One could imagine the building that houses the offshore Cognizant help desk team.

And then in the same building a few floors below is the organized-crime scammer/ransomware squad who are phoning them for the passwords...

This. No doubt there is concern from Tuvalu's inhabitants about climate change. Affects ocean levels, storm intensities, and changes the under-water biosphere. But, in this case I think the motivation for the AU visas is economic, aside from global warming.

Having worked with people from Hawaii, I initially would ask "Why would you leave paradise to come to the mainland ?!?" (usually in some crappy, light industrial park where I worked IT). The answer is that while beautiful, Hawaii is basically West Virginia dropped in the Pacific. It's mostly very rural, not much in the way of employment advancement beyond hospitality and agriculture. If you want to work in software dev, aerospace, finance, entertainment, etc you pretty much have to leave.

Certainly prioritizing employment advancement isn't for everyone, but I would wager that's the drive for Tuvalu.

Pretty much every class-action lawsuit ever.

After reducing debt/balancing the budget (President / Congress FAIL)

I would think the next worthy target is tort reform, specifically in the area of class action lawsuits. if you get the same crappy OTA channels I do, then you see tons of lawyer ads for various class actions. Lotsa pharmaceuticals, army base stuff, and still...still asbestos after it ceased to be widely used after the 1970's and 1980s. It's just a cash grab for law firms....and the marketing people to route you to a law firm. Nuts.

Put a cap on lawyer fees, of say 30% of the judgement or $5 million whichever is less. You win a $7.5 million for a class action on protein content of meatless meat...you get $2.1 million. You win a $3 billion lawsuit against Glaxo for marketing Paxil to minors....law firm still only gets $5 million, rest to victims/plaintiffs.

$5 million....that's still 10,000 billable hours at $500. Now with our AI friends doin most of the discovery that should be enough money for any firm

Eurozone debt-to-GDP ration 88%

USA debt-to-GDP ratio 121% set to exceed 125% and continue skyward after recent bill passage

Seems like US is just borrowing our way to higher GDP (via consumption, gov spending, etc) . Soooo many problems with this course of action, at least for those of us who expect to be alive for the next 10 years. I for one am personal-finance spooked about the combined effects of tariffs, Powell being replaced by a presidential sycophant, and the explosion of more debt, raised debt ceiling, interest payments approaching 50% of the budget, etc.

Firing 1000 state department employees, drop kicking PBS, even tariff 'income' none of that rates a percentage point on the budget imbalance. I can see why Musk got pissed off. He took crazy political heat for his (reckless) DOGE...only to see it swamped by a crazy lopsided budget. But honestly, the number of 'smart' people who the president has run off the road is so high there is no excuse for anyone to complain.

That about sums it up. When Prime Day first started there were indeed good deals. Now it's basically 5-10% a small selection of off-brand items. Who cares.

I will also add I'm getting a bit tired of the overlapping algorithms Amazon employs. If I put in a hyper specific item, and Amazon doesn't actually have that (or in the size I want , etc) it will of course still display 6x10^23 items I didn't ask for. The price updates, like last week I put in a pair of hiking boots in my "Save for later" basket. Was $95 in my size, now suspiciously $168 in my size. No thank you. Also not nearly the Temu level of disappointment, but I have fallen for more than a few of the off-brand items that are truly straight to the landfill. That's annoying.

Call it enshitification, call it what you want. They are still tops in the whole logistics to get the widget to you in 1-few days. But I feel like my peak Amazon buying days are behind me. I guess I've built a tolerance to the dopamine hits.

Maybe itâ(TM)s related to the TikTok deal the administration promisedâ¦thereâ(TM)s talk that a âdeal is in the works, but again Tik Tok was supposed to be shut off
January 19, 2025, then April, June 19, now September 17.

Having been both hourly (consultick) and salaried/exempt Iâ(TM)m not sure why we donâ(TM)t all just migrate to hourly.

It seems like we are stuck in a 100 y.o. employment framework for exempt v. hourly while the nature of work has changed dramatically. Farm, factory, medicine, trades all very different in 2025. With many current roles simply not existing 50-100 years ago.

Time is the one thing all jobs have in common so why not make that the common denominator. Then feel to adjust the normal work week as needed

I imagine the reticence for a change like I have proposed is that for some people there is some stigma to be âoehourlyâ. There is a fear (prob warranted) that you will get paid less annually after a switch, and lastly the exec types will find it hard to justify what they did for 1 hour to warrant $13,000/hr

These stories will pop up from time to
time on /. and elsewhere. The gist is someone forecasts a demand that the world doesnâ(TM)t seem able to meet. But just like all the others this one will be solved in due time by usual supply/demand curves. The price offered will go up encouraging expansion of supplyâ¦there will be substitutions, innovations, etc.

The add on to these stories is usually a free-market guy who is asking for government financial help to solve the âoecrisisâ

Eggs arenâ(TM)t $20, we wonâ(TM)t build nuclear power plants for AI. Civilization will be ok if the world population can decline and stabilize at about 1/2â"2/3 the current value before we âoegreat filterâ ourselves

"Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting."

This is exactly the model United uses. Here's your price...oh wait, you wanted to bring carry on luggage? That's a bunch extra $$$. ( Like who is travelling without bringing at least a carry-on....?)

Unlike Southwest (was) we let you pick your seat....oh wait there are no seats left at your fare...how about a premium seat which is exactly the same as the basic seat, except costs more. That's more $$$

Then all the other BS around change fees when they eff up, automatically cancelling your flight and rebooking you.

United straight up sux.

I flew Hawaiian Airline recently and it was a freakin' dream. A little bit of food in a meal, comfortable, reasonable sized seats. No B.S. around carry on. Free, high speed, WiFi. United, American, Delta can pound sand. I don't have the guts to fly Spirit...and sounds like Southwest is spiraling downhill for some reason.

Bad idea gets nixed once it hits the news:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/ba...

This is especially dumb politically since just three years ago the city recalled 3 of the Board of Education members for similar shenanigans...with a plurality of like 70-75%. And they are in fiscal crisis, plummeting enrollment, school closures, bad test results/outcomes. Just a head shaking...why.

However this bit from the proponents of the "Grading for Equity" program I find humorous:

"...reconfiguring the grading scale to address inherent problems with a 100-point grading scale — which disproportionately assigns an F for 0 to 59 points, but only 10 points each for the other grades."

It's like the A, B, C, D grades are jealous that F gets to keep 59% of the scale...maybe that's the equity they are trying to remedy ; )

I find Sabinaâ(TM)s channel very informative, interesting, and frequently humourous. She also speaks at a level closer to my comfort zoneâ¦not quite PhD level, but also not rehashing the basics over and over.

I wish her success, but also wonder about âthe grindâ(TM) . Whereas before a new video would be a mandatory watch, now that they are more numerous and itâ(TM)s sometimes like âoewell itâ(TM)s Wednesday need to create content , letâ(TM)s find a ridiculous paper on Arixv to ripâ

Itâ(TM)s a tough gig I imagine.

It seems like a bunch of the administrations actions seem like they are negative...no more (Federal) police body cams, cutting off programs for toddlers, cancelling food aid for starving people in Sudan, trying to cancel Big Bird (& Oscar the Grouch) now wifi for people at the library, cancelling FEMA...before hurricane season (gusty)

But these sacrifices need to be made in order to balance the books. I'm sure after this first fiscal year the government deficit and debt will begin to fall and we can work towards government fiscal responsibility just as our Republican representatives have espoused for decades. Again, any day now we will see plans for a balanced budget. Any day now.

The X12 standards definitely had some quirks, and a bit of a learning curve, but I really came to appreciate how comprehensive it is. And how bloody efficient it was on transaction size, byte counts etc. This Franken-process I describe above is a beast in size nearly 1MB per transaction, parsing all that does take time and storage, even throwing tons of cloud-ware at it. But the underlying EDI is only like 1k Its sad that all the institutional knowledge around those concepts is being lost.

FWIW I worked for Sterling Commerce way back in the day initially as tech support, then as a "consult--tick" . Fell into EDI early on and keep boomeranging back somehow. It still lives down in the basements of most Fortune 100 firms

I work at a Fortune 50 company now. One of the primary (internal) APIs was composed by and is supported by their offshore dev team. It wraps an entire EDI 8xx transaction set within a response composed of XML tagsâ¦and I kid you not, that XML is plopped into a json. All the efficiencies of the X12 standards are âoelost in translationâ

So there is EDI work, but itâ(TM)s dirty dirty work in 2025

Somewhat tangential, but I can recommend the book âoeReligion for Atheistsâ by Alain de Botton Itâ(TM)s a light read from a now-popular author.
The tldr is that one of the roles religion also plays in a persons life is a sort of grounding, centering role. The various holidays , rituals, and gatherings provide guardrails, direction, foundation and some level of meaning. De Bottons thesis (imo) is that modern world has excised religion from core society, but not replaced it with anything that provides that same framework that human beings apparently need.

My thesis is that it has been replaced by hollow corporate framework â¦say Cinco de Mayo and St Patrickâ(TM)s day â¦buy stuff, drink stuff, etc. And our morality is now guided by social media trends . Innately we realize this is empty, meaningless, negative, but we go along because we need âoesomethingâ. Book is good, give it a read. I really like de Botton

Anyway, RIP St Francis, you brought a new, different, much needed take on the papacy. Perfection is not for mortals, but your time here was good.