People don't want the news. News consumption continues to drop. People always thought of news as a bit of a chore. Something you were supposed to keep up with but not anything you enjoyed. It got turned into 24/7 entertainment crap when Fox News took over but that's not news that's propaganda. And even that isn't very popular.

People in America are in the habit of blaming individuals for either systemic problems or what our Epstein class is doing. It's a bad habit and I wish we would stop but well, there's all that propaganda encouraging us to do it...

I wanted the high-end Qualcomm chip because it has a much better modem and I have lousy reception in my area. Switching to the high-end Qualcomm chip was night and day. People could actually hear me on calls and I stopped getting text messages 6 hours after they were sent. My bedroom is no longer a dead zone.

Samsung has an equivalent phone but they put a small battery in it either because they were being cheap or because they didn't like how much it made the thing weigh. Whatever the case the battery life is horrible on it. Maybe it's better if you're not sitting in a dead zone where the modem has to work harder but I am.

There is the red magic but at the time I bought my phone it was closer to $1,100. Not sure why but it's dropped down to 800. That's not great but with RAM prices it could be worse. But I did only have to pay $500 for the phone I have now because it was right before the AI apocalypse.

Right now if you want a high-end Qualcomm chipset you just don't have a lot of good options on Android besides that red magic.

I'm just seeing the world as is. If you actually stare the real world in its eyes with all the children being murdered by Elon Musk so that he could be a trillionaire and bombs dropped on children in Gaza so some stupid little nationalist asshole can live out some weird fantasy or watching kids in America starve because some people just get off on that or because it doesn't matter how hungry your kid as long as somebody else's kid is hungrier well if you actually face that reality you turn out like me.

I guess ignorance is bliss and all. So go ahead and enjoy yourself. But I think the reason you commented is you know how bad things are and you know how horrible and horrific they are and you're trying your best to act like things are normal. You're the dog surrounded by fire in the meme.

Maybe survivorship bias will work out for you like it always has. Good luck and try not to think too hard

Conventions are a lot of fun but not everybody can live in a major city with a major convention. It doesn't really do any good for you to fly out to LA for Comic-Con. You're going to meet a lot of cool people but then they're going to scatter to the four winds.

Facebook makes it possible to meet people in your area with your interests. So you can find a d&d group or a bunch of guys to go fishing with or something like that.

This is especially important in our modern dystopia. Increasingly game stores are shutting down because private equity owns all the property and game stores just aren't profitable enough for the amount of square footage they need. All those tables that you are playing at aren't merchandise you are buying. And a store wants to get you in and then back out again so they can get more customers in. You hanging around doesn't result in enough extra sales. Yeah you might pick up a mini or two or a expansion book but then you're going to hang around using up space for basically the whole day.

Also people have to move a lot. People have to upend themselves and move to other cities all the damn time now because Jobs go away and you have to live where the work is. So if you're new to an area Facebook lets you find the community you want to hang out with.

I'm really sad to see the complete lack of nuance in this supposedly science focused forum.

Facebook can be an evil company whose product has good uses.

Actual social media instead of Doom scrolling can exist.

Social media means connecting people with like-minded interests in a positive environment.

Most websites don't do social media. We don't really have a good term for what they do.

That is on purpose. It's the same reason right wing extremists brand themselves as conservative.

If you're going to do something horrifically evil you don't just set yourself up as Horrifically Evil LLC. You pay a marketing firm to confuse the public because the public does not like nuance.

This is a complete non-story because this is dead in the Senate. Really tired of the news media wasting my damn time with stories that are meaningless.

Brick and mortar stores want daylight savings Time changes because their Big Data models indicate people spend a little bit more money in their stores during daylight hours. So we're not going to be able to get rid of daylight savings time because every time it comes up they just splash a bunch of cash around.

This is most likely just a fundraising average by a bunch of people in the House of Representatives

You can probably find the article but years ago a father found out his teenage daughter was pregnant because Target started sending him coupons for baby stuff. The reason Target did that is because they figured out that if you bought certain things that were not related to a baby it meant that you were pregnant. It was relatively simple machine learning that made that possible.

Facebook isn't a nice company but no company is a nice company.

I don't want to necessarily defend them but Facebook does have legitimate uses. I'm a introverted nerd so I don't have a lot of use for it but I have a couple of friends you are what you would call an extroverted nerd.

I can't think of any existence more frustrating and depressing than being an extroverted nerd. You're someone who wants to be around people and you aren't comfortable if you're alone but you're kind of weird and off-putting. Not for any fault of your own it's just you know you have something wrong with you as far as people are concerned. Maybe you're ugly maybe you're short and fat maybe you're on the spectrum and have zero tact so you blurt out incredibly uncomfortable and inappropriate things pretty much non-stop.

For those kind of nerds they can find like-minded nerds on Facebook and congregate and hang out.

And for regular people they can find people into their hobby. One of my more normal buddies finds his fishing buddies that way.

This is plausible deniability. Basically they want to fire people with disabilities or people who are starting to age because they can replace them with somebody younger who will work harder for less money.

It doesn't matter what experience the people getting fired have it's just a mathematical formula. We are all just cogs anymore except for a tiny handful of extremely specialized workers. If you have to ask if you're one of them you're not you'd be making it at least half a million a year and you wouldn't be wasting your time reading my dumb comments.

This is about creating a algorithm that fires people illegally and then claiming the algorithm is just a fair algorithm. This way Facebook can keep this shit tied up in court for years and we're down most of the people who would sue if not all of them.

If you have ever seen fight club it's the same kind of calculations that were done at the beginning of that film. Including the cost of the lawsuits.

I don't think people have realized just how much big data has tilted employment in favor of the employees. Or if they have realized it they've just pushed it out of their heads and pretended it didn't happen because it's too scary to think about.

I mean my head is full of all these disasters that are coming that nobody is doing anything about and nobody is going to do anything about. It's not necessarily worth knowing about it really. It would be one thing if anyone could do anything about it but when 60% of the country reads at the level of a 12-year-old I think we are pretty well fucked...

Your curiosity may get you deported.

They can work, but they have major issues.

1)For at least the first 6 months, if not the first several years, it will take more time and money to teach them than they generate. Why would any company do this?

2)As a hiring manager at company B, I see you apprenticed at company A. I have no idea if that means you're qualified. I can't trust company A to tell me, they're a competitor. Schools stand as a neutral 3rd party telling me that they've completed a set curriculum and should know that much. It's not perfect, but it's a start.

3)Some fields just have a huge amount of up front learning before you can be useful at all. Apprentice plumber? You can run and fetch tools and hold things in place while you watch and learn. Apprentice electrical engineer? You have no idea what inductance is on day one. There's literally nothing you can do. So basically at this point you're hoping the company sets up a school.

Is the overall automation threat. Google it, 70% of middle class jobs lost since the 1980s got taken by automation.

It is very possible, even likely, that we are approaching a tipping point. You can find articles explaining that the baby boomers are the only ones who have any discretionary spending whatsoever and they are propping up multiple industries. They aren't going to leave anything for their kids either. They're spending it all. But they don't blow on RVs and mimosas they blow on healthcare at least in America. And even if by some miracle there it would have been some money left in there savings it looks like the trillionaire class is going to loot it. Remember that a lot of their savings is in the form of stocks because that's how they keep them above inflation and rules have been changed that will allow companies to take worthless stock like SpaceX and dump it into 401ks...

So all of this means that a relatively small amount of permanent unemployment might cause a cascading effect.

Simply put there won't be enough money in the economy. Too much of it at the top. The tax base collapses because people don't make enough money to pay taxes and yeah you can use tariffs to raise their taxes but then they have to spend less. Before you know it government spending collapses which causes even more job losses and therefore even less economic activity and spending. It becomes a self-reinforcing loop. The whole system collapses. Mix in declining birth rates and yeah it's a disaster that we just pretending isn't happening

The real fun comes when basic services start getting cut. Education goes away and you have kids just kind of wandering the streets with no jobs because even if you bring back child labor there's nothing for those kids to do. And then the police go. A bunch of numbnuts think that's cool cuz they are looking forward to being able to shoot people. Without realizing what it was like to have roving bands of bandits...

I don't think folks have really come to terms with how fragile our civilization really is.

"Which is to say, communists advocate for communism, whatever buzzword they call it this week..."

Or whatever buzzword you call it this week. Communism is an economic system, not a set of "democratic choices". Trump thanks you for your contribution, though.

Which is not evidence of the work week going in the wrong direction, even though it is true.

The change in direction started with Reagan, we just didn't see it at first because of the internet boom (which Reagan did not cause). Prior to Reagan, we had 40 hour work weeks and homes/cars were far more affordable.

Trump is not the problem, Trump is a symptom. We have a Supreme Court captured by billionaires that has reversed law designed to preserve democracy and prevent billionaires from buying power. Billionaires don't want 32-hour work weeks, they want 82-hour work weeks. Billionaires want you making them richer faster and then dying quickly once you are not useful. That is the direction of the country.

No quicker way to solve that problem than put a huge number of people out of work and take away their benefits!

Make a quarter of the population starve and there will be no worker shortage. That's a basic premise of the billionaire mindset.