That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."

The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.

It doesn't matter if it's bad - if China and Russia agree it's bad you have to be for it.

You can never agree with China because they have a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State there so you must support a totalitarian AI Surveillance Police State here.

If you are against techo-feudalism you must be one of them Putin Lovers.

- The New York Times / Langley, apparently.

I'm amazed to find your comment is an isolated example of reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Many others are 'accepting the premise' and 'entering the frame' of the LA Times weirdos.

Didn't expect that today.

These are likely low-skill jobs, watching production lines turn out hand tools, not highly-skilled office workers/management.

This proves the line worker is an easily replaceable cog in the machine...

You need a huge pool of available workers, and work needs to be fairly generalized - easily interchangeable. Candidates need to be able to drop in to almost any available position with minimal training.

With hundreds of potential workers competing for a limited number of shifts, this will let the employer avoid raising wages, as there will always be someone willing to work for the lower rate, given a large enough pool.

In this very specific example, I wonder what the impact was in this town when a couple hundred full time jobs w/benefits suddenly turned into twice as many part time jobs you had to scramble to get and came without benefits?

What? You really can't imagine a way to measure the productivity of a factory line worker (as in your example, someone "babysitting a CNC")?

Uh, how about widgets per hour/shift?

Blue collar workers, as you refer to them, aren't typically compensated just based on their time on the factory floor - the extreme counter-example to your assumption would be an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, whose productivity is constantly monitored over several metrics...

I believe that more "gig workers" are hustling trying to turn an easy to get job (food delivery, ride share driver) into something resembling a living wage because they can't find other, better-paying, more stable work, than are students, retirees, and empty nesters trying to make a few bucks in their spare time. I have no proof, but that is my impression based on my experience.

They are cheering on a system that yes, allows a worker to supplement their income, but also gets a large share of the needed factory work done by workers who don't put in enough hours in a week to qualify/earn subsidized healthcare benefits.

The employer, according to the summary, fills about half their available shifts with workers doing less than 30 hours/week - that is the threshold for requiring subsidized healthcare.

I would be very interested to find if it is the workers that choose to work fewer than 8 shifts/week or if the employer limits who can work more than 30 hours/week...

Healthcare is the motivation, not simply appealing to workers desires for flexible hours.

With roughly half the workers working less than 25 hours a week, the employer is off the hook for subsidized healthcare - if all shifts were covered by 40 hour/week workers, healthcare costs would more than double versus this massively-flexible part-time labor scheme.

Another key part of this arrangement is the interchangeability of the work offered - when a production worker can be taught any position in, say, a half-hour, then that opens the door to extreme flexibility. In high-skill environments, let's say a doctor's office, the roles of nurse, receptionist, scheduler, billing specialist, and of course doctor, are not so easily interchangeable (it's a silly example, but it demonstrates my point).

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

That sounds great, did they also budget for a third of the targeted billionaires leaving the state to avoid the 5% wealth tax? I think not - CA thinks it's so special they can try and seize 5% of billionaires wealth and they'll stick around! LOL, other states have sunshine, and beaches, and lower property/income taxes...

The 5% tax is a wealth tax.

The wealth tax is paid by individuals that reside in the state.

When the individual moves out of state, like to Florida as a Google founder did, they are no longer a resident of CA.

Being a resident of FL, they do not owe CA the 5% wealth tax.

The billion dollar company (like Google) may stay in CA, but the state can't collect the wealth tax from the billion dollar corporation.

The amount of Venture Capital flowing into a state is not proof that billionaires aren't leaving the state. One has nothing to do with the other.

You really think AI companies can't setup elsewhere? Somehow we are building AI datacenters all across the country, do you really think the professionals in the field HAVE TO STAY in SF to access their datacenter in Ohio or Virginia? Really?