Long time PayPal user here, for both buying and selling. And yeah, they planted a level of distrust LONG ago with me. I won't refrain from using them when it makes the most sense .... but I won't leave any funds in my account with them or give them any more of my other financial info than absolutely necessary.

Consider:

1. They partnered up with eBay, many years ago, causing the auction site to remove a number of supported payment methods and forcing PayPal as the required way to buy items instead.
2. PayPal is known to suspend perfectly legitimate business accounts if/when there's any political heat coming down on them over it. EG. Small business does gun repair or sells guns and ammo while conforming to all the legal regulations, but there's an uproar at the time because of too many recent school shootings or what-not.
3. I had my own personal account suspended for months, only because I bought an item on eBay from someone who apparently scammed somebody else shortly after that, or did business with another user who was scamming. (Never figured out for certain.)
4. PayPal convolutes what should be more clear cut buyer protection. For example? I had a scammer charging fake monthly subscriptions for some kind of web site or magazine to my checking account one time. Because the charges were displaying as charged through PayPal, it was a big struggle to get my bank to handle it. They mistakenly believed I used PayPal to pay and PayPal was, in turn, pulling money from my checking account to cover the charges. So they insisted I work with PayPal to fix the issue. In reality, my PayPal account was never getting touched at all by any of this. The scammer just made it appear that way on the billing line items/details.

This comes from the company who JUST suggested AI is ready to take away pretty much ALL white collar jobs within the next 18 months.

I don't even follow baseball real closely, but I feel like I'm in agreement. I know I injured my right shoulder a few years ago. It was one of those dumb things; stretched as far behind my back as I could with that arm to scratch an itch on my back while in the shower, and next thing I knew? I had really bad shoulder pain just trying to lift my arm anywhere near my neck or head.

I figured it was going to go away on its own but for months, it didn't. I was just about to resign myself to going to a doctor and probably winding up with surgery when I happened to mention it to a co-worker who said she had the exact same problem before. She advised me that it'd go away on its own but would take a LONG time (roughly a year). Being as stubborn and cheap about paying medical bills as I was, I decided to just wait it out and see.

Sure enough, it was close to the 1 year mark when I woke up one morning and realized my shoulder was no longer giving me problems! It was really strange, since I didn't sense any gradual healing up to that point. It was exactly how she described her own injury.

That incident made me think a lot of people probably opt for surgery for these injuries before giving the human body enough time to repair them on its own.

The thing I don't hear a lot of talk about is the reality I've seen with all the different flavors of ChatGPT and other AI tools out there. The system performance just doesn't seem to be there in a way that's as reliable as human labor on given tasks?

I admit I never worked with one of the commercial packages -- so maybe I'm just a victim of the kind of throttling they're doing on free tiers? But for example, just last night? I played with Microsoft co-pilot, instructing it to create a Windows background/wallpaper for me that had a 3D printer in it, on a desk, with a bookshelf behind it full of various colored 3D printed objects. It did a commendable job of a first attempt. But I asked it to make the desk surface brown wood instead of the black it chose, and that resulted in a total freeze/hang after only redrawing about 1/3rd. of the picture. Had to quit out and restart from scratch.

If we imagine a world in a couple years or so where all the white collar work is getting done this way? I *really* can't conceive how there's enough processor power to do all the things needed in a typical day without even more of this lag or outright freezes in the middle of tasks?

We're talking about two different situations, apparently.

We have several local grocery stores in town. 3 are big name chain grocers, and then one is a local mom and pop that's been in town for over 60 years. I won't lie... we have some issues with meth and other drug addictions, here and there. But that's not exclusive to a Southern IL city or town by any means.

I'm talking about housing stock like good "starter homes" with 2 or 3 bedrooms and maybe 1,200 sq. feet or so of space going for as little as $28,000 - $50,000 and possible to bring back to good condition for roughly the same amount invested as you paid for one of them. Also some larger, older properties that would be out of the price range for many local residents ... yet still a cheap/good buy for someone who already has the money and is considering moving to the area.

I'm a Gen Xer who still really values the concept of holding onto my own music. I don't like paying for subscriptions to music streaming services that can get rid of a given album or even artist at any time, or who is likely to only offer their greatest hits, vs deeper tracks.

But I resorted to ripping my entire CD collection and hosting everything on a file server at home, with a second copy of my music on my Apple Mac.

The physical media takes up a lot of space and is subject to scuffs/scratches -- not to mention a dying popularity of CD players themselves.

I have very little interest in buying music on vinyl at this point in my life. I've been there, done that -- and the whole format is just inferior. Records wear out with each play and needles on turntables get dull over time. The format doesn't lend itself to listening in a moving vehicle either. Just a technological step backwards that's only popular to be retro and trendy.

But yeah, at this point? I'd buy digital tracks or albums and put them on my server/computer ... copying to thumb-drives for in-car use as needed. I don't think physical music CD purchases are necessary anymore, really.

Whenever I hear the moaning about housing shortages causing rent prices to shoot up, I have to temper that with the big "depends" ... location.
I live in the Midwest and I can tell you that right in my own city in southern Illinois, for example? We have literally hundreds of homes that are either vacant or up for sale by people who used to own them as part of portfolios of dozens of properties they rented out in the past.

There's no shortage to be found anyplace around here. The main issue is that much of our housing is 50-100+ years old and the homes need repair/renovation. The occasional flipper discovers the area and makes good money fixing up a selected few properties and reselling them. But we need a LOT more of that. Anyone restoring one of these homes properly is going to spend a considerable amount of time on it, and a decent up-front financial investment. But they get a great price on the initial property, and wind up with a home people would be proud to own.

The only reason I think we have the glut of available housing is because we don't really have the commercial or industrial business here to give residents a lot of good paying career type jobs. We've got the local hospital and medical centers and the usual suspects for high income earning like attorneys ... but most of our local economy are the people working retail or restaurants, or self-employed in construction or pest control or painting, or maybe working as a roofer or electrician. We gave a good chunk of people in low income housing too. Ability to do remote work makes some of that irrelevant, though, as does the fact there are some commuting work options within an hour's drive or less.

It's easy to look at this situation though the lens of doom; corporations are going to control and own it ALL. The average American worker won't be able to make ends meet anymore.

But there's at least one other angle here. If you want to make money, you need to market to/sell to the people who HAVE the most money.

Working for these corporations just means you get pennies for the dollars you help them generate for themselves. But selling products or services to them means you can charge a lot more than you'd get from your peers who are also struggling to stay gainfully employed.

I've spent much of my life working for small or mid-sized companies. I left one such company (on good terms) shortly before the owner/CEO passed away. He had always had a plan to keep the business going by making it a partnership in thirds. His vice president had a chunk of the company and their bookkeeper held the last third. He held out from selling out to a larger business that expressed interest in merging, when he figured out they really only wanted our customer list. Most of our employees would be on the chopping block. Sadly, his VP developed Alzheimer's right around the time the owner died, and the bookkeeper didn't really have the interest in owning/running the whole company on her own. So they're no longer around.

I'm also working, now, for one where the owner decided he wanted to retire. In his case, he sold to Private Equity, but only after being "sold" on the idea it was a good match for our business. (Supposedly, this was a firm who was very selective who they bought out, and had similar goals to expand the business, etc. etc.)
So far, it's shaping up to be every bit as bad as people always warn. I'm looking for an exit. Yes, they're trying to merge with several other companies and "grow", but it's all being done with zero interest in spending on more labor for people doing the computer support required to keep it all going. They're also floating some ideas to convert one company they're buying to operate exactly like ours does, and I can already see reasons that's a bad idea.
 

I think there's reality in what you're saying - but do we know who all these people are who they're laying off from "big tech"? At least from the buzz I see on sites like LinkedIn, it's pretty often their rank and file software developers!

The problem with "middle management" is they tend to be extremely difficult to get rid of. They're the ones usually tasked with reporting to leadership how well various groups are performing, and conversely, tasked with handling job cuts in a sane/sensible manner. So THEY get to pick who gets eliminated ... from the workers they have sway over. They can selectively cut a few high paid engineers or product testers or whoever makes the balance sheets look good to get off the payroll, and placate leadership. No middle managers affected directly....

Sometimes, they cull themselves out due to bad behavior that goes public and creates a PR issue. But that's relatively rare vs how many are employed.

The other nasty thing about management people is that employment has a lot to do with "who you know". These people make connections and friends with others in their same circle. So as soon as company A terminates one of them for poor performance? They get hired elsewhere in a similar position, to act as a parasite on productive in company B.

Obviously, the software giants out there like Adobe and Microsoft aren't going away. They provide so many entrenched software apps/tools that do tasks people need in the business world, and that employees are actually trained in/familiar with using.

But increasingly, the code they're cranking out is underwhelming and not exciting NEW users to adopt any of it.

I don't see how any of them can achieve much growth without developing compelling, brand new applications first? This is like Pepsi or Coca Cola at this point. Everyone who wants to resell or buy it is already a customer.

My experience w/Adobe, especially, is that the subscription model is horribly frustrating. EG. Our office has an annual small business subscription for several Adobe products. Each year, when they're about to expire, we do the renewal but it's over the Xmas holidays so Adobe doesn't really get everything complete with the renewal until early January. All of a sudden, our users get disruptive emails about their licenses being removed and the helpdesk is flooded with panic tickets. Then, things get ironed back out and it's all working again 1-2 days later. But worse yet, if we own say 50 licenses for Acrobat Pro and then a 51st. user needs it? We have to add one license to the subscription, mid-year, for them. If they use it for X number of months but then leave the company, Adobe won't let us remove the license again until the next renewal period. So we're paying for an unused "slot".

All of this hassle plus the fact the software updates are usually minor or nothing we use/need means we're not exactly going around raving about what great apps they are and encouraging others to subscribe.

One problem I've encountered now in a couple different places I lived is old/failing infrastructure. In one small city (population 6,000-ish), they had a fancy, costly reverse-osmosis water filtration plant that met all the latest government regulations, but most homes still had water that ran a gross yellow/brown at random times of the year, or problems with low water pressure.

The water lines to homes were often around 100 years old, as well as the sewer system. Nobody had ever really budgeted for upgrading or replacing the sewers because residents *always* complained (even ousting one mayor who campaigned on modernizing it). They simply didn't want to be the ones stuck footing the bill for the whole thing, by way of higher monthly sewer or water bills. After all, water was still flowing and toilets were still flushing -- and there HAD to be some other way it would get done, right? And after the new treatment plant was mandated, bills went way up already.

Where I live now, the water bill is at least $150 a month or so for 2 adults and no kids (and we don't even water our lawns). We have a newer clothes washer that's supposed to use minimal water, too. They keep telling us a lot of funds are going to modernizing the sewer system, and I do see them tearing up roads all over town to replace pipes. So I feel like it's a bill that's unpleasant, but probably necessary to pay. The part that really kills us though is the hit we take on the electric bills. The house is all electric and built back in the 1940's -- so no insulation to speak of. Just brick behind plaster walls. In cold winter months, bills easily exceed $550-600. Already replaced every bulb in the place with low power LED bulbs, but I've been warned not to blow insulation in the walls or else risk mold/mildew problems, long-term. These old homes were designed assuming they could breathe more.

Unfortunately, your comment that "as always, depends on the work" is the catch with all of what you described. It's awesome that a properly applied DEI hiring policy for orchestras resulted in a near 50/50 mix of male and female musicians performing symphonies. But that's also a situation where realistically, none of the "customers" (the people buying the tickets to hear performances) care about anything but the music that's being performed. Gender has nothing to do with that outcome.

Hiring the "most skilled" person for a given job is often more of a "mushy" dance around finding the best possible combination of hard skills and at least some of the things you're not allowed to say you're *really* looking for. For example, I've worked at marketing companies before and their top performing salespeople creating new leads and/or closing deals are universally physically attractive and mostly younger. It would be a lie to pretend that's just coincidence.

I'm not sure this analogy is completely accurate (but generally not bad). I think a better representation of reality in America would be, "I buy a lot from the pizza places that sell this great, imported pizza. They don't really buy anything from me. I'll let government throw an extra 10% tax on imported pizza because they're trying to get people like me to buy more locally made pizza instead."

Of course, as we all know -- the "locally made pizza" in this analogy is sometimes impossible to find, or requires a lot of extra effort to obtain. And traditionally, the people making it have been charging a premium price for it already.

I think the bottom line is, it's complicated and there's typically nothing good that comes of letting one's government hike taxes or fees on a product or service that the free market had already priced based on what the market would bear. Long-term? Even if tariffs don't directly get applied towards helping encourage growth of business in the country? They *could* encourage more people to start businesses making the products or providing the services people kept buying from other countries. (If everyone's paying more anyway? It means it's a little easier to compete and remain profitable.) But it's all just attempted manipulation of human behavior without a certain outcome.

You're essentially claiming credit card issuers would go under if interest rates were "only" 10%? Laughable! Look at how much they earn on card processing fees alone before stating that with a straight face.