"And this is clearly a sign of how incompetent their Democrat governor is. I'm sending in the National Guard now!!!!! Oh, it's a Republican governor. Well it's clearly evidence of how desperate those Democrats are to rig the next election. They're traitors!!!! and I want them locked up."

No no, the numbers are great, the greatest numbers we've ever seen. It's all the fault of those woke business owners who are deliberately not hiring people just to try and make Trump look bad. No doubt those woke employers were put there by Biden as well and it's also all his fault.

Or they will have a whole heap of partly built power infrastructure that is just abandoned. Takes years to get that stuff built. Will the bubble burst before they are completed?

I'm suspecting this is where we are headed but we don't have the shiny new technology fad to move onto yet. (I'm just waiting for someone to mash up AI and blockchain, imagine how much hype you could muster up over that)

This may work in the short term as we have an existing pool of experienced programmers that can take on higher roles and evaluate the code put out by these AI. Over time however those people will dwindle and if we don't have the entry level jobs training up the next generation of experienced programmers then this could lead to a conundrum.
Will we be so accustomed to AI slop by then that we just accept the inefficient / bloated / potentially error prone in interesting ways code it produces as good quality and the enshitification of our products will accelerate (without our even realising)?
Idiocracy here we come!!!

I believe that this falls into the same category as eliminating paper straws and disencouraging EV's.
His wealthy oil donors need a market for the oil that they want to "drill baby drill".
I think the general gist is to create an environment that needs more fossil fuels to create a market for his mates.

What I would love to see is for Meta to claim that it was the AI that made them do it. Blame the AI and then claim that because they were just following the AI's orders it is the AI that should be sent to jail. And they didn't read any of the content, only the AI did so it should be the one to be punished.
And to show just how angry we are with the AI, here, we put it on an SSD, you can take it and put it in jail for the next 2000 years.

I'd take his comments with a grain of salt but he could be not far off.
As a population, we are arguably getting dumber, so we are helping to meet AI halfway.

No,

What you have to realise is that Disney has already created 'Hour of Code' activities which are really not much more than adverts for Disney franchises. In fact, incredibly effective adverts as you have to interact with them. Now they want those "adverts" to be a part of every students classwork all the time so encouraging all students to have to learn to code/ have to play with your adverts is incredibly powerful.

I really believe Disney couldn't give a stuff about coding. This is just more greed and just another way to make education the marketing arm of yet another corporation.

This seems to me like it was designed to look good PR wise but never actually succeed. Which seems to be the case with a lot of these "teach the kids to code" schemes.

I live in Australia and I would like to see us go down a similar path.

If the UK proves it works I really hope it spreads elsewhere and also leads to the end of the massive profits these companies are amassing. I'm sure there profits will still be quite sizable but this should make it a bit more reasonable. I'm not an economist so correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems many countries are not in the best of financial states at the moment and each of these corporations taking $billions each quarter out of economies without realistically contributing back is a contributing factor in this? If this type of taxing spreads globally it could be a big factor (amongst several others) in getting economies back on track?

Something I have sometimes thought about is what happens when all these jobs are replaced?

If a large amount of the population doesn't have work, and a significant other chunk is worried it may soon join it. Then they either don't have money to spend, or are scared to spend what little they have. Once this gets over a certain point then businesses lose a large amount of their paying customers, leading to further job losses, and falling profits and snowballing the situation. Governments also lose out as revenue from taxes decreases sharply (and as such may not be able to support the unemployed). Those who do have the money are also particularly good at not giving it to the government.

What happens then? Do governments collapse and the uber wealthy step in and say 'we are your new overlords'? We effectively go back to monarchy?
Or do we have massive uprisings as this time we don't have uneducated peasants at the bottom but somewhat educated people who can understand what is happening and also use technology to collaborate? Do new companies spring up, willing to offer products at reaonable prices and take business away from the greedy ones? Does traditional currency get set aside and replaced with new ones, causing a reset and effectively destroying the wealth of the wealthy? Or something completely different, taking into account factors I've missed?

My guess is that they will get some ads put together with catchy jingles and get some media attention with *experts* praising how great it is and how it frees you from those *evil* Google and Apple folk (who we already know are intent on farming your information) and also will lead to cheaper prices. Then they will get their partners to run a heap of specials in store for using CurrentC for the first few months. A large chunk of Joe averages will sign up to get the specials and after a while the habit is formed.

Yes, most people in the tech community are concerned and understand why they should be but the majority of people aren't in the tech community and unfortunately probably don't care about security because that *expert* on TV told them it was very safe and, more importantly, they got to save a few dollars.

It will be interesting to see how Google and Apple retaliate (and I really hope they do in some way).

Indeed. It also potentially starts setting a dangerous precedent. Once other corporations see the benefits of "donating" like this they will want to do more of it. It wouldn't surprise me to see the government happily oblige and also reduce the funding it provides, as incentive. This continues and the corporations will soon be making quite meaningful "donations". With that will come some very strong influence over how things are run and I'm sure it will be to their benefit as opposed to ours.

Soon enough it won't be the corporations not paying their taxes to the government but the government not paying it's rent to the corporations.

That's interesting as we are actually having the opposite to your experience in the school I work at.

The teachers (mostly) think they are great

Before students had these devices they had pen and paper. Now they have a device that does word processing, spreadsheets, basic multimedia, communication (email, video chat etc), has access to a wealth of information through the internet for research, access to our online learning environment and more. A lot of activities that are great for education across every subject and that they couldn't do prior with pen and paper. And it does all these activities rather well and because it is low powered it easily lasts a whole day without recharging (with the model we have). This last point is really important as it alleviates the problem of a mess of cables for people to trip over etc but it also allows people to move around a lot easier than when they are tethered which is good for collaboration exercises.

Of course it doesn't do cad and multimedia and all that other fancy stuff. That is what our labs are for and in our opinion a desktop with a 20 something inch screen and a mouse and that is plugged into power permanently is much better for doing those tasks than even a high end laptop.

Actually you can do cad and multimedia and a lot of that other stuff on these devices. There are web based options for many of these things. Sure they aren't as powerful but for teaching the theory and concepts you shouldn't need the full blown tools (unless you are a poor teacher who doesn't understand the theory and concepts well enough and can only teach a product which you yourselves were taught on.) For instance we teach students cad with Tinkercad.com and they easily transfer those skills over to AutoCad in later years.

From a management point of view they are awesome. Way fewer breakdowns than with traditional laptops and when they do, a lot of the time a Power Wash and the student is back up and running in a matter of minutes. If it's hardware we loan them another device, they log in and are off and running again in a few minutes, and again when they get their repaired device (or a replacement) back.

I really hate this argument that a device that is easy to manage and offers many things they didn't have before (with just pen and paper) which are of value and which this device does really well, and is actually quite well priced, is useless because it doesn't do some other things which are specialised and for which we already have better devices doing those tasks anyways.