Since 1980 were taken by automation not outsourcing. Google it.

The Trump administration is heavily pushing even more automation.

His commerce Secretary has already admitted that even if tariffs magically brought the factories back the jobs wouldn't come with them because they would be automated.

We are going to have to do something about this. In the very near future, in the life of most of the people reading this, about a quarter of the population is going to be rendered completely useless. We will not have any useful work they are capable of doing.

We are not going to give them money to sit around playing Xbox and getting drunk on Friday night. Nobody is going to tolerate going to work for 40 to 60 hours a week when somebody else doesn't have to. It won't feel Fair and it will make people very angry.

At the same time we are talking about 30 to 40 million people we just have no use for. It's too many to stick in work camps or to kill.

We are going to have a huge conflict between the people who still need to do work and the people who there is no useful work to do. And there is no magical super job that's going to come along and employ them. Read the history on the two industrial revolutions, we had massive amounts of technological unemployment during both of them that your high school history books glossed over. We had 25% unemployment in the lead up to world war II.

I don't know what the solution is. I think what's going to happen is we're going to have another world war and it's going to go nuclear possibly ending the species. But if there's a third option we better figure it out and fast.

The billionaires have decided we're going to have feudalism and are working on dismantling capitalism so that they know longer depend on consumers and employees for their wealth and prestige and power. They are creating a world where they do not need you to buy their products. So they already have a solution to the problem it's just their solution doesn't include you.

Right off the bat updates are constantly crashing it because Microsoft is using shitty vibe coding to do critical updates and then acting like they can have people just check the code. Any idiot can realize quickly that's not going to work because there's going to be enormous pressure to check the code quickly in order to realize the cost savings from the AI bullshit.

Meanwhile Windows 11 is slower and more crash prone because it's filled with AI spyware designed to let Microsoft train their chatbots and whatnot on everything you do.

It is the most user hostile software in existence but because we don't have any antitrust law enforcement it's all we've got.

I keep seeing people talk about Linux but the fact of the matter is unless and until we start electing politicians that will strictly enforce and to trust law and begin the process of breaking Microsoft up Linux is not going anywhere.

The reason Linux is perpetually stuck at 2 to 3% market share on the desktop is because every time it starts to have a breakout moment Microsoft does a couple of nasty little anticompetitive things that are obviously illegal and that's it.

People have to start deciding what's more important when they go to the polls. And I think people here know how they've been making their voting decisions and what they've been giving up for it.

A Japanese game developer has started making recruits draw in front of them because they had so many people sending in fake AI slop and a few slipped through.

the funny thing, I could see AI being a game changer for Manga. A lot of Manga is simple brute force work adding shading and the like that could be better done in software. Though I don't think you need AI for that, good software could do it.

But a lot of it's still done the old fashioned way, which is a shame because several of my favorite manga ended because the author was so overworked they almost killed themselves...

Then again the publishers could just not take all the money for themselves, that works too. Japan needs more worker protections, but they just elected Trump in a dress so that ain't happening.

but if you kill the dog it's just $100 bucks. Unless it's some kind of special dog.

If the dog lives I think you're right, they might be able to sue google in small claims court to recover damages and would probably win. Though it can be hard to collect on judgements like that.

as it stands Waymo won't even be held responsible for that. Those sorts of penalties are waived for self driving cars in the cities they operate.

They have to be because they commit traffic infractions so often that the cops would be pulling them over and ticketing them constantly.

Rules for thee but not for me.

Last I checked the local government said so. They have indemnified waymo in every market they have launched their taxi service. I don't think that would hold up if they killed a human being, at least not one that isn't homeless, but so far it's held up for the more minor stuff that's happened.

Basically waymo cannot be cited for traffic violations and killing a pet is just a traffic violation. The most they could be held responsible for would be the value of the pet which is usually under $100.

It's that we all know this is a grift and we're all trying to figure out how the grift works.

I can think of a few possible things but I don't have enough of a finance background to really say for sure of what they are up to, but I know damn well that billionaires don't just hand out billions of dollars for the hell of it. There is a reason that Bill Gates is still one of the wealthiest people on the planet despite telling us 20 years ago he was going to give away his fortune.

Billionaires have been lying to us for as long as we've had billionaires, some of us just figured that out

But given this administration's history of corrupting everything they touch it's not something we should get behind from this administration because it's almost guaranteed to turn into some kind of scam that puts money in their pockets.

There is nothing wrong with a sovereign wealth fund per se if your government is relatively uncorrupted. Ours is not, the Trump administration is without a doubt the most corrupt and criminal administration in American history and that is saying a lot.

Simply put you cannot expect good things to come out of this administration even if the underlining ideas are fine. And I don't think that's any kind of exaggeration or partisan bickering. The Trump administration is openly murdering Venezuelan fishermen in the lead up to another war for oil without even the slightest pretexts. That alone should tell you we are in for a bad time. You don't have to be a genius to extrapolate from that data point and the dozens of other data points like the illegal tariffs or the huge bribes like the cryptocurrency or the jet Qatar gave the Trump or the fact that the taxpayer is going to be retro fitting that jet for his use...

If I had to guess, and it's just a guess, I would say that they are positioning themselves to profit from the money put aside for the kids. Probably sitting themselves up to redirect the money being invested in the companies that they own.

The one thing we can be sure of though is that this is a scam and the only question is what are the details of the scam.

You don't become a billionaire by being altruistic. People who genuinely care about society at Large stop accumulating wealth long before they become billionaires. To become a billionaire requires a certain level of sociopathy. There's a reason why the old phrase, never ask a Man how he made his first million, exists. That phrase has been around so long that a million dollars isn't a lot of money anymore but you get the idea.

The supreme Court has overruled 94% of the lower court rulings Trump has lost. It's painfully obvious they will just rubber stamp anything Trump wants. More importantly anything the heritage foundation and Peter thiel wants. Trump can't stay awake through an entire cabinet meeting so it's not so much that he wants anything but he would like to stay in power because he is making billions of corruption and bribes.

Meanwhile the Republican party does not have a viable candidate for 2028. Vance is a joke and a couch fucker and the rest of them are so mired and scandal they are completely unelectable. None of them have Trump's Teflon because they aren't perceived as outsiders.

So the Republican party is going to run Trump unless Trump is physically incapable of running. Meanwhile the news media will protect Trump and will convince the public that it is perfectly normal for Trump to run for a third term. We saw this in 2024 with sane washing. Which is the practice of crazy shit Republicans do, especially anything crazy Trump does being reported as normal and good in the news media.

This probably isn't enough for Trump to actually win a third term but the Republican party will use common voter suppression tactics to stop enough casual voters from making it to the polls in order for Trump to win.

It is possible the voters won't buy into this but at the same time they did elect a felon with 28 credible rape accusations for a second term because he promised cheap eggs and because trans people gross them out...

And of course if anyone can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory it's the Democratic party. They are on track to nominate Gavin newsom and he's fine but I could easily see them coming up with some scandal to take him out so they can put yet another unpopular woman forward. There is a contingency of the Democrat party that is obsessed with the first female president and will do anything to get it. And unfortunately they have a lot of pull in the party...

So yeah Trump cares because Trump is going to run for a third term. This is why he's backing off on some of his tariffs

But I was told that the sole reason insurance rates are high is because of BIDEN!!!!1!

Also good luck getting that check. It can take years.

Florida in particular is a mess right now and nobody is doing anything to fix it. We've got a fuck ton of retirees who can't afford to move, aren't dying any time soon and are stuck in condos we know are likely to fail without expensive retrofits they can't afford. It's a miracle there hasn't been another collapse and we're just hoping they drop dead of old age before it hits them.

You're not helping your case by quoting a quack like him. He's a pop sci author that specializes in junk science. Exactly the kind of guy that I would expect to do a lazy study pointing to cell phones bad.

Like I mentioned on other comments I'm still not at all convinced and correlation is not causation.

I keep coming back to the fact that these same studies have been done with every new form of media and they always find a correlation.

The problem isn't the New Media the problem is we don't support parents and kids enough so the parents plop their kids down with Penny dreadfuls or radio or TV or Internet and now cell phones and screens.

In another hundred years these same dumb studies will be done for cyberdecks.

So I'm aware that the abstract says that they controlled for socioeconomic factors I'm just dubious of that.

It's far more likely that kids spending a bunch of time on screens is a symptom of other problems.

That said on the off chance that the phones are a problem they are a miniscule problem compared to everything else kids are up against in 2025.

Taking your kid's phone away isn't going to magically make them get better grades or take up sports.

Even so I think it's far more likely that you're seeing the same basic problem across different economic groups. And because of that you could replace the phone with basically any form of media. Which is why you get the same little panic every time a new form of media comes out and the same group of social scientists running the same experiments blaming the New Media for causing the problems.

I'm not a huge fan of folk music but having listened to a little bit of it just because I'm a lefty and Lefty's tend to blare the stuff I can tell you that the same problems that we had a hundred years ago or more we're getting sung about in folk music back then and are getting sung about it and folk music today. We haven't solved any of the problems. And it's the same damn problems. The only thing new is obesity and that's just because we have reasonably reliable access to food for most people... Most people. There are still several million kids having sleep for dinner every night...

It's entirely possible even likely that what we are seeing here is just that latchkey kids are more likely to have smartphones at an early age.

The problem isn't the phone itself it's overworked parents with low pay and no social support.

The abstract at least says that the account for socioeconomic factors but I'm not able to read the actual study past the abstract.

Also I guarantee that these exact same studies can be found for television, the internet and if you go back far enough you can find the 18th century equivalent of these studies for Penny dreadfuls.

Every time a new form of mass media or a new device for mass media shows up you can bet somebody is going to find a correlation between everything bad and if. Meanwhile we never actually do anything about things like child hunger or forcing kids to get up early to go to school when we have plenty of studies indicating the teenagers need more sleep and it needs to be later in the morning...