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.

Seriously, root is needed for software installation and updates (and not always even that) and that should be IT. Done. finito.

Yeah, individuals may have root access (but in corporate situations, even THAT has some limits to it - e.g., I can't see the that the 'spyware' I know is on my work machine actually exists. I know it does (because, for example, it is blocking me from screen-sharing to my AppleTV even off the firewall)).

But on a shared machine like old-school Unix minicomputers, that stuff is off-limits except to admins. This actually proves why that was the case - individual users can't be trusted with 'root'. And now we know that extends to non-sentient 'users'.

So this may prove that the bots are going to abuse their powers and therefore shouldn't be given any...but it also proves that the admins of these boxes that the bots are running on have about as much concern for real security as they ever did...which is to say, next to none until the exploitation is already out there.

This is a task that only required standard 'user' access - get the original software, get the dev tools needed for the new language, and have the tools for running the original to check parity), and that's it. They needed nothing more. They didn't need root, they didn't need email, they didn't need the ability to write commits to the others' repos. They needed the tools to do the job, nothing more.

Just like real users.

Funny you write that. I was also acing in high school. Then I went to university at a top notch school, and my first physics mid term resulted in the grade... 33%. Yupe that's what it was. My friends had like 42, and 25. One friend looked at me and said, "it hurts doesn't it..." Yeah it did.

What I learned is that I might have been smart in high school, but there are some really smart people in a top notch university. Like seriously smart. It motivated me to work at it and I passed. In fact in the second semester I was doing rather well again. It required me to work. My friends on the other hand decided to move out of engineering. One became a male nurse (he actually was well suited for that), and the other became a remote sensing specialist. He explained it to me back in the early 90's as using satellites to do geography. The irony with that one is that it is now an amazing profession.

What I am writing is that in the end we all learned to deal with it and assess what we really wanted to do. I don't think the vibe approach will work out.