They spent 60 years getting us to this point starting when Barry Goldwater lost. Right wing extremists have been gradually taking over every single aspect of American culture and civilization and the economy.

I mean yeah we indulged in pointless moral panics and bigotry and racism so there is a little bit on us.

But frustrations about bigots aside you're blaming the victim. Especially when so many people just do not have the education and critical thinking training to see past propaganda and moral panics.

Yeah, any sensible human being is against the concept of work. Work should be viewed as a necessary evil. Not as some bullshit puritanical means to its own end.

Keep in mind when a scientist sits down and learn something or a surgeon does the same they're not working the same way you and I are. They're doing something that they find tremendously interesting and fulfilling.

The problem is the English language is shit on a shingle so we don't have a word for doing something that is simultaneously useful to civilization as a whole and fulfilling to differentiate it from something that's just a stupid bit of drudgery that is physically necessary.

So we use work to cover both of those things. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that billionaires who never do a lick of work in their entire life benefit from that quirk of our language.

Also I'm sure I completely lost you there's no way you're going to follow a conversation this complex and it frankly isn't all that complex. Why are you wasting your time here? Did you get kicked out of Reddit or something?

Also to clarify, there is a difference between being taught the general skills and knowledge needed to do a job and being taught specific tasks needed to make someone's business profitable.

Back when I was a kid there was a line between school work and on the job training and you got paid for on the job training. I am pretty certain the old farts floating around this forum also got paid for actual on the job training.

Now not only do kids not get paid for on the job training they pay for the privilege and they don't have a choice because that's the only way into a middle class life assuming you're lucky enough to even get a shot at that anymore.

It seems like my kid just barely squeaked in but it's hard to say. From what I can tell anyone five or six years younger than my kid is get screwed in the current job market even more than my kid could even fathom.

Our entire system and civilization is collapsing around us. And we're too much of a bunch of pissy little 12-year-olds to do anything about it

I doubt it has anything to do with honesty and has more to do with the fact that he's at risk of costing billionaires a lot of money and if you do that you usually go to jail and you don't get to bribe the president for a pardon.

My guess is he's getting out before that.

I do find it hilarious that he's famous for predicting the housing market crash that every single sensible and honest economist was telling us was coming.

We really really hate listening to experts. There's a reason that stupid movie Forrest Gump is so popular and Homer Simpson so beloved. For some reason we really love the idea that you can be a completely ignorant fool and still be tremendously successful.

The rush is that burning it is buggering up the planet. If the US refuses, it becomes a security issue and we be dealt with appropriately.

These are the kind of nasty little services you see in Asian countries where people are working 12 hours a day 6 days a week.

Basically you don't have time for anything so at some point if you have an errand you need to run you end up having to pay somebody else to do it even if it's something as simple and stupid as this.

You justify it by saying that you're getting paid at your job enough to cover this but you're actually massively overworking yourself and you will eventually burn out. Meanwhile the company you work for is using you up and eventually when you're dried up they will throw you out like used toilet paper.

When you see stuff like this it's a sign of a failing system.

There's a huge number of small business owner types that desperately want to run their own businesses and will do anything and risk anything to do it.

I've got a buddy of mine that I've kind of been out of touch with just with work and such but I remember that he absolutely killed himself in a desperate bid to avoid working for somebody else. He used to run a local car audio place but couple of his employees basically poached all his customers and then a minor economic downturn finished the business off. After that he spent decades doing little tiny computer stuff for just enough money to keep his trailer held together by tape and glue. His wife also worked full-time as a waitress.

So you find somebody like that and you dump the franchise on them. Let them work 90 hours a week trying to make it profitable. Most won't but there is a nearly unlimited supply of those guys and you can just keep cycling through them. Usually they've got some savings kicking around or maybe a relative died and left them some money.

It's one of the many ways large corporations extract wealth from the working class. Basically dangling the dream in front of people with the full intention of scamming them out of money

I doubt those stores have more than five or six people so that's probably not very many of the 15,000 that are getting shit canned.

Even if a store has 20 or so people that's still only 4,000 out of 15,000. I don't use Verizon I'm on T-Mobile but at any given moment there's usually only two or three people even in the bigger stores and those stores are only open during regular business hours.

I thought I wouldn't use the pen, that it would not recognise my handwriting. It actually works really well. It's a decent way to enter and edit text.

The company that makes the prescription antihistamine I'm on fired the staff responsible for making sure that I get my prescription.

It took me about 4 months to sort that out during which time they lost about $400 in revenue.

The thing is they just don't seem to care. In the past there would be competition. But there just isn't any anymore anywhere. Like not too long ago my doctor would have just put me on a different drug that was easier to get and had the same effect. Those companies have been bought out and they just don't exist anymore.

It's an entirely new kind of economy. Capitalism without competition. They can keep raising prices and screwing us over and firing us and making us work longer hours for less pay and there's basically nothing we can do about it.

We will never totally stop using oil of course, but we need to mostly stop burning it for fuel, outside of a limited number of applications. We need to do something about plastic pollution too.

I'd say that will he the harder transition to manage. Electrifying everything isn't too difficult and most of the tech is already mature. Replacing or dealing with plastic pollution seems harder, as will be dealing with increasing costs as fuel oil product consumption is greatly reduced.

That's one of the reasons why so many young people in the West are disillusioned with Western democracy. They want somewhere to live, they can't afford anything. Meanwhile in China the government plans ahead, builds massive new cities, and young people can afford to buy a nice modern apartment or house.

Having visited one such development, it was like walking into one of those show houses. Not an IKEA one either, a high end luxury one. I didn't look too closely to see how much was real solid wood and how much was veneer, but the apartment was spacious and very well furnished and finished. The owner was a logistics office worker and his wife a full time mother.

We really need to figure out how to deliver that with Western style democratic systems, because the old "look how bad life is in the Soviet Union!" isn't going to work this time.

European manufacturers are finally getting their act together on EVs it seems. The Skoda Elroq is probably going to be the best selling EV this year, in the UK.

We need EVs, we need to get off oil. Some pain is inevitable, all we can do is delay it, which makes it worse.

He's upset that he gave up a treasure trove of incredibly valuable data for nothing more than some help raising money and a few contacts.

That data was worth billions and had he realized it back then he'd be part of the billionaire club.

Basically he's upset that he's not going to be the one getting to screw you over using ai and llms.

I'm all for it if it actually happens but I'll believe it when I see it. I think all Microsoft wants to do is stop subsidizing the hardware which would defeat the purpose. At that point I can just buy my own gaming PC.

What makes steam stuff interesting is that they just kind of focus on getting it right with medium level performance and a decent price and I don't think Microsoft can do that so they're probably just going to put out a $1,200 gaming PC. That's assuming they actually pull it off and it doesn't get shot down by other people from company and fighting.

So who knows what's going to happen with AI bullshit devouring everything