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.

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...

No generalization ever applies universally. That doesn't make them useless. My father knew the difference between useful and problematic complexity. I get your point, and I also completely understand his.

"do you really think the grades are that important?"

If I'm asking somebody's opinion of John Stuart Mills, probably not. But if I need them to design a bridge, the yes, I want to know they were graded. And, to one point expressed in the article, I want to know the institution is concerned about maintaining a reputation for producing capable graduates.

If we think a bachelors degree has low utility now, imagine what value employers place on it if grading stops being a gatekeeper. It might be slightly more favorable than nothing... but barely.

Are smart people more prone to psychological issues?

As my father (a heavy duty mechanic) told me often, "The more complicated you make something, the more likely it is to break down." I think that's true of brains. But I doubt that would account for quarter or more of the student body being "disabled".

Rather, considering how the number of self-diagnosing jackasses I've met has skyrocketed in the 2000s, I can totally see victimhood being part of the problem.

"There are no more stupid people anymore. Everybody has a learning disorder." - George Carlin

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.

I've seen Meta's glasses, and they look close enough to normal Ray Bans that you might not give them a second look. What was this guy doing to evoke such ire? I mean they look like normal eye glasses, not something unusual that would stand out like Google Glass.

If you deliberately introduce malware into your species boot process, it's not that evolution got it wrong.

Well, yes. That's some of the "necessary few" I refer to. :)

When the thinky works is handled by some necessary few and a whole lot of technology, we still need people to do the shitty, unskilled work. I don't want to do it, so I'm glad people fail out of the bottom. If your skillset is knowing how to ask an AI to do it, the clock is ticking.

* Ingredients: 65% sarcasm, 30% wary sincerity, 5% other