It's 6:13pm. A person is walking, only a silhouette against kaleidoscopic billboards selling the latest drugs. A man, by clothing and posture, but nowadays, no one knows for sure. He seems intent on going home, going to his family, going to a place of respite between four walls, in their box of an apartment, in the middle of this concrete jungle where 8 million people are strangers. Suddenly, the loudspeakers blare. They were installed in early 2025, soon after the Mad Queen was elected to power. It's only been 2 years, but they're now a familiar sight, an eternal companion to the Flock cameras monitoring your every move. Usually, it's messages of faith. "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN TOO!" they declare. But today, no, today is different. Today is Wednesday. On Wednesday, they announce the coming, and the staying, of the Mad Queen. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HAHAHAHAH!!!" That laugh... That laugh haunts his dreams. His shoulders forward further, he shakes his head and accelerates his pace. "I should have voted for Trump, goddamnit" he thinks, but it's too late now. The Mad Queen reigns.

ACKCHUALLY... We all love US-centricity, but Star Trek was first broadcast in Canada on Sept 6. Its actual anniversary would have been a couple days ago.

I disagree. If the voters slowly realize the person they voted in is shady... that's a good thing. It took a while, but damn, it gives me (limited) hope.

I agree. People have been sold this belief that the government is incompetent, inefficient, and that letting the rich buy our infrastructure would mean it would be better managed and we would pay less at the end. That is the biggest lie of all, as any efficiency gain squeezed out goes to the owner, not us as a society.

I'd add utilities (electricity, internet) to that list.

But think of the children. If you deprive the capital owners from making money off of basic human needs, they won't be able to hire servants, who won't be able to feed their kids. It's for the kids.

"Terribly" common, I don't know, but Canada has had its fair share of power outages, affecting hundreds of thousands of people, usually caused by weather (storms etc.). Just search for Canada in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., 34 matches, and that's the stuff someone noted down for Wikipedia, I'm sure there are more that no one bothered to write down.

It's kinda scary, because if you hadn't stated it, I (as a normal person, not a literary critic) would have never been able to tell this was AI.

Regardless, people get catfished all the time by scammers, and AI is either heavily involved there or at least as good as a random scammer. None of this is surprising.

Paying him off is now the cost of doing business in America. We're a goddamn corrupt banana republic.

I agree with you that in practice, in today's society, destruction like that won't work unless it's taken by thousands of others. However, I also think the official complaint channels are often just as ineffective. I also find it ironic this is posted so close to July 4th. Imagine if the founding fathers just complained and didn't take arms...

Are there software kill switches in chargers, that cannot be bypassed even if you control the hardware (honest question)? If there is, I get the concern. If not, aren't these basically battery systems drawing power from the grid that an European government owns, and push comes to shove, the local military could take ownership?

Maybe I'm not enough of an AI believer. Maybe we're talking different use cases.

For enterprise software, you may have senior developers in 10 years that can guide AI to fix issues. I still think that the person maintaining it needs to understand the code, in case AI cannot fix it correctly (that's where I'm not enough of an AI believer).

On use case, this Android App thing is not enterprise software. A lot of the vibe coded software we'll see will be designed by a random person, who may or may not let the software die. If it's an app on your phone that's not important, who cares, but in the corporate world I could see random vibe-coded applications being shared and used by hundreds of users, and then the original app owner retires or gets laid off, and then... chaos. It's similar to today's Excel sheets with DBA macros, except more complex.

Idiocy is rampant in corporate America.

Vibecoding and other AI slop will end up creating a mess of unmaintainable software. However, the summary says "the resulting creations, for now, are only meant to be used personally". If the use case is personal apps only, I think it's pretty great. I would never want to download a random vibecoded app from the store though.

My point was that "human capital" is demeaning, but I don't know what a better expression would be, and all the other terms the OP wrote don't work because they mean something specific. Also the comment was "our large company NOW uses a HCM system", and this is not new at all.

We're all in agreement that corporations are sociopathic. Human society goes through a pendulum, it feels like every few hundred years the elites need to be reminded there's a handful of them and billions of us. I hope everyone realizes that soon.

I don't disagree with you that "human capital" is not a great label, but all the other terms you used have specific meanings in HR.

Talent management is about a combination of hiring, training, and retaining employees. People management is what typical middle-managers do, supporting employees in their daily activities and keeping a team operating. "Human capital management" includes both (and more - performance management, compensation, etc.). You could call it "human resources management" maybe, but HCM is what has been used for decades ("SAP HCM" was "SAP HR" back in the 80s, but has been "HCM" since the early 2000s).

I've been part of layoffs before (on the planning and the giving end), and I remember the head of HR said "we want these meetings to be individual and in person, because that's the least we can give to our employees". That stuck with me. Layoffs suck for everyone involved, but at least try to treat your employees like human beings.

Asking your folks not to step into work and firing them by e-mail.. I guess that's the modern way of running HR. I also imagine they'd use your personal e-mail, because as of 4:01am your corporate accesses will be revoked. Cold as fuck.