According to Wikipedia, the US has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 549 per 100,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Canada - the country next door which is very similar in broad cultural terms - comes in at almost exactly one sixth of that number. So maybe the States might get serious about addressing the huge social and institutional forces which are largely responsible for that discrepancy?

A good start might be to make prisons NOT part of the for-profit private sector. This incentive to 'create' prisoners seems to be a contagion which has spread into policing and the whole justice system. Then you could maybe fix the public education system and introduce universal healthcare. Again, a major culprit here is having ceded care of public-good institutions to for-profit interests. These jobs are neither simple nor easy - but they need to be done.

Huge corporations whose number one mandate is to maximize profit and shareholder return at the expense of all else - are a worldwide problem. We all need to be fighting that fight. And it seems that the US needs to be fighting it more than most other countries.

I've never experienced TikTok; but everything I've heard leads me to believe that even before AI became so pervasive,` the platform had way, way more slop than YouTube. Presumably, a greater affinity for slop in general implies a greater incidence of AI slop.

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK

Valid points, perhaps well made, but undercut by the vacuous AC Subject that you propagated. Lazy? Or just unthinking? You undercut your own position and the main result appears (by the scrollbar metric) to be helping AC "guide" half of the discussion.

As usual, my own thoughts tend to wander into nether regions, but I wonder whether it would be possible to reach any sort of agreement about what constitutes a good discussion. It is certainly my impression that there used to be a lot of them on Slashdot, but these days? Not so much. I also noticed that Slashdot appears to be down to its final editor.

So here's my funny idea how to pollute the Slashdot conversations with AI support. The latest owners (whoever?) should recruit a couple of AIs for editorial slots. Let's go all pie in the sky. Let's include enhancing the moderation system to also evaluate the work of the human and inhuman (dare I say subhuman?) editors. Which editor picks the best stories in terms of producing those "good discussions" we somehow agreed were good? Which editor produced the best summaries that induced the most humans to actually look at the fine articles? Heck, why not even consider which editor was least attractive for AC drivel, with or without AI support for extra slop.

The government contracts/subsidies are about military spending and ensuring that larger countries can compete with one another in military power.

Building, funding, keeping an industry critical to national military priorities is the purpose here.

Where's the Apple buyback or warranty fix for defective devices?

They are out of support warranty period, though for fundamental unpatchable security holes a 10 year window of buyback is needed.

And buyback at a percentage of the most recent equivalent device's retail price, not a pro-rated 3% off of buying a new device.

The EU has laws about fitness of purpose.

Does Mozilla expect to keep going another 10 years with the 25 year old lame JavaScript, html (XML overhead), CSS, and the pyramid of workarounds?

It's all been in the "fortran forever" vein from them on the web standards for 20 years.

(Yes, Fortran is good for a lot of scientific and other uses....)

Linux switched to Git in 2006.

A replacement is needed, even if it is a wrapper on top of git. (Yes Lore is not git)

The dozens of non-programmer people we've had to train on using Git and the fundamental disconnect of terminology git uses is a negative.

So what groups of people will be in a job which has a large labor surplus?

And, exactly, what job and how much will their wages go up or down for the tens of millions of people in a job with labor surpluses?

Lastly, what percent of the total jobs will have labor shortages? 1%, 2% ?
And what will the other 98% of the people needing to work, feed themselves, have a place to stay, raise children do for money?