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Comment From what I understand (Score 1) 48

Automation is so cheap now that even Chinese labor can't compete. But the government has been forcing businesses to hold off on automation in order to prevent the inevitable economic and social turmoil from laying off that many people. Although it is absolutely hilarious that "communist" China has to worry about keeping full employment...

There are signs that it's changing because their ruling class has consolidated enough power they can afford to start blowing off the public. But I don't think they're quite ready to do it 100%.

Comment Fix my bloody right click menu first (Score 0) 36

It shouldn't take 10 seconds for my right click menu to show up unless I hold down the shift key. And yeah there is a registry hack I can do but on my work PC it's a huge pain in the ass to have it put it in every freaking time I get an update because of course every time Windows 11 updates they clear the key...

I swear Windows 11 is the most user hostile piece of software I have ever used in my life and I have programmed on IBM mainframes...

Comment From the article it's just browser fingerprinting (Score 1) 51

It would run on any modern browser that runs javascript because it's just a JavaScript script that monitors everything you're doing. It's also nothing new browser fingerprinting has been around for ages and is used by basically any website of any size to try and catch bots.

I'm actually a little surprised they didn't already have a fingerprinting product.

Comment Re:Why were critical systems not replaced? (Score 0) 11

The article talked about the cost of customer confidence lost too. In other words even if they came back online the 6-week pause would have caused them to lose a bunch of customers. And they don't have the capital to get them back through advertising campaigns and discounts and such.

It's actually terrifying how many businesses run at the absolute edge of margins and are perpetually on the verge of collapse. Like how any given city is 3 days away from chaos...

We focus on the tech companies that are making so much money that they literally cannot spend it fast enough. And that also like to keep a ton of cash around for stock BuyBacks. But it really doesn't take much for most companies to start cutting staff and even shutting all the way down.

This is both how and why increasing interest rates "fights" inflation. Businesses lose access to credit because it costs more to loan so any little problem in their business immediately becomes a major disaster because of credit crunch and they go under putting a whole bunch of people out of work. Those out of work people spend less reducing demand which slows inflation. If the business doesn't collapse outright it's at least going to do layoffs and pay cuts which achieves the same goal.

Comment Re:Is this true? (Score 1) 224

but this sounds like the kind of drivel spewed on behalf of big companies that want to be able to hire cheap foreign labour

Yeah sorry, but while I understand your world view may be based on graduate low cost coders, and data entry drones, America is known for many things but underpaying engineers, medical professionals, speciality mechanics, and pharmacists is not even remotely among them. In America those professions are paid among the highest in the entire world and are subject to a significant amount of skilled immigration as a result (another term that Slashdot hates).

It's interesting to put teachers in that sentence though, because largely American seems to think teachers should go fuck themselves but don't even pay them enough to shop for a decent toy to do it with.

Just because you have a jaded view doesn't make something true, nor does it make the problem American. Changing how you pay people doesn't resolve the issue of potentially falling behind other nations (though many western nations are experiencing the same problem.

and decision makers will just eat it up blindly without verifying who is paying the economists / paying for these studies, and what the real motivation is

Investment banker's motivation is to make money. They have a dependency on a healthy economy. Some times the actual truth is just boring and unfortunately there's no underlying conspiracy or secret cartel looking to screw you.

Comment Re: People do the same. (Score 2) 51

Indeed it would sound very easy, except that human movements aren't random, and with proper statistical models it's quickly possible to determine someone who didn't know the difference between natural restricted and biased variance and randomness.

You're the target audience here: the people who think that this "sounds incredibly easy" will be the first to have their bots blocked. Yeah it'll be worked around, but the bar is raised in the meantime.

Comment Re:This seems dubious... (Score 2) 44

Solar isn't for extending range, it's for self charging while idle. It's never been a viable way to extend range and only ever a suitable addition for any device that may spend a lot of time stationary.

And example of such a thing would be ... a trailer. These things can spend a significant portion of their life parked.

By the way I just checked, apparently most of the world is not "Northesatern USA" despite how much Washington State would have you believe otherwise. Using the worst case on a national level to justify why something does or doesn't work is just stupid all around. The vast majority of the USA couldn't give a shit if the sun shines in Seattle. That's not to say that this is a good idea, just that your approach to discussing the problem is either incredibly biased or incredibly dumb.

Comment Nope it's not (Score 1) 224

We have a few bottlenecks in farm labor but that's only because we treat Farmers so poorly that it's very difficult to get people to do the work. We also have a few bottlenecks in some areas of healthcare because we created those bottlenecks by underfunding our education system for the last 20 years.

People who don't understand anything will tell you that per capita education spending has gone up without realizing why.

We don't have factories anymore. They are full of robots if we have them at all. This means that if you're someone who is into academically inclined, which is to say you can't just teach yourself and the teacher is really just there as a oversight, then we don't have anywhere to put you.

In the old days if you weren't somebody who learned on their own and therefore was super cheap to teach then we just sent you to the factories. Or the farms.

We use borderline slave labor for the farms so we can't really send Americans there. And like I said factories are full of robots. Moose out front should have told you.

So we have all these kids that we have to do something with. So what we did was is we created a shitload programs to try and get them to the point where they would be at least employable in some kind of job. Those programs are expensive so the per capita spending has gone way up.

The problem is that we still need lots of people to be trained to be doctors and nurses and stuff like that so we need to be spending more money there too. But nobody wants to because we're already spending more money trying to keep people who are now basically useless involved in the economy.

Comment Only 2 in 5 Americans have a good job (Score 1) 224

That's 40%, so it sounds better when you say it like that. Statistics and numbers are fun.

But it does mean it's 60% of Americans don't have a job that allows them to afford a one-bedroom apartment, a reliable car and retirement savings for when they physically cannot work anymore. Good job here isn't opulence and splendor it's getting by and saving a bit for when your body breaks down.

So every time I hear there's a labor shortage I get really pissed off. Because there's a massive shortage of jobs that can support an adult.

And I don't care what job you do or how silly or useless or simple it is if you're working 40 hours a week you should have a good life. Honestly you should have a good life whether you're working 40 a week or not. This thing where we set up a system of endless work is insane.

Comment Honestly that doesn't solve the problem (Score 0) 224

It doesn't hurt but you're still going to have birth rates below sustainability because when women are given the option they have one or two kids and stop. So even countries that have everything like that still have low birth rates.

The only way you get the crazy high birth rates needed to feed the engine of capitalism is you have just enough money that people can prevent the kids from starving but not enough that civil rights start happening and women stop being property.

Basically you need just the right amount of civilization to create the kind of baby boom that made the population this stupidly large. Two little civilization and disease and War and poverty kill everyone. But too much and human beings don't just keep spitting out babies. And I think it's an impossible balancing act. That tiny bit of civilization that happened from about 1890 to about 2016. It's like dancing on the head of a pin.

Impractical terms we are going to have to start building a civilization that doesn't need endless population growth or we're going to drop into a new dark age ruled over by incompetent wanna be tech bros like Elon Musk. A sort of hyper advanced combination of kleptocracy and kekistocracy.

Comment Re: Oh well (Score 2) 224

Wages and career prospects are a factor in what students chose to major in:
- Business and Finance: relatively easy courses, excellent career prospects and very good pay. Good social status too
- STEM: work long and hard to graduate. Wages are decent but in general there's not a lot of upward mobility (unless you go into management). And no one looks up to engineers.
- Academia: unless you love what you do, forget about it, because you're not going to get anything else out of it. Not even tenure, these days.

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