I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

If every person using an AI assistant becomes a mechanical turk for sending data back upstream to the AI provider as a means to bypass robots.txt that's what isn't cool. Local usage for the benefit of that user should be ok, but not the follow on effects.

Paid "research" by a company that would benefit from the result? Check.

Questionable self selection of data sources ("We focus only on conversations in the United States to align with occupation and work activity information from O*NET.", "Note that Copilot-Thumbs may not be representative of overall task success, as some types of users may be more likely to provide feedback, or some types of tasks may be more likely to elicit feedback from users.")? Check.

Oversimplification? Whoo boy, they are killing it on this one. An economist is described as "Compile, analyze, and report data to explain economic phenomena and forecast market trends, applying mathematical models and statistical techniques.", which is simplified to "Forecast economic, political, or social trends.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions.", which is simplified to "Analyze market or industry conditions." Check.

Using the thing being studied in the study ("we use a GPT-4o-based LLM classification pipeline to identify all intermediate work activities (IWAs)"? Where's Kramer? Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie you would like to see? Check.

Conclusions that defy basic logic. "Passenger Attendants" scores high on can be done by AI. Flight Attendants who bring you drinks and evacuate you in an emergency are going to be replaced by AI? Or maybe redcaps, the AI is going to carry your bag to the plane or train? Or maybe the sleeper car attendant on the train who makes your bed. Check.

Is AI taking some jobs? Probably. Is it taking most of them? No way. The tech economic bubble burst. Too many tech things have reached saturation, there's no more up and to the right for them. Companies predictably have gone into cost cutting mode as a result, and the stock isn't being juiced by 10x growth. So they are selling an AI snow job to cover up that the core businesses have reached saturation and aren't going to generate 10x results anymore. Tech is in for a hard time in the near future, not because of AI, but because people have as much social media, streaming, etc as they want, and everyone now has it. In fact many are fed up and giving up parts of it, because they have learned it's garbage. There's no new people to feed into most of the systems anymore.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

That's right, people need to stick to reliable, high quality sites like /.

It might be a factor. However, the population is growing, and while the demographics are shifting a bit, they are still a lot of kids, reaching drinking age.

However there are milestones that us older folks had while growing up, that no longer seem as important to the younger generation.

Watching a PG13, R Movie, Getting a drivers license, drinking, smoking, Having Sex, Getting Married, Going to College, Getting an Apartment, getting a house... All these are in decline with the younger generation. Some because of increased difficulty with finance, due to increased cost of living rising higher than salaries, and also prevalence of online culture and access to direct media, so people are finding Cliques that are not necessarily tied to doing particular things, and accessing stuff they are more interested in.

They are plusses and minuses to this trend, but I wouldn't spend too much time complaining about it, younger folks will be doing their own thing that is different than the way older people did for generations.

No, but normally as production increases a lot of the carbon offset is mostly better managed at scale.

For example, a Diesel train may burn 4 gallons of fuel per mile. however being that it carrying so much payload that they rate it 500 miles per gallon per ton.
While an Electric Car that says has 100 eMPG will not be as carbon low in energy expenditure if needed to pull so much weight.

That number seems like the cost to make the material, from start, not in sets of hundreds of thousands of drives.

Well Tech companies had been less than strategic around their hiring and firing practices for the past decade or two.

They try to hire as many people as possible, give them some work to keep them busy. Just so these employees will not be working for their competitors who are trying to hire them for the same reason and give them busy work. Then when money gets tight, they dump them, not realizing that that busy work they were one actually became something profitable for the organization.

They leave, some start new businesses or others get hired by a smaller unknown firm with the skills they learned at that company is useful, and allowed to make the next big thing, that undoubtedly hurts the original company.

AI is a useful tool. However it is being over used, often in cases were standard logic based software can do the job just as well, for a fraction of the computing resources.

Not necessarily. As stated in the summary, people on UBI were more willing to change jobs, or continue further education.

While this might lead to higher education prices, but not necessarily additional inflation overall. I expect those who changed jobs, may had chosen careers that may pay less where they have a more fulfilling career without the worry about meeting basic needs. Other options would they may have chosen higher risk and possibly higher reword type of work as well.

Speaking from my own personal experience as an American. There were many opportunities that I have personally rejected, because my family conditions means I need a steady reliable employment, which is often rather dull, and not pay as much as other opportunities. The more exciting jobs available, would often have a smaller salary, as my experience wouldn't transfer over as well. Or work for a company that may have massive layoffs.

What would most likely happen with UBI as a side effect would be lower salaries in general, with perhaps less expectations as a balance. Causing spending demand to mostly stabilize and remain constant.

Lucky for us (at least for this topic) we live in the 21st century. Where Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, are cheap, have good energy density, and are very safe.
 

I think youâ(TM)ve missed how much money AI companies are lighting on fire on both compute and being first. If it cost a billion in compute to solve the captchas but they got the data, they would do it. The fundamental problem is companies are being rewarded with billions of investment and stock growth for this behavior. They will continue until the money dries up.

This has little to do with AI and and everything to do with Section 174(c)(3) in the tax law. https://www.corumgroup.com/ins... First, this caused companies to hire less developers, in particular startups that couldnâ(TM)t take the tax bill. Second it caused women companies to reclassify people as other roles since calling them software developers was no longer a write off. The tax law is 90% of the jobs lost, AI is 10% at best.

The flaw is worse then just trying to evaluate merit.
Every person has strengths and weaknesses that are unique. If you have a worker in the warehouse who may be under performing, he may be under-performing because the worker isn't challenged enough, where promoted to say management he may be much more effective. However, if you do that, the warehouse workers who are busting their balls to get promoted would be pissed, and unmotivated by such an action.