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Comment Re:Well, duh (Score 2) 150

They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.

The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or getting degrees that won't help them. If this weren't the case there wouldn't be a massive student debt crisis because the degrees would be paying for themselves. Most degrees still do, at least engineering or technology degrees. The multitude of people getting art history degrees and trying to get one of a very small number of positions in those fields, not so much. Unless you're at the top of the class or well connected (or probably both) then the odds of that degree doing anything other than saddling you with debt is a dubious prospect. But instead of telling anyone the reality of that the colleges will gladly let you drown yourself in debt.

The idea that college is a magic wand that can waved to solve all of society's ills is naive. It won't even necessarily make people happier. I've known several people (mostly Indian) who were essentially forced to get an engineering degree (or a medical degree) who have good jobs, but aren't happy. It's easy to understand why their parents who often grew up exceptionally poor made those decisions, but even if you decided to limit admissions or shift what's funded to align with what's actually beneficial to society, not everyone is going to make the shift. The people who really do want to study art history, philosophy, theater, etc. aren't suddenly going to want to change to mechanical engineers or programmers.

Comment Who would dare opt in? (Score 4, Insightful) 31

Who would opt in to this? No matter how well the company tries to police this, there will be AI generated slop of artists singing terrible lyrics that they would never do in real life. Does is matter that the company can issue take down request after the fact when your new hit single "Adolf's Solution" featuring your likeness adorned with a silly mustache has already gone viral? Maybe that's on the nose enough for an LLM to shut down, but there are plenty of other terrible things that can be made with this and 4chan will try to make them all.

Comment Re:Between billionaires and retirees (Score 1) 45

There aren't that many billionaires. The Wikipedia article on them says that there are only a bit above 900 in the U.S. and a little over 3,000 in the entire world. They have a lot of money, but only because other people voluntarily gave it to them because they valued what they were selling. Maybe this isn't the case worldwide and I'm sure there's a warlord or two that managed to export enough wealth from the people to be considered a billionaire, but most of them got there because they built something valuable, perhaps a few because their father did.

I don't entirely blame the problems of the present on previous generations either. They certainly could make life better for the current or next generation, but why should they. Many of them worked hard to get where they were. Many more worked hard and got nowhere. Why should they give up what they earned to spoil someone who lacks the context to even understand how appreciative they should be. They'll be dead in time and their assets will be passed along regardless of whether they hoard them right now.

If you want to blame someone for the world not turning out the way you wanted it to, look no further than the mirror. Why don't you amass the wealth or power to shape the world as you wanted it to look? Why would you expect anyone else to do it for you?

Comment Re:leaning on a broom (Score 1, Interesting) 45

No, those are government jobs. No one in the private sector employs anyone (unskilled or otherwise) any longer than they have to. Unless they're in management of course. I think most managers are hired to waste the time of other managers that are also time vampires so that some engineers and developers can actually get things done.

Comment What they didn't say (Score 1, Interesting) 37

Notice they said absolutely nothing about using it to target keyword ads at you, build profiles about you to target you with ads, and whatever else they're doing with the data to push more bullshit ads on you. The only smart feature is to disable the account and use something else that respects your privacy.

Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 37

Geothermal is already workable. Ask the people in Iceland where it accounts for over of the country's power generation. The reason it's not everywhere is that unless you live next to a volcano or other geological features that put out enough heat, there's no way to tap into it other than transmitting the power from those places. Making it even more efficient or increasing the output are certainly things we should do as well, but geothermal is already working now. I like it better than solar or wind because the power generated doesn't fluctuate like those others do and hence there's less reliance on batteries if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.

Comment This should be good (Score 1) 30

You can't even get some people to take a regular shot/vaccine or they think it causes autism or any number of other negative effects. Good luck telling them you're going to put a bunch of tiny robots in their or their child's body. Just sell them an expensive but otherwise benign crystal and give someone else the technology for cheaper.

Comment Re:Seems crazy (Score 1) 52

Courts move at a snail's pace. Ten years is a bit on the long side of that, but it's not unheard of. People forget that the SCO vs IBM lawsuit started I. 2003 and was still going over a decade after that. After that point a lot of it was mostly just dealing with appeals, but the case was still ongoing in some form until 2021 when it was settled out of court.

Comment Re: 100% not lost (Score 1) 52

Get your lawyer to argue it was intentional destruction of evidence. That would allow the jury to make whatever inferences they want about what may have been in it (they'll probably do this anyway, but getting the judge to tell them that always helps) and then let your lawyer insinuate that it's worse than it probably is.

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