FDNY life is rough but it is still vastly better than Chinese factor worker life. That 18-hour shift is not constant answering calls, a lot of it is downtime. Also, they get a lot of time off in between. And retire with good benefits years and years before the Chinese worker.

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK

Valid points, perhaps well made, but undercut by the vacuous AC Subject that you propagated. Lazy? Or just unthinking? You undercut your own position and the main result appears (by the scrollbar metric) to be helping AC "guide" half of the discussion.

As usual, my own thoughts tend to wander into nether regions, but I wonder whether it would be possible to reach any sort of agreement about what constitutes a good discussion. It is certainly my impression that there used to be a lot of them on Slashdot, but these days? Not so much. I also noticed that Slashdot appears to be down to its final editor.

So here's my funny idea how to pollute the Slashdot conversations with AI support. The latest owners (whoever?) should recruit a couple of AIs for editorial slots. Let's go all pie in the sky. Let's include enhancing the moderation system to also evaluate the work of the human and inhuman (dare I say subhuman?) editors. Which editor picks the best stories in terms of producing those "good discussions" we somehow agreed were good? Which editor produced the best summaries that induced the most humans to actually look at the fine articles? Heck, why not even consider which editor was least attractive for AC drivel, with or without AI support for extra slop.

Not very persuasive but you have me speculating if you were one of those overclockers. I suspect the main philosophical difference is that you think hardware is more important than software and I'm in the other camp. We seem to be in an abnormal condition because the computer hardware has been changing so rapidly for a few decades now...

Anyway, at the rate things are changing these months, I am actually worried that I may live long enough to see how it all comes out in the wash.

NAK

So the vacuous Subject apparently spans about a third of the large discussion? Thanks to the vacuous propagation? There should be a kind of meta-moderation of the discussions. Dare I say correlated to the kinds of FPs? But looking at your [nomadic's] post, your concern is escaping me and a Subject change might have helped.

Anyway, my too-obvious-to-be-insightful reaction and the obligatory joke I am l looking for in response to this topic involves some sort of categorical search constraint. There are ALWAYS some kinds of labor that are in short supply, but that doesn't do much to help the ALWAYS much larger number of people who are unable to supply those specific categories of labor that are in short supply.

Again with the speculations on "If I were a betting..." but good luck in convincing me that Bezos is too stupid to understand what he has done, though I'm pretty sure he would use some flavor of the "making money is an ethically pure motivation" excuse. Again with the "I bet to differ" stuff?

Personal disclaimer needed? Or some kind of rat race exemption? For most of my motley career I was able to go where the labor was in short supply, and it worked well for me. But looking at the current situation, I am unable to spot any of the jobs that I did that can't be done with AI now, and the AIs are continuing to improve rapidly. Rather too rapidly to be worrying much about the unintended consequences. For example, did you even notice that the mass market paperback business went extinct?

Thanks for saving me a long and tedious search, though I'm still going to try to root around the discussion a bit. (Main reason to reply is to try to figure what key terms I should look for, since the moderation has become so useless these years.) And you told it well, too. Even used some of the examples that I came to mind. I'm hoping the discussion will expand into broader considerations of stock-market madness as the new balloons are madly inflating all over the world.

So... "stock" and "balloon" seem to be the key words? And of course there will be the obligatory search check of the moderators' collective opinions about Funny...

Don't take this is criticism, shilly, because I am grateful, but I'm also unsure if "insightful" was the best mod. It appears you have 3 insight votes, 1 vote for informative, and 1 for overrated, presumably by a typical wannabe censor. In this case of the too obvious? My problem remains with the moderation system, which apparently needs the help of Nomad the Changeling... But on reflection, I'm beginning to agree with the "insightful" though I also want to check some of the details... For example, I think that nine years depends on some unconventional accounting. (This week I had a couple of meetings with a former internal auditor at Enron, though one of the principled ones who looked around and left quickly... I should have asked him about "creative accounting". But that's another term to search for in the discussion?)

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

"and where blue collar workers get to retire on a full pension before white collar workers."

Yes, if only I could enjoy the life of a blue collar factor worker in China. Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?!