They voted for AI and automation to wipe out office work?

That's legacy Fox, with the Marvel label slapped on. The original Deadpool would never have gotten made inside of Disney proper.

From the article:

"U.S. public companies have cut their white-collar workforces by 3.5% over the past three years"

I'm sorry, who was President during that time?

These are permanent structural changes, a long time in coming. Predicted by many and blown off by many more.

The problem with a "knowledge economy" is that automation can basically take over 95 percent of it. You need a balance of services and manufacturing and agriculture, and the first world knowledge economies have been outsourcing the later two to cheaper third world countries and teaching their youth that getting their hands dirty is beneath them. Anytime someone brings up plumbing or welding or some construction work, there's a group here that always responds with "Back-breaking! No! Undignified!".

Fine. So starve then. You're not getting your UBI or a lifetime welfare state. So I suggest you learn a skill that can't be replaced with a glorified Google script, or hope your parents have saved enough money to support you on their couch while you protest the indignities of spreading drywall or operating a backhoe.

Shut up, Ryan.

Just about any newspaper or news network site now is either paywalled, or a defacto browser hijacker that floods you with pop-ups, videos, and subscription requests as soon as you enter.

"Perhaps if it had adequate funding"

LAUSD has about half the number of students they had 20 years ago. They have more than double the number of administrators and about 20 more teachers over that same time scale -- and the budget of LAUSD is over $18 billion -- up from $8 billion 20 years ago. The number of students in that time also went from closer to 800,000 to about 400,000 now.

What this doesn't include are the various city, county and state bond initiatives that added additional funding (which came at increased per dollar spent due to interest on the loans).

The amount of money we're spending is not justified based on the student population. The number of administrators is not justified by student population.

And "oh". Student performance have continued drop.

It's not a funding problem. It's a gross mismanagement problem along wtih turning LAUSD jobs in to "rewards" for both union employees and political supporters.

Awesome! Professional puzzle solvers wont be collecting unemployment in the short term. The bad news is that unemployment will likely be broke when toasters can solve puzzles 5 or 10 years later...

Oh FFS. Food banks are locally run, staffed, and financed.

I don't believe you.

Who's stopping you from writing a check?

It's not our responsibility.

I'll just have to learn to live with the knowledge that you disapprove.

Except that the cash is drying up anyway, per the article source. And it was inevitable that enrollment would slow down as soon as China ramped up their higher education system enough to provide for their own needs. That's been their M.O. in every other sector of their economy: get Western help until self-sufficient, then kick the West out to protect their own markets. Education is no different from factories in this case.

In 1950, most women were married and stay-at-home moms, with the female labor participation rate at just over 30%. Most men did the working. We have a vastly different social situation now. The women's labor rate is now 57%. Men are now under 67%. In the year you citied, 1950, men had an 86% participation rate. The male rate has been steadily dropping since the 60's. So there's definitely been a change in attitudes and work ethic since the 50's.

Such revolutions always end up with the revolutionaries killing the very people they were supposedly fighting for. Ask the French how that turned out for them.

That's not the argument. The argument is that simply giving people money all their lives with no requirements for work in return will make them permanently dependent on others. Worse, they'll come to have a sense of entitlement that their neighbor owes them a living. The West has always prospered with the worth ethic: He who does not work, shall not eat.

So, if AI takes that work away to an extent that will truly leave masses of people permanently unemployed? Then better a Butlerian Jihad than Behavioral Sink.

When work and purpose is taken away from Man, he rots.

Americans would have no problem temporarily helping a nation that had a crop failure one year, or had food supplies destroyed by a hostile force. What they have a problem with is permanently taking responsibility for feeding that nation, when that nation is more than capable of feeding itself. And that became the problem with USAID. It became a permanent burden, often with the expectation that US tax dollars were always going to show up to do the job that the native people and their governments should be doing themselves.

I also suspect that much of USAID wasn't for humanitarian purposes as much as it was for buying influence abroad, under the guise of humanitarianism. One of the primary objections to cutting the USAID budget at places like the Brookings Institution and CSIS is that if the US stops paying foreign food and medicine bills, then China will step in and play sugar daddy. Well, good. Let China drain their coffers then. As far as I'm concerned, that's not a bug, that's a feature.