They offer you more than minimum wage because of the existence of a minimum wage. Otherwise they'd offer you not $1 per year, but just enough to afford to return to work when added to whatever welfare they can squeeze out of government and society. Minimum wages do apply to salaried jobs as well. Check out what you can earn in countries that don't have them, and then thank a union. Or throw off the shackles of the minimum wage and get into a type of work that really doesn't have one, gig work, and let us know how that supply and demand thing works out for you.

The Luddites died in grinding poverty with all indications being that they were correct, it was their grandchildren who got the new jobs that came along as a result of the automation that ruined their grandparents. Wages and standards of living have been stagnant for a half-century at this point. There are people frantically applying to hundreds of jobs they're well-qualified for and not getting so much as an interview. Over 100 people are applying to each job opening these days, and likewise it takes over 100 job applications for an average applicant to get a job (both rather conservative estimates). If improving productivity led to rising wages, why are we not earning 40% more for the same number of hours people worked in the '70s? Why has going from mainframes and dumb terminals to present-day computing added approximately jack shit to ~90% of workers' pay?

Good for you! Especially if you work in tech. Sucks for the people who aren't part of your anecdote though.

Look up the history of the ones you don't think may have value and you'll learn about the workers who fought and/or died to get the laws in place that keep you from experiencing the same thing, which you now take for granted. Or if that's not enough, maybe you should experience a 996 work schedule in China, work alongside a nonexistent/laughably low minimum wage in a Caribbean country, or do some dangerous work in a Nigerian e-waste mine to get a taste of what happens without all those regulations.

The school administrators, unlike the people who actually make the schools work, such as it is, tend to be paid pretty well.

I get so tired of hearing the school systems stress technology so much, because they are inevitably 20-30 years behind in their understanding of how to best utilize it, leave alone secure their systems. I always fantasized about teaching a computer class that didn't even touch a keyboard for the first half year...

I recall Windows 3.51 was quite secure for the time. But once they merged the DOS branch of the OS with the NT branch, things got a lot worse for several years.

It's good to hear AWS has never been hacked because just about every other company with data has been. A lot of people rely on AWS, and what you are saying is accurate and if they are running their systems correctly, there can be a reasonable expectation that they will be secure. That's nice to know.

> What I learned is that teachers have literally no time for anything.

The school system in the U.S. is notorious for this. Teachers get so much stuff dumped on them, much of which has little to do with actual teaching. It's a truly thankless job that cannot be fixed by dumping more money into the system. It's fundamentally broken. There are plenty of good teachers, but their effectiveness becomes more and more fettered every year.

Source: father of 4, and husband to a school teacher

In my experience the two worst things to combine are "education system" and "technology".

If the script kiddies are hacking your system, you've got bigger problems.

Is "script kiddies" still a thing?

I'm so old.

Not using Plex is the gift that keeps on giving. Why so many people went for it when there were better open-source alternatives available, I'll never know.

Trade deficit as an emergency, I think that's the economic equivalent of declaring the color of a T-shirt to be an emergency.

There are quite a few Vinfast cars going around, I wondered if people were importing them individually but then I spotted a Vinfast dealership off the highway (401 I think?) next to a Lotus dealership.

Was there much overlap between the 6502 version and the 8088 version, or did it need to be completely rewritten?

I could see them having a higher level design, which could in theory actually be C code, which just needed to be rendered, er, compiled down to the specific instruction sets. I'm assuming all this assembly was written as assembly, but there could still be a higher-level design, rendered as flowcharts or whatever that was translated for each architecture.

It's a fascinating part of computer history. I miss those days, even though I never actually had my own computer until after I graduated from college.

Chile seemed to be making something similar work with early-'70s computer technology, until Henry Kissinger decided that democratic socialism was a threat worse than Soviet communism and had the regime overthrown and replaced with a murderous right-wing dictatorship:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit...

It's just another catalyst for people who are mentally ill (and probably not very smart) to do harm. It's inevitable with any new kind of technology.

I thought you should be able to find the link to the data in the news article, but since you can't, here it is:

https://www.pewresearch.org/so...

While the planet could support more people with properly managed resources, this idea that innovation comes from pulling the genetic one-armed-bandit enough times to hit a few jackpots and pop out a few Einsteins is ludicrous. Einsteins aren't born, they're made and enabled. If you want new ideas and innovation, support and empower the people who are already there to do it. We already have lots of people who could generate new ideas including lots of potential Einsteins, they just don't have the time or conditions to make a breakthrough like he did. They're scrapping away at a shitty job that eats all their time to make an already rich person richer instead of having the time to study bleeding-edge physics etc. in their generous downtime at a chill job in a patent office. Or they've gained the skills to make breakthroughs but are wasting them on making Facebook more addictive or developing Grok.

Per capita GDP isn't even a good measure because it isn't a measure of average wealth at all, it's a measure of total national income with no regard for how big the average person's slice of the pie is at all. I think what you're looking for is median household income or median personal income.

It's not society, society doesn't care too much about population growth, it's the economic system. Capitalist economic systems require infinite compounding growth in a finite world (so that capitalists can at any time turn their money into more money without doing any work), and so far the main driver of that growth has been population growth.

In a related problem, most pension/retirement schemes work like a long-running intergenerational ponzi scheme that will only avoid collapse as long as the next generation is bigger or at least wealthier than the last, and now we have two generations that are smaller and poorer.