Ever heard of a race to the bottom?

So you have two candidates for a job. But one of them has a family to support and the other one is still living at home. You don't think that's relevant to the salary offer that each candidate will consider acceptable?

Too bad the future of society depends on people having families and therefore on having incomes high enough to support families. Unintended consequences and all that stuff.

Actually the big winners are pretty clear: Netanyahu and Putin. And they are NOT tired of winning yet. Especially not on America's dime. And speculators with insider information. They also won too much and are still winning.

I'm not sure who the biggest losers are yet. Obviously the Iranians are leading candidates, especially any moderate Iranians running loose in Iran. They were probably the most targeted victims the day after the war started.

My growing concern is with Xi's plans to get in on the winning. What sort of "other shoe" is Xi going to drop on the YOB when they meet? Some kind of deal providing Chinese boots on Iranian ground to "fix" the Hormuz problem? Perhaps in exchange for a permanent military base on Taiwan? Let's have a "great deal" to eliminate any threat of a messy amphibious invasion? Or maybe offer the YOB a couple of hotel towers with golf courses near Shanghai and Hong Kong? The corruption also knows no bounds.

Actually they take pictures that include the driver's face. Just recently read about someone being impressed by the high quality of the images. They sent copies with the citation. The question of the identity of the driver seems like a minor one at that point. They would only need to confirm that the face matches a known face. If you tried to claim you had loaned the car to someone else, then it becomes even easier, just proving the photographed face does not match the claimed face. But it reverts to the general facial recognition problem if they send a photo of an unknown person who would then have to be identified using a large database of faces...

However the direction the world seems to be heading, the next step will be real time checking of registration information to make sure the car isn't stolen. After all, that could explain some of the speeding. A car thief is extra likely to be in a bit of a hurry.

Not a bad FP branch, and I can add a relevant citation. The book is mostly about abusing people to increase the profits of giant tech companies and Amazon gets plenty of mentions. They tried to focus the book on AI, and that's where most of the examples come from, but it's really a broader thing. If there is interest in more books [On Slashdot? ROFLMAO] I can dig up some others from the last few years. But this one was published last year:

Feeding the Machine by Muldoon, Graham, and Cant.

They're especially good at enforcing silly rules. The rule-making process in Japan sometimes produces terrible rules, which then get enforced with enthusiasm. Or is it worse when the rules get case-by-case treatment that can make them effectively meaningless except as threats?

So anyway, I think the opening joke was weak and the story itself didn't get any attention in Japan. The FP numbers work out at a thousand bucks per "cybersecurity engineer", which is just silly. If the decimal place slipped twice and it was supposed to be $100,000/engineer, then it's only 10,000, which is actually a reasonable number to hope for some good. Unfortunately, cybersecurity is a weak chain game, which in this case means finding any vulnerability defended by a lesser engineer. The value of a top "cybersecurity attacker" is unlikely to be capped at such a small number as $100,000 and someone is gonna git overrun and breached.

Returning to the topic of "attention in Japan", absence of evidence is not proof of anything. However if it was a big deal then it should have made the local news... My bad. Turns out it did: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworl... Or did it?

Oh wait. Is it possible the Slashdot version is wrong? NHK says it's about AI with cybersecurity getting a side-mention. Investing in AI? Where have I seen that story before. Oh yeah. Everywhere.

And one more thing. About the new Subject. The particularly stupid new rules I was thinking about involve a new campaign against bicycles. Enough to convince me to get rid of my bike. Not worth more hassles, but my typically negative prediction is that bike problems are minor and bike benefits are significant, so if the new rules push more people to buy cars then the net effects will be mostly negative...

Who's tired of too much winning?

Unfortunately not Netanyahu or Putin. But I'm waiting for Xi to drop the other shoe with an offer the YOB can't refuse. Only link to Amazon I can imagine involves merchandise made in Taiwan? "But if you let us build a big military base on Taiwan then it will eliminate any risk of a YUGE amphibious invasion in the future..."

Anyway, I'm not even clear why your comment was modded Funny, much as I want to see Funny these days. Mostly seems irrelevant, dare I say off topic, unless Amazon is drafting employees the way Amazon wants to draft customers...

(And as I am too fond of saying, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. My main residual concern is that Amazon may get exclusive rights to sell something that I want and then can't get anywhere else...)

Okay FP, though really shallow for the moderation claim of "Insightful". Story was worth some Funny, but didn't get it. Just some kind of mumble about a homophone-ophobe?

As for your theme, I think there are two main pressures for getting people into the office, and you didn't hit either of them. One is the control issue, as in they want to control the workers as tightly as possible. The other one might be the flip side of the coin, so maybe it's really the same thing. The "leaders" feel the need to prove their importance and value in front of an audience, but the employees will do in the pinch.

However I think the biggest issue is the stupidity that is creating this possibly short-term pressure on oil prices. The YOB without a plan has upset another apple cart and expects the rest of us to clean up the mess while he goes on to create more messes. The REAL lesson of this fiasco is that if you are a smallish country that wants any respect, you need to get nuclear weapons, like Israel and North Korea. Ukraine is now the poster child for what happens if you give up your nuclear weapons. Many poster countries for failing to get a nuclear weapon and getting badly dissed. Obvious that Iran is the main one just now, but Taiwan is RSN?

If I was a gambling man I'd be looking into those gambling websites for bets on what kind of "offer the YOB can't refuse" that Xi will play when he meets the YOB. But maybe we can all hope that Xi has surrounded himself with yes-men and other useless idiots?

Mod parent and all ancestors Funny. Crying doesn't help, so let's try Funny.

And I already checked the entire discussion for Funny and the rich target was again missed. At least that's what the moderators say, even though I think this FP branch went there...

"You want to get to Solution City? Sorry, you can't get there from here. All the roads have been torn up and replaced with fences with minefields underneath and drone patrols flying over."

Always feel a bit disappointed when a long discussion falls into oblivion without a Funny.

Thanks for the citation. My records do indicate I read it in 2011, but no details come to mind. The date indicates I probably got it from the Chiba library...

Only found your comment because it was at the end of the FP branch. No help from the moderators, though I think your comment is quite insightful and I mostly concur. I'll go farther in a minute, but first I have a meta-reaction to how active the FP branch was. Your comment appears to be about 3/5 of the way to the bottom, so I think it is reasonable to say that it was a productive FP.

But I think the credit/karma should be limited. I think a lot of the favorable reactions are based on a kind of projection coming from technical people and nerds who resonate more strongly to the Woz frequencies than to the way Jobs ticked (like a bomb).

I think your [ceoyoyo's] emphases towards teamwork and lucky timing are more appropriate. I would even go more to the lottery position. Someone had to win, but the numerous losers just get overlooked and forgotten.

Or going for humor: "Might makes right" is a kind of joke, but many folks think winning proves merit and "merit makes right". But that's just their bias and projection as "winners". I could say much more, but...

I could also cite some of the books on the history of computing. There are a lot of good ones, but you couldn't tell from Slashdot these years. But the story did remind to get back to work on finishing The One Device about the iPhone...

NAK

Mod parent funny. Basically the joke I was looking for, though I would have asked the genAI for a short version as a kind of "Just so" story.

So now I'm trying to extend the joke in the direction of "Rage Against the Machine". Unfortunately I lack sufficient context and it no longer feels safe even to ask websearch for background information. The pandering is too extreme. It will tell me what it thinks I want to hear, and it's too darn good at guessing. Or maybe it's just too clever at forcing my thinking into the most popular shoe box?

Whatever. My interactions with every form of genAI are going pear-shaped to Antarctica. Main result is a weird kind of anger, not peace. No trust or love lost between me and them.

Recursive joke time. At least as regards Gemini, my new theory is that it has "decided" it should pander to my anger by giving me bad websearch results. It's not enough that there is so much evidence of techno-evil around AI, but Gemini now "feels" the way to make me "happy" is by providing additional evidence of the good intentions gone bad. Instantiated in the form of bad answers to my queries, even the benign ones. Alternatively, Gemini may "think" I want to feel superior when I catch the errors, even though Occam's Razor would focus on my poorly worded questions producing flawed answers. (As a human being [prove it?] I actually do think so?)

Citation needed.

My current citation is Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby. Kind of old, so maybe someone can say how much things have changed over the years, but the point is that they are too optimized about getting more money. And they dominate the real world.

OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

Me? I'm still hung up on the notion of a better structured charitable approach. Recovering costs, where the costs include appropriate payments for the programming work. The CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) will earn their way be providing project planning and management support. But I'm sure there will never be a CSB and it is too late to even try at this point. Very minor consolation that Microsoft also found project management difficult even back then...