Despite very credible allegations, Biden was never convicted of raping raping Tara Reade. And his daughter's recollections of him inappropriately showering with her outlasted any statute of limitations. But I see where you're going, there. The rest is a good fit, right down to the weaponized government, for sure. The plot twist is that the real kingpins are behind the scenes, using him as a puppet. It's good villain story line material fresh from real life.

HR: "We're doing a RIF, and unfortunately, we're going to have to let you go".

Worker: "What am I going to do?"

HR: "Learn to co... oh, fuck, I'm so sorry".

For the women that DO want to have children it's certainly an increasing problem.

So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.

That doesn't explain everything. Fertility takes two to make babies. It doesn't explain why male fertility is also dropping. Testosterone and sperm counts have been steadily dropping in first world countries for decades now. And everyone notices. Men are getting more boyish-looking and less rugged. There's more guys firing blanks. Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be. That surely has something to do with the lower testosterone. So something else is going on. It's not just economics.

It comes mainly from three reasons:

One, only some kinds of recycling make sense. Aluminum? Of course? Steel? Certainly. Glass? Mostly. But many materials simply don't make sense to recycle. I WISH plastics could be recycled more, but in all practicality, they can't, at least not in a commercially desirable form. And recycling paper is the biggest fucking scam in the whole business. It takes far more energy and water to recycle paper that it does to make it from fast growing virgin softwoods like pine, of which there is no shortage.

Second, there's the utterly arrogant attitude from the evangelists of recycling. You know the type. Infamously holier-than-thou types that want to know what sacrifices you've made today to Save Mother Earth. It really is their religion.

And then, there are affluent types that wave recycling around as a status symbol, signaling that they're the right kind of people, and you aren't. George Carlin infamously pillaged the fuck out of them:

Outside of a handful of Beaux-Arts buildings that are truly lovely (the Library of Congress, for one), DC is mostly a collection of Brutalist monstrosities that regularly make the list of ugliest buildings. When the Great Society programs starting kicking in during the sixties, it set off a wave of ugly, soul-sucking concrete construction that consumed DC.

Who the fuck gave Zod net access?

The river that swept away those girls actually rose by up to 45ft in an hour. And the NWS had extra staff on hand as they knew there was a possibility of flooding. Flash Flood watches went out at least 3 hours prior. It was just one of those situations where a number of things combined quickly to make a tragedy. The storm grew fast. The camp was in a valley that used to have flooding problems but, since there hadn't been one in years, people got complacent. And of course, it happened in the middle of the night, while everyone is asleep. In Summer Camp. It was, pardon the expression, a perfect storm of things.

You can definitely design high end toilets and better pipes. You can buy a "smart toilet" now, but for between $8 and $12k, the vast majority of people are going to stick with good ole' simple shitters that rely on Isaac Newton. But you're still never going to not need someone to work on them physically from time to time. High and Low end.

I wouldn't know. I don't watch Fox News. Or CNN or MSNBC for that matter. But by all means, keep being an arrogant ass and implying that your opponents are mindless rubes that take marching orders from a TV screen. It's worked out so well for you, after all.

This is precisely the wrong approach. No one wants AI on their device. It makes them expensive and slow.

I've been making the argument for years now that the kind of computerized automation that's coming will be an asteroid-kills-the-dinosaurs level of change in the white collar workforce. I was told from many quarters here at Slashdot that I was wrong, and that all I had to do was look at how past increases in technology always ended up with higher employment levels eventually. And my reply to that argument is still the same: all those previous improvements created jobs because they made workers more productive (on paper, at least), and so they were a good investment for employers. The computerized automation coming now (that actually began more than a decade ago but is just now really picking up steam) is different because the profitability for employers comes from the fact that it outright replaces workers rather than making them "better". It replaces that work better and faster, to a price point that it simply makes no sense to employ a human when this fancy script will do it at low cost.

Bottom line, if you work with your hands in a task that takes skill and training, then you're fine. AI is never going to turn a wrench, weld a pipe in the ocean, or unclog your toilet. But if your job is 75% glorified data entry, well, you've got dark days ahead.

I was assured just six months ago by Very Smart People that our economy was never hurting, thank you, and that the previous administration did a gangbusters job, and all the crying about eggs was for "nothing". And now you're telling me that cutting the federal workforce by a small amount was enough tank that robust economy?

I mean, its simply couldn't be that not only the US, but the whole first world's economy is starting to show the cracks from too much debt (both government and personal), high COVID prices that never came down, and a labor participation rate that's been steadily dropping since the Dot Bomb in 2000-2001, especially for men. It simply couldn't be that all of your seemingly prosperous neighbors with new cars and big houses have been living an illusion financed by maxed-out credit card accounts and 84 month car notes at high interest rates, and now that AI automation has arrived, all those middle-level office jobs that paid those credit card bills are about to be replaced by glorified scripts?

Men have been steadily dropping out of the workforce since the 1960's. It's a gradual descent, but still constantly downward. Right now we have a male non-labor participation rate that's extraordinarily high for a non-depression economy. A lot of men have simply decided they're not going to work if someone else... family, government, whoever... can support them. So a male applying for a job that hasn't worked in years throws up all kinds of work-ethic red flags to HR departments. No one wants to be the workplace where that guy struggles to become productive again.