Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

That said, and with all due respect for Matt's past accomplishments in forging a community and a company to support it, I think Automattic (and so Matt) made a terrible choice around 2015 by deciding to use Slack for internal and even external communications instead of just using WordPress with the 02/Oxygen plugin previously used.

I wrote about that at length when I was applying for a job at Automattic circa 2015.The gist of that concern is on the main page of my website and says:
        "And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS. :-( We always have many principles to choose from, and it can indeed be hard sometimes to get the priorities right. As Scott Berkun (who left Automattic after a year to go back to writing full-time) wrote, even in a metrics-driver organization like Automattic, there is no metric for picking metrics or deciding how to weigh a variety of metrics (beyond perhaps survival itself).
        Here is a version of Twirlip I started as a proof-of-concept Thunderbird Server webapp to handle email, chat, and other real-time communications as another step towards a social semantic desktop. It is the beginning of the embodiment of the "ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto". But if you are looking for something good now that is FOSS, check out Mattermost, Matrix.org, Mailpile, Kolab, and similar things."

An archive page of that job application and Slack comments from back then is here, includign with the section on transcending polling in WordPress:
"Automattic JavaScript Engineer application by Paul D. Fernhout"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
      "But there is an alternative to trying to shoehorn WebSocket-related changes into the WordPress core PHP somehow. Such an update notification service to reduce polling could instead be hosted at WordPress.com in parallel to a WordPress server for a fee for those who don't want to run Node.js (or whatever) locally to supply that service. ... Such a WordPress feature to reduce polling needs might then be used to add near-real-time chat to WordPress. This might reduce the otherwise increasing desire for Automatticians to use Slack to communicate with each other about WordPress. That is a movement that seems problematical to me concerning WordPress's future. It would also be like Automattic moving to Pusher instead of improving WordPress to be low-latency and near-real-time. Even if Slack (by all reports) is a great product (as proprietary products go) that can monitor and log and search all of your communications stored on their servers, in theory using Slack widely within Automattic makes Automattic's internal communications available to the same proprietary competitor (if even just rogue employees) for business intelligence purposes. It also seems strange to me for Automattic to cede the area of near-real-time communications to a proprietary company without at least trying (really hard) to come up with an alternative built into WordPress, especially because such things have already been shown to be workable. I feel Automattic could (and should) be innovating in this area to help the WordPress community move in new directions. ..."

A fundamental issue is that people at Automattic at the time saw WordPress' competitors as things like Wix, not things like Slack. I was reminded of when in the 1990s ParcPlace (a Smalltallk vendor) thought Digittalk (another Smalltalk vendor) was their main competitor and disastrously bought them while ignoring that Visual Basic and Delphi and similar products were really their big competitors (which I had warned someone in sales there about about). WordPress could have become the premier chat platform for companies (including using ideas for a near-real-time message updates relay server leveraging technology someone at Automattic has written). But instead Automattic and the WordPress community it shepherds moved to Slack. Just a very sad way to see a great FOSS community focused on communications destroy itself by embracing proprietary software. And it seems like Matt played a big part in that short-sighted decision somehow (maybe having friends who worked at and.or funded Slack judging from some of his bloig posts long ago)?

Here is a more general essay I wrote in 2016 on why not to use Slack for free software development (in part trying to explain to Richard Stallman of the FSF why Slack was such a threat to the free software movement):
"Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development"
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons...
====
Contents
* Introduction and summary
* What is Slack? (A proprietary centralized communications hub web service )
* Free alternatives exist to the proprietary Slack
* Automattic/WordPress is sending the wrong message about free communications software
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* A democratic government is a special case of a free and open source community
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
* What if Slack went free/libre and open source?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The cost of changing later can be high
* Matrix.org is a better way forward
* Would I ever use Slack? Sadly, yes. :-(
====

Tangentially, I also tried to get Automattic/WordPress to use Mithril instead of React back when React has problematical licensing relating to patents... In the end though Automattic and Matt had enough clout to get Facebook to change the React licensing terms (even though I still feel Mithril has a better conceptual design with better developer ergonomics than React).
https://github.com/Automattic/...

Anyway, I'll never know if WordPress and Automattic might have gone in very different directions if I had gone to work there -- or if I just would have become frustrated and bitter from still seeing it all play out the way it did despite my best efforts there (given social momentum and power structures)?

For example, it took five years to get this memory exhaustion and crashing bug I reported in WordPress fixed for when you edit a long page too many times (which I discovered while writing that job application). That is a bug which may have cost the entire WordPress community many millions of dollars a year paying for bigger servers with more memory than they really needed to avoid the problem, compared to if the bug had been fixed sooner:
"High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions"
https://core.trac.wordpress.or...

P.S. Sad anniversary of September 11 today and the destruction of technology used for social advancement in Chili in 1973 (as another example of politics and personality disrupting humane tech progress as with WordPress):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Project Cybersyn was a Chilean economic project developed from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), with the purpose of constructing a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that linked to a single mainframe computer. ... The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer (1926-2002), and the system embodied his notions of management cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce to develop self-regulation of factories. ... Project Cybersyn ended following Allende's removal and death during the coup detat of 11 September 1973. After the coup, the Chilean military abandoned Cybersyn and destroyed the operations room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "According to historian Sebastian Hurtado Torres, there is no documentary evidence to support that the United States government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces from September 11, 1973 itself. However, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and intervened in the conditions prior to the Chilean coup of 1973. Historian Peter Winn found "extensive evidence" of United States complicity in events that helped in part to create the conditions that led to the coup. However, given the local political polarization and the performance of the Popular Unity government, there is no academic consensus on whether this intervention--which primarily took the form of financial support for the media, political parties, and opposition organizations--played a decisive role in the events of September 11, 1973."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The android officers are ordered by Central Command to cease pursuit, on the grounds that the expense of his capture exceeds their allocated budget for THX."

So maybe there is hope for humanity after all in token budget limits? :-)

Another source of hope is humans and Ais learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Grid scale batteries can do more than deal with the intermittency of solar power.

I recall news about the Tesla Megapack in Australia keeping the electric grid stable after a gigawatt scale coal power plant was somehow suddenly taken off the grid. So, consider how batteries could help in keeping electricity flowing should a gigawatt scale nuclear power plant have an unplanned shutdown, it's not like the electrons behave any different if they come from a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

If there's a need for grid scale electric storage then nuclear fission allows for energy storage at lower cost than batteries, and possibly lower cost than pumped hydro storage. Nuclear fission is uniquely suited for thermal energy storage since they can produce temperatures higher than concentrated solar thermal, thermodynamics tell us the higher the temperature in the "thermal battery" the better.

A nuclear power plant with thermal energy storage allows for ramping down power and diverting that heat into storage for using when solar power fades with clouds and nightfall. Thermal energy storage could be little more than a tank on a molten salt coolant loop. Because thermal energy storage is so simple the cost of construction and operation could be the cheapest option for grid scale storage. If batteries prove to be lower cost than thermal energy storage then a nuclear power plant can use batteries instead.

If we are going to be truthful with ourselves about the cost of energy then we should not ignore how batteries could be paired up with more than just solar.

Canada figured out how to build gigawatt scale CANDU nuclear reactors without large steel castings. If getting large steel cast parts is an issue for Americans then Americans could work out a deal with Canada, or develop similar reactors independently. That's assuming we'd want to continue building gigawatt scale reactors. Right now there's a Department of Energy contest of sorts to see who has the best small modular reactors. The winners of this competition would likely need a few years yet to get from these first-of-a-kind demonstration reactors to mass production, which means they can avoid any issues over sourcing large steel castings.

There's more to cost reduction with scale than keep building gigawatt scale reactors. SMRs can be designed to scale with quantity, and that's the sales pitch being used to find utilities willing to fund nuclear power plants.

I am continually baffled on how those opposed to nuclear power keep bringing up problems that have been solved decades ago.

That might be a problem right now but certainly solvable in something like five years. When I was attending university for an electrical engineering degree and planning out which courses to take for the next semester I discovered that the professor for one of the fluid dynamic classes had a degree in nuclear engineering. That made me wonder how many other professors teaching at American universities were nuclear engineers. There's few universities in the USA offering degrees in nuclear engineering, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a shortage of professors willing and able to teach nuclear engineering courses.

If universities see demand for nuclear engineers from both students and the energy industry then they can develop a nuclear engineering program. A nuclear power plant will need people trained in nuclear engineering but only a handful of them as there's plenty going on at nuclear power plants that will not require knowing anything related to nuclear fission. There's clearly enough nuclear engineers for the current demand, because if there were not then I would not see any university with professors trained in nuclear engineering teaching courses ion how to build windmills, they would instead be teaching at a university with a nuclear engineering program, or they'd be applying their expertise designing or operating nuclear power plants.

As it is now it takes about eight years to build a nuclear power plant from breaking ground to producing electricity. This gives the nuclear power industry time to avoid a future shortage of nuclear engineers. The nuclear power industry can, and almost certainly will, do what they can to speed the process along. While attending university I learned of scholarships from John Deere to get more agricultural engineers. If I had learned of this scholarship earlier then I would have switched to agricultural engineering to see my costs to attend university lowered. Much like that nuclear engineer teaching students how to build windmills the degree doesn't lock people into a narrow field of employment options. If I studied agricultural engineering at university I could find work programming binary load lifters by applying what I learned at university about moisture vaporators. The companies building nuclear power plants today can offer scholarships in nuclear engineering just like how John Deere offered scholarships for agricultural engineers.

I'd guess the authors of the fine article believed that the age of the power plant wasn't important enough to include. There are plenty of details not in the article since the authors of the article will have a maximum word count from their editors, this is so the readers are not given trivial details that would bore and/or confuse the reader. The editors and reporters will have a point they want to get across, the point I got from the article is that there's a growing demand for electricity which has forced people to reconsider the viability of nuclear fission as a source of electricity. If the reader wishes to learn that detail they can easily find that with a web search using the same computer used to read the article.

I'll save you from the trouble of searching this yourself, construction started in 1970 and the reactor commissioned in 1975 which would make this reactor about 50 years old.

That was in the article. The plant had been damaged by a powerful wind storm, as seen only in a once in a lifetime level of power. The reactor didn't see any damage, the damage was to property around the reactor that turns the reactor heat into electricity and sends that electricity to the local rural electric cooperative. At the time immediately after the storm the plant could not raise the money needed to repair it, while also paying for the refueling and maintenance that was in progress then. Minds were changed on restarting the reactor because of rising natural gas costs.

Just like I commented above there's only so much detail that can be put in a news article while also keeping the word count to something that can be easily processed by the intended audience.

Every nuclear power plant is required to show the NRC they have funds set aside for decommissioning before a license to operate is granted. In the end all Americans are contributing to this fund by electricity fees, taxes, and likely more. It appears you believe that there's better options than nuclear fission for producing electricity. I expect that the people working on restarting DAEC did the math on costs versus benefits and found restarting DAEC was their best option. I'm quite certain that these people know more about the costs and income than you do.

Why should anyone be all that concerned about how long the decommissioning will take? There's all kinds of infrastructure projects that take a similarly long time to complete, why should I think any different about a nuclear power plant?

What you've written doesn't mesh with nuclear power. It appears to me that you are simply ignorant about nuclear power and can't be bothered to do the slightest to educate your self. You clearly have a computer and internet, if you didn't then you'd not be posting comments to Slashdot, which allows you to find answers to your questions in only a few minutes. I'm reminded of a comment that's been attributed to Mark Twain, those who don't read will remain as ignorant as those that can't read.

There's two events that stick out in my mind that demonstrate to me how opinions are changing on nuclear fission for energy. The first event was seeing Andrew Yang advocated for nuclear power in his campaign for POTUS. If Yang believed Democrats would not support nuclear power then he'd not likely run as a Democrat. The national Democrat party platform included support for nuclear power shortly after Yang dropped out of the race for the White House, and I'm of the belief that leaders in the party made this shift because Yang was getting popular as a candidate. Yang speaking in favor of nuclear power, and getting plenty of votes in primary elections, likely got Democrat leaders nervous on their chances to win in that race. Yang forced other Democrats to comment on nuclear power, and those that spoke out against it were losing votes to Yang or Republicans.

The second event that tells me public opinions on nuclear power are changing happened in the last week or so, I'm seeing adverts in favor of nuclear power on YouTube. For something like 50 years Democrats were either openly opposed to nuclear power or were trying to pretend that nuclear power doesn't exist. If there's enough money to produce and distribute these adverts then there must be plenty of people willing to fund these adverts.

I'm aware of the distinction between the two words, I was trying to be funny. I set up the joke but then failed in delivering the punch line. I was referencing the "four boxes of liberty", with those boxes being soap, ballot, jury, and ammunition/cartridge/ordnance/whatever. If the local government fails to enact/pass legislation to change behavior, and/or fails in changing behavior by nonviolent means, then this could lead to violent enforcement, where violent enforcement includes handing out ammunition.

Sure, rarely in life is anything absolute.

Define "typical of an RV" for the class. I know people with an RV, and I've done a bit of looking on what an RV takes for power more generally, so I believe I have some idea on what an RV might take for power. If we are to take my brother's RV as something approaching "typical" then we will see two AC units for cooling. This allows for running a single AC unit if there is only a "travel trailer" outlet for power, which provides 120VAC @ 30A, or running both units if there is a 240VAC @ 40A outlet as found at more "up to date" campsites suited for larger camper trailers and RVs. On a warm Midwest summer day like today there could be a near constant running of the AC unit(s) from early afternoon until about midnight when the outdoor temperature gets below 70F. If we assume a cool fall or spring day for camping then there could be electric resistance heaters running constantly through the night and into the mid-morning when the sun starts to warm everything up.

I can understand that during much of the camping season the high power loads will be largely intermittent, such as microwave ovens as well as more intermittent use of heating and cooling, but that is not guaranteed. I don't know how an RV park would calculate loads to determine main service size but this still means that a BEV with a portable L2 charge cable is no worse than an RV during cool or warm weather.

If the choice is to spend $500 (the highway robbery DCFC fees such as in TFA plus fees for a motel room for the night) or to sleep in the car for the night during mild weather at a campsite for $25 then I'll choose sleeping in my car. If there is severe weather to the point sleeping in my car would not be safe, some hurry to get where I'm going, or some other unusual need, then I'll eat the $500. I won't like paying out $500, would likely dispute the fees as soon as possible as shown in TFA, but if I had to eat that then I'd consider it a once in a lifetime case of bad luck as well as a learning experience to better plan my travels in the future.

That's great but TFA is about a gentleman traveling through the Midwest USA, on what I assume to be a summer vacation, being left with what appeared to be limited options for recharging the BEV he rented. There's a lot of missing details on the situation so we'll have to speculate. If a motel with free EV charging was within the range left on the battery was available then I would expect the driver to take that option than gamble on the fees from an unfamiliar charger. Then consider the point I made above, there may have been more going on which dictated using the DCFC regardless of the fees than spend the night at a campsite in rural Michigan.

A quick look at DCFC fees tells me that $0.40/kWh is about as low as anyone can find in the USA. For a 65 kWh battery like in the Chevy Bolt that comes to about $25 for a full charge. Consider DCFC fees that would be from average to high and it might be double that, perhaps even triple or quadruple. A quick look at some local campsites and I see overnight fees for a spot with electricity being between $25 and $50. Maybe campsites cost more where you are but I'd expect most Midwest campsite fees would be in that $25 to $50 range. It's been a while since I rented a campsite but I doubt there's much difference in the fees over that time and over the general Midwest area, feel free to prove me wrong. Remember that we are talking about people traveling through rural USA, there may not be a Tesla Supercharger on the path from A to B.

I agree that Tesla appears to offer the best option for EV charging, regardless of which make of BEV being discussed, but Tesla chargers aren't always an option. I point to campsites as an option to recharge as (at least in my experience) fees are posted clearly, they will offer a safe place to rest for a few hours to overnight if necessary, will have toilets (though perhaps not the most modern and clean), and likely other amenities to make the stop at least relatively comfortable and likely more comfortable than the typical charging station which offers little more than a slab of asphalt baking in the summer sun. Assuming the BEV driver is not in a hurry, or lacking better options, then $50 for a few hours at a campsite to recharge (literally and figuratively) isn't that bad of an option. What's the better option here? A $200 tow to the next town with a Tesla Supercharger? Or a motel with free overnight EV charging?

The larger point is to keep an open mind on EV charge options when traveling through unfamiliar territory and/or sparsely populated areas like the Midwest USA. Instead of only looking for DCFC on an app consider also campsites, motels that have L2 chargers, truck stops that might not be listed on most EV charging networks, and so on. I've seen comments on Slashdot on how some hospitals and churches have EV chargers that are either free or low cost, they may not be DCFC but expect to at least have a safe place to rest while waiting to charge.

Like most local shops that treat their patrons like shit they made the local news for their actions. This often leads to corrections to this behavior in short order. The shop can change their behavior in response to locals being less likely to visit their shops (and therefore impact income) or the local government will pass some ordnance (or is it "ordinance"?) to more forcefully adjust their behavior.

EVs are still a new enough phenomenon that NACS as a standard charging port is only two years old (or something, it's close enough), so new that we might still be seeing CCS or whatever on new EVs for another two years. The "piece of shit" dealers with sky high fees on charging aren't likely to get away with this highway robbery for much longer. People will learn which dealers are pieces of shit, EV charger apps will learn to post fees as well as potentially just refuse to list charging sites that rob EV drivers, and laws will be passed to force fees charged to be posted prominently like we see now with filling stations.

I'm disappointed that anyone believes they can get away with this kind of robbery, but I'm also encouraged that this is making the news which will discourage this robbery in the future.

I've had generally pleasant experiences with local auto dealers so I've not been trained to believe that dealerships rip people off like I'll hear others express such happening to them. Again, I expect this to be self correcting, especially now that so many drivers will have a smartphone that can give rapidly updated information on anyone that could try to rob them with shady business tactics.

Oh, and a note to those looking to avoid high EV charging fees:
A tip I picked up is that it's cheap to charge up an EV at campsites for those thinking ahead to pack a portable charge cable, a cable that can be had for something like $100 from all kinds of shops be they online or brick and mortar. From experience a campsite will offer as much as a 240 VAC @ 40A outlet for "shore power", or at least some kind of electrical outlet, and charge something like $25 for the night regardless of how much electricity is consumed. You don't have to stay the night, presumably sleeping in your car, but you can if that means charging up cheap while spending the night in a safe place to sleep. Nearly every campsite will have toilets, showers, and WiFi for campers to use. The nicer campsites could also have a swimming pool, laundromat, perhaps a little convenience shop to pick up basic food items and/or toiletries, maybe a playground or hiking trails to get some exercise and/or distract any children traveling with you for a bit. My point is that by thinking outside the box on places to charge there are options to save money on EV charging, or at least having a more pleasant stop than the typical roadside charging spot that is lacking the most basic of comforts for the stop.

The question was asked in the fine article of why post the charger as available to the general public if the owners were doing everything possible to discourage the public from using it. I can make a couple guesses, including the guess in the fine article that the owners thought they might be able to get away with the high fees if anyone was desperate enough to actually use the charger they installed for the purpose of charging the EVs they were offering for sale.

Another reason I can speculate could be incentivizing this behavior is that there is (or was at the time of installation) some kind of government incentive for posting the charger as publicly available, such as some provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that had considerable incentives for promoting more EV sales. Regardless of the cause I expect this to be a self correcting issue. If this isn't fixed with legislation, such as marking the fees in ways clearly visible like current rules on refilling stations, then it will be fixed with competition on lower fess and with charger locator apps indicating what fees to expect at each location.

Even though I live in the relatively sparsely populated Midwest USA I'd feel confident I could get to where I need to go while also avoiding exorbitant fees on public chargers. When growing up on the family dairy farm we were about 15 miles from two small towns that offered most every service we'd need, such as dentists, optometrist, hospitals and clinics offering every basic medical service, schools, libraries, groceries, clothing, auto dealerships, restaurants, and more. Airports, "bigger" hospitals, the more niche shopping, etc. would be more like 50 to 100 miles away, something easily done on a single charge with most BEVs available in the last decade or so. To get to a major metro, such as Chicago or the Twin Cities, could be as much as 300 miles for a Midwesterner by my estimations. Such a large city will have many options for public chargers, making exorbitant fees on an EV charger unlikely to stand for long.

I guess where I'm going with this is that I'm as confused as anyone on how EV charging fees like this could exist in 2026. I don't have an EV currently but I'm thinking that my next vehicle will be a PHEV. Articles like this make me nervous to jump into EVs with both feet and look for a BEV. What also makes me nervous about a BEV is the "range anxiety" that comes from even the EV advocates when news like this is brought up. If BEV owners are so anxious about range that they are insistent that every restaurant, movie theater, parking ramp, and even their own workplace, have a place to plug in for charging, then why would I want a BEV? This leads me to believe that I could be left calling for a tow, or left paying sky high fees at a public EV charger, because my BEV lacks the single charge range to get me to work, shopping, religious services, places of education, or whatever.

If EV advocates want to see more people buy or rent BEVs then I suggest doing two things. First is to quit with the insistence that EV chargers be available at every parking spot, that only feeds the "range anxiety" that should have been left to history by now. Point out how most daily driving is within 100 miles of where people call home, and even an abused cheap used BEV will make up for those miles on a single overnight charge from a common 120 VAC outlet. Second, do some common sense advocacy with those providing the charging and other services, or act on this yourself by putting your own money into getting chargers installed. I believe that advocating for more legislation, such as tax incentives and subsidies, are often counterproductive. If you are calling for more laws on incentivizing BEV sales then that it likely to feed into public resistance as it justifies their unfounded "range anxiety", feeds into fears of government overreach, and more that will only get people to dig in their heels and hold tight to their dinosaur burners.

I'm wondering if EV advocates have become their own worst enemy.

Hows this for more serious job market stats?
"Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are "functionally unemployed," economic analysis finds"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/f...
        "The U.S. job market is less robust than it looks, according to a new analysis.
        The nation's unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July, well within the range economists consider healthy. Yet that measure, which reflects the percentage of people 16 and older who don't have a job and who are looking for work, is an imprecise metric that fails to offer a full picture of the health of the job sector, according to Gene Ludwig, chairman of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP).
        The economic research firm's "True Rate of Unemployment" (TRU) seeks to capture the share of workers that the group defines as "functionally unemployed." This includes not only people who are unemployed and looking for a job, but also those who are involuntarily working part-time and who are earning poverty-level wages, or less than $26,000 annually before taxes.
        Functional unemployment across the U.S. has climbed four straight months and stood at 24.9% as of July, although that's down from 25.2% in December, according to the Ludwig Institute. ..."

Shadowstats has some similar unemployment numbers:
https://www.shadowstats.com/al...

To me, these sorts of huge (but often ignored) unemployment numbers reflect the continued playing out of larger trends like I outlined in 2010:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."

Like for example Bill Atkinson's famous productive -2000 lines: https://www.folklore.org/Negat...

For decades I've been suggesting on-and-off that a big problem is too many commercial programmers writing too much code and making too much work for each other with an endless proliferation adhoc interfaces, each a new "standard".

As an egregious example, years ago I read somewhere that Microsoft Office embeds like six entirely different virtual machines. Maybe it has improved since with the CLR?

Except for proprietary competitive forces, how many spreadsheets, compilers, VMs, email clients, word processors, and databases do we really need? Even in the realm of games, how many game engines do we need? Granted, game content may be a different story, but even there how many low-to-medium-quality games do we need?

The same is true to an extent with the entire internet. How many low-to-medium-quality comments do we need to wade through on various topics?

Imagine if everyone was using, say, (optionally-typed) Scheme with a great set of libraries to write everything (including with "org mode" in a Scheme-powered emacs-like multi-tool with a calendar etc), and there was just no "JSON" or "JavaScript" or "XML" or "Office-compatible adhoc file formats" or even "C" or "Rust". Not saying that an optionally-typed Scheme is the best choice, but what a different computing world to imagine. Guess my Symbolics 3600 Lisp machine experience in the 1980s spoiled me. :-) And I have to admit that TypeScript on widespread Scheme-inspired JavaScript VMs with WebAssembly has moved the computing world a lot in that direction with pros and cons.

I know an obvious objection (as with Linux's endless front-end and distributions) is about choice, but at some point there is a tyranny of excessive choice, like "twisty little passage ways all alike".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less is a book about overchoice written by American psychologist Barry Schwartz and first published in 2004 by Harper Perennial. In the book, Schwartz argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. The book analyzes the behavior of different types of people (in particular, maximizers and satisficers). This book argues that the dramatic explosion in choice--from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs--has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution and how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse."

I have no problem with people writing personal code for fun or learning or personal growth (which I highly recommend) -- the same way a person may play the piano as a hobby without expecting every time they play a tune the result needs to become a packaged commercial musical product.

The main thing I think about these days is how to have a much simpler tech ecosystem. Including for this reason outlined by Rich Hickey (author of Clojure) in "Simple Made Easy":
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
====
Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity's virtues over easiness', showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.

We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability.

Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable".

"Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy.

What matters in software is: does the software do what is supposed to do? Is it of high quality? Can we rely on it? Can problems be fixed along the way? Can requirements change over time? The answers to these questions is what matters in writing software not the look and feel of the experience writing the code or the cultural implications of it.

The benefits of simplicity are: ease of understanding, ease of change, ease of debugging, flexibility.

Complex constructs: State, Object, Methods, Syntax, Inheritance, Switch/matching, Vars, Imperative loops, Actors, ORM, Conditionals.

Simple constructs: Values, Functions, Namespaces, Data, Polymorphism, Managed refs, Set functions, Queues, Declarative data manipulation, Rules, Consistency.

Build simple systems by:
* Abstracting - design by answering questions related to what, who, when, where, why, and how.
* Choosing constructs that generate simple artifacts.
* Simplify by encapsulation.
====

Or, as a joke:
"Weinberg's Law: If builders built buildings the way (current-AI-enhanced-HR-staffer) programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...

In case he does, I hope Bill Gates is learning to laugh at the irony my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Or in other words, as people were saying even in the 1960s:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/...
      "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer."

How can we mitigate that risk? Like President John F. Kennedy quipped (echoed by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project):
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
        "There are three things which are real:
        God, human folly, and laughter.
        The first two are beyond our comprehension.
        So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)

Or, as I explain in more detail:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and economic] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Here is someone involved in AI who gets that our direction out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction and level of compassion going into it:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it. Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026."

I'm glad to see more AI and technology leaders starting to get that. Another example:
https://www.schmidtsciences.or...
        ""As AI systems advance, we face the risk that they will act in ways that contradict human values and interests--but this risk is not inevitable," said Eric Schmidt. "With efforts like the AI Safety Science program, we can help build a future in which AI benefits us all while maintaining safeguards that protect us from harm."
        The cohort of researchers--including "godfather of AI" Yoshua Bengio at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, OpenAI board member Zico Kolter at Carnegie Mellon University, and "AI Snake Oil" author Arvind Narayanan at Princeton University--will focus their work on research that addresses the critical safety challenges that AI faces."

Ultimately though, guard rails can come off or be jumped -- so we really need AI with a sense of humor -- especially for irony. :-)

--------

And we also need AI developers and funders who root their work more in compassion as a guiding force more than competition.

Something I wrote to Ray Kuzweil on that back in 2000 (put up by someone else I sent a copy to):
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "It will be difficult for you to change your opinion on this because you have been heavily rewarded for riding the digital wave. You were making money building reading machines before I bought my first computer -- a Kim-I. But, I think someday the contradiction may become apparent of thinking the road to spiritual enlightenment can come from material competition (a point in your book which deserves much further elaboration). To the extent material competition drives the development of the digital realm the survival of humanity is in doubt."

And also in 2001:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
          "Beware that people (usually not well versed in E&E [Ecology & Evolution]) cite ecology and evolution all the time to support a belief, but that does not make it a scientifically valid thing to do. For example, it is common to cite competition as a given in nature, but Lewis Thomas in "Lives of a Cell" points out that most successful organisms participate in effectively collaborative efforts -- like the symbiosis between mitochondria and eukaryotic cells. Likewise, the fact that something is true in most species does not mean that humans (given intelligence and culture) should behave that way -- because if E&E teaches anything, it is that there is a lot of diversity out there."

And in 2007:
https://heybryan.org/fernhout/...
        "Technologies designed to amplify and extend the scope of corporate greed likely just will not have the same positive basis as ones built out of joy and humor and love. If you ever watch the British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf, greed seems much more likely to design "Queeg" than "Holly". Langdon Winner writes about related issues at length in his classic _Autonomous Technology_.
      In short, I feel it likely you are clinging to outdated disprove assumptions about motivation and creativity and economics. And I speculate that the reason is in part ironically from your past success. Those assumptions may be holding you back, and holding on to them may indeed help bring about a very negative side of the singularity you want to avoid."

Also on that theme: https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...
        "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.
        Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.
        No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

Jane Jacobs wrote a great book on civilization collapse in 2004 titled "Dark Age Ahead":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "Dark Age Ahead is a 2004 book by Jane Jacobs describing what she sees as the decay of five key "pillars" in "North America": community and family, higher education, science and technology, taxes and government responsiveness to citizen's needs, and self-regulation by the learned professions. She argues that this decay threatens to create a Dark Age unless the trends are reversed. Jacobs characterizes a Dark Age as a "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what was lost is lost."

She makes many good points. That said, like John Gardner wrote in the 1964, "Every generation must learn for themselves what the words on the monuments mean":
"Self-renewal : the individual and the innovative society"
https://archive.org/details/se...
        "The only stability possible is stability in motion."--John William Gardner
        In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that "a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it."
        A society's ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit--not a lack of material might--that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual's role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats.
        Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated."

Also on ideas from that book: https://fluidself.org/books/ps...
        "Every individual, organization or society must mature, but much depends on how this maturing takes place. A society whose maturing consists simply of acquiring more firmly established ways of doing things is headed for the graveyard--even if it learns to do these things with greater and greater skill. In the ever-renewing society what matures is a system or framework within which continuous innovation, renewal and rebirth can occur.
        Our thinking about growth and decay is dominated by the image of a single life-span, animal or vegetable. Seedling, full flower and death. "The flower that once has blown forever dies." But for an ever-renewing society the appropriate image is a total garden, a balanced aquarium or other ecological system. Some things are being born, other things are flourishing, still other things are dying--but the system lives on. ..."

For example, as I wrote elsewhere on July 4th, even as the USA is facing political issues, the internet has become a place where people provide each other support about health issues in a Patch-Adams-style participatory wellness community. That is an amazing revolution in itself. As Patch Adams said: "The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy. (Patch Adams)" Or, I'd add, to help others be happy too.
https://soylentnews.org/commen...

I think a big part of self-renewal in our society may come from both humans and their AIs learning to laugh at the irony in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

You can also often reduce the risk of cancer recurrence significantly via diet (e.g. avoiding most or all animal products and ultraprocessed foods, and eating lots of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries & fruits, and nut & seeds) -- especially along with other lifestyle changes like exercise, avoiding smoking and alcohol, stress reduction, good sleep, community, etc..
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/arti...

Problem is there is not much money in such advice... Especially when there are many vested interest in selling unhealthy food and profiting off of sickness. People who make money off of sickness don't even have to win the scientific argument, they just have to seed enough doubt to confuse people so they keep doing what they were doing. That strategy by industry of intentionally sowing confusion is mentioned here 18 minutes in - and it was based on the success by the cigarette industry (and I'd add the fossil fuel industry) in doing the same thing:
"What The Health - Full Documentary"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"18:24 You know the strategy is not on making their products any safer. The strategy is to just try to confuse the public to introduce doubt. You know.
18:33 there's a famous tobacco industry memo. It's called doubt is our product. That's all they had to do. They didn't have to convince Americans that smoking
18:41 was healthy right. They just had to introduce doubt -- then they would win. If there's just enough controversy people kind of throw up their hands: I
18:49 don't know what to eat. Confusion is their game"

That said, I hope treatments like Moderna's eventually show convincingly that they do a lot more good than harm -- since the process of getting individuals and societies to change their diets can be a very slow one -- as mentioned here about 35 minutes in:
"100 Year-Old Nutrition Professor: 7 Keys to a Long Life | Dr. John Scharffenberg"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"35:26 [Scharffenberg:] They're going by the cholesterol level with the idea that if you lower your cholesterol you will not have heart attacks anymore.
35:32 It's not true. It's not true. And we made a mistake. We should tell them that lifestyle [including a whole-food plant-based vegetarian diet] is important.
35:40 But the problem is we haven't persuaded people to live like they even know they should live.
35:47 Yes. That's our problem. [Interviewer:] And that's why I'm studying to become a therapist, I want to figure out how do we...people know what to do, but... [Scharffenberg:] A lot of them know what to do.
35:55 They don't do it. [Interviewer:] It's hard, yeah. [Scharffenberg:] It's hard."