But I don't know what you do with people who can't get past the 12-year-old level of thinking of "if you make me pay taxes that's slavery and if you take away Elon musk's hundreds of billions of dollars then my shitty little income and retirement savings are next.."

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%.

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...

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.

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.

For the 20 or 30 employees there...

Modern factories don't need a lot of people. China and India have them because labor it horribly cheap there. With access to slaves in many places.

Trump's own commerce Secretary admitted that even in the factories come back the jobs won't

I'm sorry to hear that. It's a common story, unfortunately. People complain that Gen Z "don't want to work", but it's more accurate to say that they don't have opportunities to work, and when they do get a McJob they have zero loyalty because it's not like working hard there will allow them to progress some sort of career.

There are a few places trying catapults and planes, but they can't carry a lot of weight.

The Soviet Buran spaceplane is probably the model to follow. Unlike NASA's Space Shuttle, it didn't have its own main engines. It only has orbital manoeuvring thrusters, and possible some jet engines for use in the atmosphere when returning to Earth. Instead the whole thing was lifted by a rocket and boosters.

Well, now we can recover the boosters, so you can see where this is going. The rocket was needed for steering, but the boosters can do that now, so maybe it could just be a disposable frame that straps a bunch of boosters to the spaceplane.

These guys are imbeciles. They got rich manipulating a system and being the king rat who managed to do win by survival bias.

This is like we have the world ruled by stiltman and big wheel.

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.

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.

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.

That's the plan. You can't run AI locally, you must pay them to run it in the cloud, on the RAM you can't afford to buy yourself.

I can't really see many companies looking at this hybrid design and deciding it makes economic sense though. You have all the downsides of a fossil fuel engine, all the weight and maintenance and consumables. The electric part is mediocre.

Maybe it makes sense in countries with really shitty infrastructure where supplying electricity is hard or expensive, but in Europe every time sometimes under-estimates battery electric progress, time always proves them wrong.

Gen Z were lied to so frequently that if you tell them something is good for them now, they will probably do the opposite. Only slightly joking.