pay cut high inflation caused by tariffs and the monetary policy needed to combat the mess they are causing means you're going to have less buying power and a de facto pay cut

One of the things that sucks about being an American is everybody thinks of themselves as king of the castle.

But the reality is we are all completely dependent on thousands of interlocking systems we just like to pretend don't exist. I guess the existential dread from facing how things actually work is a bit much though.

I said "their traditions".
Even if some of them have chosen to drop their traditions, that is still a part of the history of their religion. Christians have their share of history and varied degrees of practice too.

So do you embrace and protect historical traditions, or do you force them to change? And if you're forcing them to change to conform to your views what's one tradition vs another?

If you have gas appliances and no venting - welcome to the worl of oxygen deprivation.

I think the idea here is that yeah it's bad to breathe in cooking fumes even the stuff coming off what you're cooking but it's still better to reduce those fumes by not using gas unless you have proper ventilation.

I remember a fair number of people in the '80s getting fooled by Eliza, a collection of heuristics designed to create the illusion that the computer understood what was being types and formulating reasoned responses. Of course, it was doing no such thing.

Modern chatbots do a much better job of it. 'Good' enough that susceptible adults sometimes go over the edge into a full mental health crisis after a month or so interacting with them.

The constant affirmation and un-wavering support makes the chatbots the ultimate yes-man. We have all seen what happens when celebrities and people in power become drunk on their own yes-men.

It's worse than internet echo-chambers. At least those don't tend to let the conversation get that personal and specific. Chatbots will get as personal as you wnt and they are designed to never break engagement (how will the company keep gathering underpants if the chatbot keeps saying no?).

And all of that with adults. Now imagine turning all of that on a young teen that hasn't had time to mature enough to know better. YIPE!

As this sentence was obviously generated by AI, who is the "I" being referred to?

Which core feature doesn't work on Windows 11 without TPM?

I don't even notice it anymore ever since my clocks change automatically.

This.

Bill gates dropped out of Harvard, not a Cert II in Nail Care.

They also had wealthy parents.

As for rich people, yep, they are completely different. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Eton collage and then Oxford because his family had connections and could afford the fees. He studied Literae humaniores (that's classic literature for the lay person, he read a bunch of old books) and at the end of which, his family used their connections to get him a job where he'd get a good salary. He went on to become a tabloid columnist and then politician, before joining the conservative party he probably contributed very little to the economic situation in the UK, after joining the conservatives he definitely worsened it.

You see the last point quite frequently in professional jobs. I call them Tarquins (gratuitous Hyacinth/KAP reference), a Tarquin is someone who basically did the minimum they could in education knowing their family would take care of the results. They're usually not very bright and only marketable skill is being a minor child (3rd of 4th son in old money) of someone important who golfs with a company director who gave them a job. Befitting their connection they can't be shoved down in the mail room, they have to be given something important to do, however being utterly incompetent and motivated enough to do something that could be dangerous they need someone to watch them to make sure they don't do any damage, yes a minder. This is how you can tell your boss hates you, they make you the Tarquin minder. Boris Alexander dePiffel Johnson is the exact reason that Tarquins need a minder because he's an example of what happens when they get the chance to do something important and clearly have no idea what they're doing and no clue that they have no idea.

Daylight savings Time slightly increases in person shopping. That in turn increases the value of commercial real estate.

Every time we try to do away with daylight savings time out come the retail lobbies and more importantly the commercial real estate owners lobbies and that's the end of that.

Every aspect of your life is shaped and warped by big business.

At that point the parent has failed long ago.

Also if the parents aren't the caring type, they won't bother with parental controls, if they're the overbearing type that think they can lock their kid away from anything they don't like, they're delusional as the kid will find a way around it.

Daring to suggest the parents are responsible is a quick way to get modded down but it doesn't change the fact it's true.

If your kid feels the need to hide the way they're feeling from you, you're a bad parent. Sorry, not sorry. Your job as a parent is to prepare your child for adulthood, not lock them away from anything you consider unsafe, impure or too adult for them and then delude yourself that your attempts are actually working until the day they turn 18 and magically expect them to handle the stressors of the adult world.

As a child goes into adolescence they're going to be exposed to more and more of the adult world. Perhaps less being exposed to it and more being able to understand it, however they won't fully understand it and in many cases won't have the knowledge or experience to handle it. A parent can either become someone their child can trust to come to with embarrassing and serious issues or someone who the teen is scared of... In the latter case they'll end up seeking others to help them and many of those will not have good intentions.

Granted, few children with caring and competent parents will be experiencing suicidal thoughts to the point where they feel acting on them is the only remaining course of action (been there, done that, literally have the scars to prove it).

Also teens have been committing suicide long before the advent of AI or the internet. Blaming AI is just another attempt at deflection from parents who are desperately looking for anyone to blame but themselves.

This is how religious control works,

1. Declare that something normal and natural is a "sin".
2. Everyone sins.
3. The get-out from your sin is to be forgiven by religious authorities. Of course only the deity can forgive sin but the deity has representatives on earth that is totally not doing this for their own benefit and power.
4. Once forgiven, people go out and commit more sin.
5. Rinse and repeat.

Remember that it won't take much for this state of affairs to come to western nations. The US was always half way there, now it seem that it's 3/4 of the way there but those of us over this side of the pond had best not kid ourselves, the fascists in Europe will happily co-opt religion to get and hold onto power.

No religious war or state has ever benefited god, only men and only a few men at that.

Well this is a religious decree based on religious grounds... Stop expecting it to make sense.

And to a lot of people, WiFi is synonymous with internet. People who believe in religion so strongly they will fight wars to have it enforced tend not to be very bright to begin with.