So you'd be terrified and shocked how much information can be gleamed by taking seemingly unrelated things and putting them all in a giant database and using machine learning to query that database.

The most famous example is the father who found out his teenage daughter was pregnant when Target started sending him coupons for baby stuff.

The girl had done some shopping and bought several things that weren't directly related to pregnancy. But if you are buying all those things together Target had figured out it meant that you were pregnant and they sent out coupons for more baby stuff because of it.

None of the things were actually related to pregnancy and if you bought them weeks apart that wouldn't have triggered the system. It was buying them together that glued off Target and their Big Data systems.

I don't think folks have really grasped the change big data has made in our civilization.

Remember video game magazines? The physical ones in print. They didn't go away because of the internet. They actually held on for a very long time. What killed them was Big Data.

The big companies had big data and they were able to run the numbers and show that the money made by advertising in the magazines was less than the cost of the ads. So they killed the advertising and the magazines went under. A whole bunch of jobs gone and video game journalism basically toast (not that it was great to begin with but still)

I could probably come up with scenarios where data about your air fryer usage could be connected to other databases. For example they might be able to connect that with your purchases to figure out your putting on weight so your insurance company can raise your premiums.

For years that the air fryer was spying on me and I was assured that I just needed to take more pills. /s

Yep. In the 1998-2005 era I'll admit I was an idealist who thought Information Wants To Be Free and the automated future would be like Star Trek where molecular resources can be manufactured into anything on demand, leaving humans free to be poets and philosophers or whatever. By the end of that decade - 2010 - the trend extrapolations were unmistakable to anyone paying attention. If old industries can be "disrupted" and automated/distributed with appy apps that love apps, then after a short expansion period the making of appier apps will become the largest remaining labor-market of the economy, and thus automation itself will become so valuable that it is the must lucrative next target for the Disruption gold-rushers.

That "knowledge economy" we were promised in the 1990s simply cannot be sustained for more than a bubble interval. A knowledge economy in actual practice is just another MLM. Which is also how college costs exploded even as college benefits imploded. We subsidized/incentivized a system where people are employed to sell wholesale supplies of information to other people who, after leaving college, find there's not much they can DO with that information other than become a professor and resell their wholesale supplies to the next Knowledge Distributor. The non-college version of this is the thousands of YouTubers generating YT revenue from telling you how to make $60,000/month setting up an Etsy shop, which was swiftly followed by YTers telling you how to make $60,000/month generating YT content about setting up a YT account to tell people who to set up an Etsy shop.

The entire "gig economy" of the past 10 years - which so often was presented as an answer to my predictions of permanent structural unemployment because it supposedly showed how appy apps were generating new employment - was in fact to me the clearest evidence that I was right. The gig economy is also ultimately an MLM. We can't all get paid to Uber each other to the grocery store on our day off from driving for Uber. We can't all use our OnlyFans income to subscribe to everyone else's OnlyFans. Markets consume resources as fuel, and conservation of matter/energy applies. At some point someone has to import new resources to the economy, whether that's materials, or knowledge, or people, or technology, or, usually, conquering another territory and thereby acquiring its resources for "free".

Thus, a "knowledge economy" isn't strengthened by recursively self-accelerating technology automation. Automation is actually the Achilles Heel of a knowledge economy. It is the runaway nanites that consume nearly all possible labor-value and turn every potential worker - the white collar lady with the Ph.D. and the blue collar dude driving a cab into indistinguishable grey goo, incapable of generating/injecting any more fuel into the economy and therefore summarily discarded.

A handful of Taliban willing to use absolute violence are able to control Afghanistan. You really do not need a huge population to control people if you're willing to use absolute violence and engage in borderline or not so borderline genocide.

Before this week I would have said you right it's impossible but Israel has complete air superiority even during the day. It's insane. What it looks like is Iran did the same thing Russia did where the entire government is hopelessly corrupt and money that should have gone to missile defense and air defense went into people's pockets.

Result is Iran is incapable of defending itself against a opponent willing to just drop bombs until there isn't anyone left.

The real problem here is you're not a country if you don't have nuclear weapons.

On the other hand I doubt Israel will try to take Iran. They have plenty of land to take from Palestine for years to come. But I do think we are going to see a return to large scale wars where people steal land from each other.

Are forced to exist in the real world while everywhere else just pretends climate change isn't happening. Like there is two parallel Earths.

In completely unrelated news Ford has released the largest SUV they have ever built and are marketing it as such.

I agree the powell is a terrible person but he's a terrible person in the context of the economic system we find ourselves in. Biden reappointed him because there wasn't anybody better that could be pushed through the Senate confirmation process.

And we could have gotten a lot worse than Powell.

That stuff is going to be horrific but Trump has mostly backed down on the tariffs so although there's a ton of damage it's limited. He's also trying to back down on deporting Farm labor, which I'm surprised didn't get more news coverage that's our corporate media for you.

Still I suspect we will just use prison labor. That's what Alabama did and it'll spread.

The real problem is going to be those tax cuts. It's going to freak the bond markets out and when that happens that's going to be a crash that'll make 2008 look like a fun time.

Stuff that the regular viewer is not going to even begin to understand. You will never find anyone in news media who will bluntly stay the purpose of high interest rates is the cause layoffs so that you earn less money and spend less thereby reducing demand. Basically forcing Americans to tighten their belts in order to reduce demand and therefore prices.

It's balancing the books on the backs of the middle class and the working class and I follow news media to an unhealthy degree and I have never once seen it discussed without a fuck ton of jargon to make it incomprehensible to the average American

Remember it doesn't take much to lose the average american. One of the reasons Trump is so popular is that he speaks with words about a fourth or fifth grade level. He says gibberish but it's gibberish that doesn't include words people do not understand or know.

I don't say this to insult people I say this is a matter of fact and so that you can understand why Trump is so popular.

People can understand the words he's saying and although those words often mean basically nothing (seriously don't listen to what he says read a transcript it's crazy) even though those words mean nothing taken together people can ascribe whatever meaning they want because they know all the words.

It's like reading a religious text as a believer and not a scholar. It means whatever you want it to mean in the context of the time.

I don't see how you could possibly use College to reskill. Ignoring the incredibly high cost I can tell you right now that if you go to college to learn a viable skill, which is really just anything in healthcare these days, then they aren't going to let you into your 300 level courses if they find out you are even working part-time.

The same pretty much goes for every degree because if you are working then the odds of you graduating are basically slim and none. And there are not enough slots in the 300 and 400 level courses for all the kids that have a 3.9 or above GPA.

My kid literally had an in person interview to be allowed into their 300 level courses. I remember having to spend money on nice clothes. The kind of interview clothes you buy your kid for their first major job interview. Only this wasn't for a job this was just for them and their 3.8 GPA to be allowed to take the next set of courses to graduate.

Her GPA was slightly below some of the other kids but they owned a car that I bought them and they weren't working because I was paying for their living expenses with the help of some family and by living like a pauper. It paid off they have graduated and they are after 5 years of work just at the point where I think they might be able to support themselves with only occasional help if something goes wrong like a major medical bill.

High interest rates are designed to cause layoffs. That's how they fight inflation. They don't tell you that in grade school. I think the reason should be obvious. If you get up to college level they will finally let it slip in the most bizarre jargon infused way so that they aren't talking about what they're actually doing directly.

It works like this. Borrowing money gets expensive, companies run their businesses extremely close to collapse so the owners can pull out as much cash as they can. A few major corporations who don't sit on the cash for stock BuyBacks.

This means companies rely on cheap loans in order to make it through minor downturns in business. If Borrowing isn't cheap they immediately turn to layoffs which cycles through the economy.

Jerome Powell has a video with senator Warren where he admits that he planned on 15 million layoffs with no plan to stop them. Biden didn't let him do it

Before Trump the interest rates were scheduled to go down. After the chaos of trump and the tariffs and taxes and everything else interest rates remain high.

So the minor layoffs from last year that were being held back by policy decisions from Joe Biden are now rapidly accelerating..

None of this is anything you will get from corporate media for obvious reasons. Honestly it was something I figured out slightly on my own and slightly from a combination of the associate press and the BBC with a little bit of commentary from left-wing pundits on the side. Very little because those left-wing pundits mostly suck and were busy screaming about Joe Biden causing genocide in the Middle East because he didn't bring peace immediately...

Electing Trump was a monumental mistake and bad things are going to happen now. We go through a cycle where we elect a Republican and they destroy everything and then we put a democrat in charge to fix things but we never keep them there long enough or give them enough votes in the senate. We usually flip the Congress to Republican in the midterms basically making the last 2 years of any Democratic president term useless.

I have watched the Republican party repeatedly try to crash the economy using the budget reconciliation process. Essentially economic terrorism. And the Democrats have to back down because those terrorists will happily shoot the hostage. If you haven't figured it out in this analogy you are the hostage.

So every year we lose a little more ground and every year of the propaganda coming from corporate media is a Little bit stronger and every year Americans are unable to grasp basic aspects of our economy like how high interest rates caused Mass layoffs which is how we regulate inflation...

And the end result is Trump and at best we are going to get a recession and at worst a depression. Only this time I don't think there will be an FDR to save us.

You're correct on proximity but you're ignoring the stakes.

The FDA chief can issue directives that make your blood pressure meds harder to get.
The Commander In Chief can unilaterally make decisions that result in tens of millions of human deaths within the next 10 days.

If the CIC needs zero training/experience to hold tens of millions of lives in his hand, why would the FDA chief - with smaller scope and lower stakes - need more than the CIC in their respective theater of action?

I started predicting a near future of software-induced permanent structural unemployment ~15 years ago on this and other discussion platforms, only to be deluged with "but, but... buggy whip manufacturers!!!!!!"

It's inevitable. It's not that there won't be any work. It's that there won't be enough work 8 billion humans are capable of doing or reskilling to within their lifespan, and the wages for the remaining unskilled labor will collapse below survivability. Especially because, even already in 2025, the jobs of the upper labor market become primarily centered around creating/licensing technology to eliminate all the jobs of the lower market.

Next prediction -- after some global wars (assuming there is any meaningful survival) in 50-100 years this will be what leads to the removal of taboos on Eugenics (and after that, human cloning). Just like you can't afford to spawn processes that eat up RAM/CPU without an intended, valuable outcome, we will come to view human conception as something that needs a plan/purpose, which must be built into the architecture of the embryo.

I'm a Democrat and a lot of those Democrats didn't vote for this because of corruption. They voted for it because they want to see some regulation and they think they can get enough into the bill to stop some of the worst abuses.

It's because they believe way way too much in the system. They think they can work with the Republicans on stuff like this. And they think they can get regulators out there to protect people if they have a law in place. Never mind Donald Trump basically firing anyone who could do anything about the abuse that's going on here.

Their conservative in the literal sense, refusing to acknowledge change. The other side doesn't play by the rules anymore but they still do. So they passed laws to regulate and they get rings run around them so the laws are worse than ineffective. Basically well meaning fools.

AI is a problem but not quite yet not to this extent.

Trump is going to cause a recession. The massive amounts of uncertainty around his trade war coupled with the massive amounts of tax increases that trade war represents and inflation guaranteed a recession. But the on again off again is somehow worse. Remember folks markets hate uncertainty.

Now to add to all that he is getting us into a war with Iran with no clear objective and no exit strategy. And he's going to yank $800 billion out of the economy through Medicaid cuts, basically shut down every rural hospital in America and slash taxes on the 1% by somewhere between 5and 7 trillion

When those tax cuts hit they're going to spook the bond markets which is going to trigger sell-offs across the economy and tank the dollar. That may not even be a recession that might be a depression. It is of course scheduled to hit 2 weeks after the midterm election because of course it is. He knows what he's doing. Or rather his handlers do he's senile.

So companies are going to do layoffs so they can force us to work longer hours for less pay (or not pay us if you're one of the ones that gets fired).

That lets them stockpile cash so they can do massive stock BuyBacks when the economy tanks and manipulate their stock price.

We do have structural problems in our economy and civilization due to automation but we can work on those. The short-term immediate crisis is one entirely created by ourselves by letting Donald Trump win the presidency. It's a political problem not an economic one

We don't enforce laws properly. Trump fired all the bureaucrats who do law enforcement and there is no sign of him hiring them back. Lots of people were violating the law in 2008 and we didn't hold much of any of them accountable. We bailed them out because they had set themselves up to take down the entire economy if we didn't.