We are doing something about it, but it's not very good. Look at what is happening to the economy - there is a proliferation of low wage (minimum wage if your country has it) jobs that do not generate enough income to support the worker. The state then taxes the remaining middle class workers to top up the wages of those workers so that they can survive on those low wages. Everyone is getting smushed into a barely surviving precariat group - it's the death of the middle class.

The thing you have to remember is that robots will never drop to zero cost. All that has to happen is for wages to fall enough that a human worker is still cheaper than the robot. Once you start subsidising wages, this price clearing level can fall well below subsistence. If you continue to do this then you can keep humans in jobs as long as you want.

But think about that world - you have humans doing jobs that robots could do, because you are artificially trying to keep them busy doing shitty jobs. Meanwhile you are destroying the middle class to enable this.

This is essentially what we are doing. You can see the results playing out already.

I don't even think this is some grand conspiracy from the 'elites'. It's just what happens when you build a whole society where everyone is expected to work until they drop, and then you automate away all the work. I don't know how you fix this without some completely new social structure. UBI might be it but, honestly, I have no idea. Ideological shifts are never simple nor painless.

The issue is that China understood how to automate things like assembling phones, because they are making all the phones. In the West, there was a lot of steady progress towards automation before we started moving everything to China in the early 2000s. Then all that institutional knowledge got lost because it was cheaper to just get some Chinese workers to make it for us.

IMHO this is such a huge problem for the west. I have tried to make things in the west and you quickly run in to issue where some part can only be purchased from a Chiense company. You then realise that the Chinese company has people who speak perfectly good English, will actually get back to you (unlike many Western companies unless you are from a big name brand), and that they can do quality (if you're prepared to pay for it). You then just think, well, if I have to get some of the stuff made in China, then I might as well just do the whole thing.

I mean, Shenzhen is insane. If you are buying and LCD display, and you need a custom flex cable, you can get in touch with the company that is making the raw polyamide tape and visit their factory if you need too. In the west you used to be able to do that, now all roads lead to 'we need to talk to our supplier in the far east'.

I don't know how the west fixes this. I've talked to people in governance and they are stuck in the 'oh China will build the robots but we will make the software', which is nothing more than a colonialist attitude towards what the Chinese are capable of.

Because for the past 30 or so years, it has worked very well for MS to keep their main products barely useable, rely on lock-in and chase the next big thing so they can get their dirty hands on it early and lock more people into more products.

That is exactly wrong. Beta versions are there to find bugs. If nobody complained about them, they won't be found. So if you try beta versions, please DO complain about bugs.

I guess "vibe-something" is going to be the anti-word of 2026. People are slowly waking up to what it actually means to let the AI do the work.

I'm not dissing AI, I'm using it extensively myself and there's a few AI whitepapers with my name on them. But like any tool, it can be great when used correctly and ruin your day when not.

That doesn't mean what they do is automatically legal.

I'm pretty sure there's a demand for "murder my husband", or for "can someone please drown my neighbour". And yet it's illegal to offer such services.

Also: Voters. Smokers are still a fairly substantial fraction of the population, enough to swing a vote, especially if, and that appears to be the trend in most western democracies these days, there are two opposing political sides roughly evenly matched.

I mean, does it not strike anyone as a very weird coincidence that we have almost perfect 50/50 splits in so many countries?

No, but they do everything BUT force to make it the most attractive option. Just as one silly example: With wages and prices as they are, having both partners work full-time is basically required unless you're in the top few percent of earners or inherited wealth. So who's going to cook? After a long work day? Convenience food is the obvious choice. You are not being forced, but unless food is a high-priority item in your life, you are very much steered into that direction.

If you want *any* manufacturing jobs brought back to the US, they are going to be in mostly automated plants. Car companies can barely hire enough workers to cover existing shifts. People don't want to work in factories, and companies don't want to spend $100,000 a year paying workers to stick an automatic torque wrench onto a bolt.

Even completely automated factories large-scale need a few thousand employees to maintain and ship stuff.

That response sounds like "Yup, we're doing it. but by arbitrary definitions we keep your data safe and only use it for our marketing purposes, as detailed three layers down into the user agreement you clicked through"

The Chinese-made cars being sold in Australia by brands like BTD and MG and GWMHaval are not "unreliable junk".

The only decent thing to do is to keep these anonymized. If they become public record every bit of personal information entered into chat GPT will be public knowledge. SSNs. ID card scans. affairs. mental problems. Health problems. There shouldn't even be a question here.

This is the purest illustration of rule by committee. It beautifully illustrates how competing interests result into something that's somehow worse for almost all involved than doing nothing. On paper, the goals sounded noble: Reduce emissions from fleets. Avoid crushing small businesses that genuinely need work trucks. Nudge consumers toward cleaner, more efficient vehicles.

In practice, CAFE is an abomination. They created a loophole big enough to drive a Ford Super Duty through, and then the automakers did exactly that. A quick recap for anyone who has not followed this saga since the 1990s:
here has long been a dual standard: one for "passenger cars" and a more lenient one for "light trucks", the latter including pickups, vans, and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) That classification created what many call the "SUV loophole." In effect, a vehicle that might, in all practical respects, resemble a car but classified as a "light truck" could escape the stricter fuel-economy and emissions constraints applicable to cars.

Because automakers must meet only a fleet-wide average, not each vehicle individually, this gives a strong incentive to produce and sell more of the looser-regulated "light trucks." Light trucks with poor fuel economy can be balanced in the fleet average if the manufacturer sells enough efficient cars (or EVs, nowadays) but with the loophole, upsized SUVs or trucks became a rational choice. This dynamic has been identified in economic analyses of CAFE's impact on the US vehicle market. this does not prove that every driver of an SUV did so because of regulations. Consumer preferences, marketing, and cultural factors also matter. But the regulatory structure plainly created a meaningful incentive for automakers to shift production toward heavier, less-efficient but more profitable SUVs and light trucks. When the consumers must choose either vehicles too small for winter, families, and vacations or a behemoth because there's no actual light pickup pr large sedan on the lot, they're not picking the smaller one.

And let's not pretend it's all an innocent mistake. The automotive lobby absolutely noticed what these overlapping rules made possible and spent years making sure the loopholes stayed open. Millions of dollars flowed into Congressional campaigns to ensure that "light truck" definitions remained comically broad. Tighter average fuel economy numbers or looser ones will do nothing to fix this. The whole scheme needs to be undone.

It can be a version of make work for the US, and I would argue it should be: work that isn't as productive as the market demands people be to be employed, but will in the future make enough by a huge margin to pay for it. These tech layoffs should be working on robotics.

How so? I don't see how hovering makes any difference at all... it's just a waste of fuel, increasing gravity loss. It's nicer from a controllability standpoint, but SpaceX has clearly perfected the hoverslam maneuver and once you have that down it makes more sense than to waste fuel hovering and translating. Bolting itself into the deck helps with rough seas, I suppose, but it seems unlikely you'd want to try landing in very rough conditions anyway.

Nah. They do it when it makes sense. They don't do it for Starlink launches because it's cheaper to launch a slightly lighter load and shorten turnaround time, to avoid waiting for the droneship to ferry the rocket back to land. Plus their launch cadence is so high that they'd need a big fleet of droneships. So they reserve those for paying customers who need the greater capacity. I don't think anything about New Glenn's capabilities changes those calculations.