I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

thanks

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Fuck that.

I want the govt more OUT of my life, I dont want to give them more pathways into my life....

So, what is your prediction? It sounds like you think Amazon is going to fire thousands of people in hopes that AI will eventually replace their roles, and then say, "whoops, it doesn't work, we're screwed," and the packages will stop flowing. Is that your prediction?

Anybody have a way to read the blomberg article?

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.

Let me tell you about this little detail called CO2...

I'm not even a manager and there are, at present count, 30 hours of meetings on my calendar. I go to less than half, I just let the meetings sandbag my calendar so that new meetings are difficult to schedule. Either you know me and we have a reason to meet, or fuck you.

The actual managers are much worse off. Corporate life is stupid.

According to the NZ EFTPOS site there is a rental fee for the machine, if not purchased. Then there is a monthly usage fee based on the size of the company.
If the customer then uses a credit card or similar there are additional fee charged by both EFTPOS and the credit card company.
Debit cards do have a fee but it is lower than credit cards so stores merchants have that fixed into the cost.
In the USA some store will still take checks, cheques, and it is no additional cost.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

We all know real programmers use butterflies.

As a patient with metastatic cancer, my story is on the other side. I was going around to Dr's for a year or more trying to figure out why I was feeling more and more exhausted. (I say Dr's but don't remember if I ever got seen by more than a nurse practitioner). I kept saying I felt like it was something physical, but got sidetracked into psychiatry. I had visible lumps under my skin and everybody said, well it's probably just lipomas. In the end I got undeniable symptoms and was finally given a chest xray, which (unlike an MRI) costs like $99. By then it had spread everywhere. So far I have lived almost a year, which at one point was deemed highly unlikely, but it has cost my insurers well over $1M and counting.

Didn't all of these problems come up with Google Glass over ten years ago? In fact the term "Google Glasshole" was coined for people using Google Glass to record people who didn't want to be recorded. While it is legal to film in public, they did not seem to understand why people did not like it. This user seems to fit that mold.

No but they were experimenting with germanium. My understanding is that researched stopped because while they could get better results with germanium, the problem was how to use it germanium practically as it is 1.6ppm in the Earth's crust while silicon is 282,000 ppm.