Peter Turchin has quite a lot to say on that subject.

As a previous poster pointed out, what fields are affected? There might be a shortage of mining engineers, but there is a surplus of surplus of gender studies. I'd also point out that the periodic table is complete. Cosmology might be interesting but isn't putting food on the table or electrons on the wires.

Speaking personally, I have a Ph.D in extractive metallurgy. That career field was largely shut down by the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration because mining was deemed impure and unclean. I was supposed to transition to a new career in ecotourism.

Given the current economic turmoil is it really surprising the students are thinking twice before committing that much money and time to a field that may not exist by the time they are done?

A couple years ago China was shipping college graduates to the countryside and handing them a hoe. They had a wrong major problem too.

Also worth noting, the neighbor is getting a new roof. No AI in sight, humans only. Some person, not an AI, is mowing between the rows of trees in the orchard across the street. And it was me picking the last of the raspberries on Sunday.

Don't overestimate the usefulness or the economic value of a Phud.

The orchards will be hiring fruit pickers before Labor Day. Feel free to apply and displace an H2-A worker, or better yet an illegal immigrant.

3 PM Eastern Washington weather, 86 F, 12 mph wind, 19% relative humidity, No AC needed.

Don't worry, we'll get our roasting eventually. It is summer after all. Then I will set the heat pump to Cool. Last year I needed cooling mode 21 days. It's in heating mode from mid October to Mid April.

https://www.zerohedge.com/weat...

If you scroll down near the bottom of that article there is an interesting graphic, the 1930s really were hot.

Answer 1; Highmore South Dakota. Admire the pictures of the windfarm after the windstorm. So much for free power.

Answer 2, Night. So much for solar power, now you have to add batteries. Take a modest 50 MW data center and a 15 hour winter night and see how many Tesla Max power batteries (3.9 MWH each) it takes to get through the night, and then calculate their combined weight.

Now it's morning, the batteries are flat and you have 9 hours to recharge them and still keep the data center running.

Bonus problem, there is a heavy overcast today. The PV is at 8% of nameplate. (That's a real number by the way,) Now how many solar panels do you need to run the data center and recharge the batteries?

But you still didn't answer the question, what are all these people missing from the workforce actually doing? I know two millennials who are literally living in their mother's basement playing video games on her dime, but is this normal? Is the drug trade taking that many people?

No one knows where the missing workers are, or what they are doing.

White folks used to pick the fruit in the orchards. I picked cucumbers as a teenager. Call the employment office and see how to get hired.

All true, and it also includes working under the table. They are getting lunch money somewhere, but where seems to be eluding the official statistics.

"you don't know which of the 10 applications for Foo to click on?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'm looking for a new TV. I know this problem.

There is a socket for a TPM on my 2019 motherboard, but it's not included.

You don't have to be a purist. My desktop is an AMD Linux box. The 4600G is entirely sufficient and I didn't have to spend a fortune on a video card.

The laptop is an M1 MacBook Air because of great battery life while the PCs are all about Gaming bragging rights and don't care about anything else, and they seem to be plastic crap anyway.

My phone is a $130 Motorola that makes and receives texts and phone calls. I don't care about anything else on a phone.

I do have the low end iPad because it's immune to AI, and when I was shopping the Samsung cost more, and so did the Google tablet.

Especially the electric ones. They outweigh my 4X4 Colorado.

"Second, with larger A-pillars designed to protect occupants in rollover crashes, modern cars tend to have larger blind spots than cars sold at the turn of the century (presuming the 21st century)."

You can hide an entire pickup behind that super fat A-pillar. I've had a couple close calls myself because of that. Sure you can drop the car upside down from high orbit and the cab will still be intact, but that pillar makes a huge blind spot. It's quite the neck workout to peer around it too. There would be a good spot for a camera and a small screen.

So now is when you get to plot out the duration of no wind periods. Then ask yourself how many tons of batteries it will take to get through the calm periods.

I did that for the local conditions here in eastern Washington. I had to invert a new unit, the aircraft carrier equivalent. It was quite common to need the equivalent of over 20 aircraft carriers in batteries to get through the inversions which feature both heavy overcast and dead calm.

It was quite the wake-up.

Favorite graph here,
https://transmission.bpa.gov/b...

In a word, winter.

No sun, dead calm, very cold.

Look up how many hours of day light Winnipeg gets in December.

The control system responded to a combination of inputs it had never seen before that resulted in a low pH condition by increasing acid flow to lower it further.

That is close enough for me. All those weights between layers result in a non-linear failure mode which is not acceptable in the real world, rather like Elon's self-driving cars ramming firetrucks.

As Cringley points out, all they've done is throw horsepower at it. It's like the old argument in physics, if we knew every particle's position and velocity we could calculate everything forever. But you can't know that so the whole concept if flawed.

It is fun to watch the flailing though. "But it's got to work, I've spent Billions!"