De Immenso et Innumerabilibus On the Infinite and the Countless By Giordano Bruno Of Nola

is essential reading. It sounds like 1950's sci fi.

The fact this was ever a question is a farce.

We all pay for the gas in our cars to get to work. We pay for the electricity that runs our homes and computers.

Somehow, big tech thinks they can just mooch instead of paying for the batteries for their toys.

Crypto and AI should have launched a great leap forward in clean energy.

All the oligarchs care about is profit, not legacy.

I hate that I can't run MS Office on my cluster of headless Linux servers.

The key problem is that AI isn't being used to make the final draft faster to write, it's being used to replace people to maintain a status quo.

They could hire more journalists to go out and do fact finding and come up with key quotes and key statements that AI could then weave into the final article. Journalists could spend a lot more time building the structure of a story than banging out the final article. This would also free them up to cover the local stories that often get ignored because there just isn't time for them.

If you can go to a community meeting with a tape recorder and a notepad and write down the angle and 10 key points, AI would put together a very compelling article so you can go off to the next one.

Most journalism is supposed to be written in a boring, just the facts manner. Exactly the kind of work suitable for a robot. After a human collects the facts.

COBOL isn't a legacy language. It's domain specific language that is designed for exactly what banks need: high precision math without floating point errors.

Any Comp Sci student should be able to take what they learned and apply that to COBOL.

What actually sets COBOL devs apart is their attention to detail and ability to do math.

Even if backend banking code was written in TypeScript, they would still have to hire the best of the best to work on it. You can't have errors at that level.

If the employees are being paid for every hour they work or have stock to make up the difference, sure, maybe long weeks make sense.

But volunteering free labor so someone else can be rich is pretty foolish.

A junior developer earns $10 an hour because it takes them 10 hours to solve a problem.

A senior developer bills $100 an hour because the same 10-hour project takes one hour. The productivity gain is reflected in higher value, not lower pay.

If AI reduces audit time, that is a measurable productivity gain. But time reduction alone does not define value.

If AI also improves detection, reduces risk, and increases reliability, then the value of the audit may increase even as the hours decrease.

Pricing purely on hours assumes the service is nothing more than labor input. That ignores quality improvements, risk reduction, and reputational impact, which are often the real economic drivers of an audit.

There is room to balance time savings with cost savings. But focusing only on reducing fees risks treating AI as a cost cutter rather than a capability enhancer.

Instead of asking how much cheaper an audit can become, firms should be asking whether improved audit quality expands trust, strengthens legitimacy, and ultimately supports market growth.

Cutting costs can increase margins in the short term. Improving quality and legitimacy is what sustains them.

Online, there are interesting shops everywhere with niche products. But they do nothing for local neighborhoods.

If you work from home, you can make a good living paying a single mortgage or rent payment. But if you want to sell something, now you have to pay for a second location.

If small towns want to be interesting and invite investment, then they need to make it possible for people to run small businesses out of their garages or front porches. They could cap annual revenue if they wanted to limit it to upstarts.

But the system is deliberately designed so that you need to have substantial money already if you want to run a business. You're not allowed to start small and grow.

Geocities tried to turn the internet into a city and failed. But with VR, it could be done. People could rent virtual space so that people could actually browse products and talk to shop owners and other people. Roblox is perfectly suited to it with "games" being turned into "shopping districts" and you can go in with just your friends or see everyone. It's just missing the integration with ecommerce and lacks professionalism.

Capitalists don't want to pay educated people. They get in the way of oligarchy.

Humans are not just robots that need to be task trained.

College make people educated as whole humans. The real problem is that women and minorities are more interested in college than white men. So we have to pretend college isn't worth the time.

Only 38% of the US is college educated.

And it shows.

Get college educated and stop putting idiots in positions of authority.

Using AI to write your complaint is a perfectly valid use of AI. It maintains your points, cleans up the language, and makes it impossible to say who the author is just by the writing style.

The question is entirely whether the accusations are true.

And gig companies are absolutely exploiting workers and customers, while the specific details listed may or may not be true.

If you work 40 hours a week and can't afford a house, a car, a family, putting your kids through college, and an annual multiweek vacation, you're being robbed by your boss.

If AI could replace humans, it also replaces corporations.

AI is not taking jobs. It's just the latest excuse to outsource. The myth is that Idiot + AI = competent worker. But that isn't the case.

If corporations were run by smart people, they'd be using AI to speed up their roadmaps and rush ahead of the competition. Or come up with new pet projects for people to work on.

If Zuckerberg can build wealth with AI and not workers, then the workers can build wealth with AI and not Zuckerberg.

If AI replaced corporations, they'd shut it down. And it already is. But not yet to the degree that it upsets them.

The problem is not AI. The problem is not paying people. If you create a product people like and it makes you money, pay people to displace your reliance on AI.

Wanting a "people's car" was inevitable.

That's the business not investing in the people and the resources to move ahead. "Missing deadlines" also often stems from demands exceeding resources.

From the 1990's to the 2020's, Intel was more focused on profit and shareholders than investing in people and R&D.

It’s telling that Gelsinger described a culture where “not a single product was delivered on schedule” — and yet, that might be more of a symptom than the disease. In many industries, the obsession with arbitrary timelines and “on-schedule delivery” metrics becomes corrosive. When deadlines are treated as fixed points rather than guides, quality and innovation become secondary to appearances of progress.

Artificial timelines often create environments where teams are punished for realism and rewarded for overpromising. Engineering — whether of chips, cars, or code — demands time to iterate, test, and refine. When leadership values the schedule more than the product, people cut corners to meet goals that were never grounded in the reality of the work. Over time, that behavior institutionalizes mediocrity.

What Gelsinger called “decay” often begins when organizations forget that timelines are supposed to serve the work, not the other way around. Real engineering discipline means being honest about what’s possible — and having the courage to move a date if that’s what it takes to deliver something that lasts.

Corporations don’t exist to hand out jobs — completely agree. They hire people because human creativity, judgment, and problem-solving generate more value than they cost. That’s the foundational engine of economic growth.

But saying “companies don’t create work to hire people” assumes the amount of work is fixed, like slices of a pie. History tells a different story. Every major leap in technology — electricity, assembly lines, computers, the internet — didn’t eliminate work overall. It created whole new industries, new products, new forms of demand, and millions of jobs that never existed before someone imagined them.

The real question today is: will companies use automation to expand opportunity, or will they let fear and short-term profit pressures shrink their vision to whatever fits after payroll cuts? Treating workers as a cost to minimize is the fastest way to shrink your own future. Redeploying them to innovate, build, support customers, and explore new markets is how productivity becomes prosperity.

Humans haven’t become too expensive. What’s become too expensive — at least in the corporate mindset — is patience. Investment. Shared success. The belief that people are not just an expense line, but the actual source of value creation.

If we want a thriving economy, the answer isn’t fewer workers. It’s smarter, more meaningful roles that turn technological progress into shared wealth rather than shared precarity.