I agree that for those of us who come into the field before Java, C is about as simple as it gets; there's literally not much to know about the language. However, the majority of post-Java programmers have no idea what a pointer is or the first thing about manual memory management. I actually prefer to work in C over Swift, and luckily Swift bridges to C quite nicely. I use C and Zig for much of my server work, and for smartphone and desktop apps under the UI. Why? Because I get fine-grained control over memory and threading, so my apps are smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient than comparable apps, and by a wide margin. That said, I do think that those who know how to program in C WELL are shrinking. It's not that it's hard, it's that newer entrants haven't used it and it does let you blow your leg off if you aren't careful.

There are lots of higher-level technical jobs that pay annual salaries far exceeding $100k. If it takes only three years to recoup the $100k, if the employee works for them for five years, they've still saved a fairly considerable amount of money.

On top of that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to take fees paid to the government as tax-writeoffs. Sufficiently large firms might well simply write off the money spent this way directly against their taxes.

You know what would work better than that?

Subpoenaing the hiring managers and HR staff and their records to see what sorts of applicants they've received domestically and to interview existing staff of the company and any 'heathunter' types they've used to fill jobs before to find out if they're actually having trouble filling jobs or if instead they're simply trying to replace more expensive domestic employees with foreign workers at reduced salaries.

There have been far too many examples where laid-off or soon-to-be-laid-off employees described the active process of training their replacements with great detail. If they wanted to really make a dent they would take those claims seriously and investigate accordingly, and levy heavy, heavy penalties. I'm thinking something like 10x the original employees' salaries kinds of fines.

What loans are they that can be called? I was under the impression that loans are made with specific terms of repayment and that's generally that.

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.

A little bit of aluminum foil and that 'feature' is dead.

If you're really feeling spiffy, the wire mesh from an old screen door from before they switched to plastic would probably work as well.

It's fairly simple. If it's that important as service, use government tax revenue to fund its function. If a hot economy is what they want and this helps the money flow, let the rich who can afford the taxes and benefit the most off of that hot economy pay for the privilege.

Unfortunately debt is wealth for those who can manage to convince those who loan money to make those loans to them, particularly if one can find a way to convert the borrowed money into one's personal money while shedding the debts in specially-tailored bankruptcies.

This is partly why there are whole classes of investors that buy struggling companies, separate them into business-units where one unit gets saddled with basically all the debts, sells-off the good bits for profit, and sends the red-ink business unit into bankruptcy.

This is also why some businessmen will set up company after company and leverage naming rights and other costs to said companies to have those companies pay-out to said businessmen, then let the companies die on the vine and go into bankruptcy after extracting as much wealth out of the other investors and lenders. And they are allowed to do this again and again and again since these aren't personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy process needs significant reform. Those who engage in these practices one time need to be barred from serving in or owning new corporations in a controlling capacity after the second time. Once is a fluke, twice is the beginning of a pattern.

That's frankly bullshit. The system put a red ring around his face on the security monitoring system. The system told the employees to treat him as a shoplifter and as dutiful employees of their company with the system their company told them to use, they complied.

This is almost the exact same excuse made in the movie Brazil by Michael Palin's character Jack Lint, "Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?" after torturing an innocent man to death.

It appears that the United Kingdom is becoming the very dystopia that speculative fiction writers and screenwriters have been warning about for the better part of a century now. And the rest of the world is right along with them to varying degrees.

My wife and I are teaching our child how to do math on paper and in her head (ie, away from the computer altogether) because of this sort of crap.

I'm not actually going to dispute that developments in computing historically have led to reductions in particular types of jobs. It's clear that what used to take roomfuls of clerks to receive, sort, review, transcribe, and file got replaced by computers with minimal oversight by a handful of computer operators. That did lead to a lot of those file-clerks being laid off. Similarly we used to have both public and private telephone operators whose replacement started with the very idea of the dial-phone and the automated neighborhood exchange, central office, and PBX.

Thing is, these were not creative jobs. These were human-cogs in machines, and in many of these cases there were new jobs managing and maintaining the new systems in exchange, in addition to the jobs to create these systems and continue to refine them.

AI seems to be about replacing basically everyone in every job.

The only crisis of trust is all these techbro CEOs expecting us to trust them simply because they've concocted something and have started foisting it upon the public whether we want it or not.

Even if one removes all of the speculative-fiction comparisons to what authors and script writers come up with, we're still left with a bunch of companies trying to vacuum-up all of the stuff that we as human beings have created in order to emulate us, with the specific goal of replacing us for their own profit. why would we be okay with this?

Additionally AI as it was originally popularized when released to the public showed us that they are happy to replace actual human creativity with bad copies of human creativity, and they expect us to accept this. Human creativity is one of the reasons for living, and seeing the utter deluge of bad AI-slop content on various platforms like Youtube continues to prove that these tools are not good for us. Yet they expect us to trust them.

They're destined for West Texas, where gas companies will pay you to take the natural gas they have to burn off otherwise. They are installing private natural gas turbines to power these things. Amazon is building a huge one as we speak. What's halted is connections to the grid, the off-grid ones are marching along unabated, and there are a lot of them.