There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

And it's happening whether you want it to or not. It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work. Over half of Americans are white collar workers and the prospect of replacing them with automation is to tantalizing to give up.

Even if only a third of this crap works you're looking at permanent 20% unemployment on top of the typical 5% that the economy floats around. And that's pretending we are at full employment by pretending gig work is full-time work and ignoring underemployment and the millions of people who just gave up looking for work and the ever-increasing number of homeless people.

As a reminder world War II started with 25% unemployment.

I don't think there's a solution. We are just going to put too many people out of work and we're not putting everybody out of work all at once. This means the people who still have jobs are going to fight it out with the people who are now completely economically useless to society. In the middle will be the trillionaires consolidating their power.

I suspect eventually we will hand the nuclear launch codes to some religious lunatics and then it's game over. It is possible the trillionaires will simply create their techno feudal nightmare as well.

But I do not know how you overcome the concept of, if you don't work you don't eat. That is so deeply ingrained in people and there's nothing more infuriating than watching somebody stay at home playing Xbox drinking beer and getting laid when you're putting in 60 hours a week at a shit job you hate. No amount of logic or reason and no amount of telling you to start asking why you're working so hard for so little will change the emotional knee-jerk reaction or the ability for those trillionaires to point you at the unemployable and get you the fight with them crabs in a bucket style.

And this is before all the other social problems with employment collapsing, like how men traditionally are valued as providers and that role is becoming obsolete or how we have tons and tons of people who are just not ever going to be able to hack it academically but that we have absolutely no use for... Especially in a country that refuses to fund infrastructure which is pretty much all countries.

If somebody wants to suggest a specific way out of this trap besides just dismissing this as Doom and gloom I would be happy to hear it. I have noticed that people have stopped accusing me of being a luddite. It's too obvious that the storm is coming at this point to pretend it's not.

Everyone just seems to be hoping they die before the shit hits the fan. But I think it's coming too fast. Even some of the baby boomers aren't going to escape it anymore. You can't have shit like a data center in Utah sucking down more electricity than the entire state and not have consequences that are immediate and devastating for the surrounding communities

It's a question of what you traded that money for or what your neighbors traded it for.

So when people go to vote they have a hierarchy of issues they use to pick what's most important to them.

This is why you have Trump sitting at a 40% approval rate in polling averages but a 70% disapproval rate on the economy. People prioritize different issues or just confidence in the man versus what they can see happening day-to-day with their own eyes...

The most common and Stark example of this are people who prioritize moral panics over economic issues. So somebody who votes for a political candidate who is going to cut services they desperately need because that political candidate promises to protect them from trans girls in sports or ethics in game journalism or the woke mind virus or whatever the current mortal panic is. Back in my day it was violent video games and before that satanic rock music... Kind of miss those days.



They also have a hierarchy of information. Everybody hits an information limit at some point. I haven't dug into the particulars of how the Democrat party apparatus works for example although I know I should because it's important to understand. Compare that to a much much lower information voter I'm better able to make informed decisions.

So the basic problem is people will trade money and privacy for addressing moral issues and that people have varying amounts of information they have access to and can process.

Fundamentally improves education with an emphasis on critical thinking would fix this but the problem is parents don't like that. Little Johnny gets taught how to dismantle arguments and systems and he comes home and points the skills that whatever sacred cow the parents have, most commonly religion but also a variety of incorrect political views or moral views.

Parents want their kids to have enough thinking skills that they can get a good job and avoid being scammed but not so many that they can no longer relate to their children. They don't want schools creating a generational gap. In some extreme cases like the Jehovah witnesses they have traditionally stopped their members from going to college at all because they lost them so quickly. One of the quickest ways to leave extremist American evangelism is to sit down and actually read the Bible critically...

So every time you see something like this you have to stop and think how did I vote in the last election and what did I trade and what did I get for that trade.

You might say that you did all right but the problem then becomes your neighbors.

And that was the reason why they were pulling them, not the desire for exclusivity.

Pulling them off of PC is actually a problem for Sony because modern AAA games are so expensive to produce that it's difficult for them to be profitable on a single platform. Even when you have the most popular platform out there like Sony does.

I don't think helldivers was ever really designed to be a PlayStation exclusive. Also don't think it was meant to take off like it did. It's closer to a AA game in scope. When you play something like the Horizon games with all the voice acting and cut scenes and incredibly elaborate animation and dozens of different features and options and hyperbalanced gameplay you are looking at something that had a ridiculous budget.

So something like helldivers 2 had somewhere around 50 to 70 million dollar budget versus the 200 million they spend on Horizon Forbidden West.

Also the hell divers games were in development for 8 years, a lot of the budget was just development hell where is the Spider-Man games or the Horizon games cost that much even when the games were making solid progress in development because they were just so freaking huge in scope.

Sony came to the PC hoping to make enough money to make the games themselves profitable or at least break even. It doesn't seem like a modern single player, triple A game can be profitable. Even Grand theft Auto needs to rely heavily on multiplayer content to do it.

There aren't a lot of AAA PC games these days and Sony's releases were some of the few we got and they were all the very high quality.

But this isn't because they're trying to be evil or anything they just aren't selling enough copies to justify the ports.

If the cost of a PS5 was low I could see that because people would just buy the PS5 and not bother with the PC version but with a PlayStation 5 pushing $700 for the base console that doesn't seems like it wouldn't be the case. I don't know the demographics though but the facts of the matter is they aren't selling enough units for anything except the Spider-Man games.

Ever tried running Windows Vista on a minimum spec computer? Painful doesn't even begin to describe it. That's where we're at right now with Windows 11 but at least in the case of Vista they were doing a bunch of fancy modern operating system tricks that brought new features, albeit stupid new features but still they were genuinely trying new features. The hardware at the time couldn't handle that, you really need it about four times as much RAM and an SSD to do what they were doing and that was just too expensive for oems at the time so when does Vista crawled on anything but a high-end gaming PC.

With Windows 11 we've got all that shit performance but absolutely no new features except the operating system spies on me now and feeds all my data into Microsoft's AIs so they can sell co-pilot to my company after firing me. Or at least that's the goal it's debatable whether or not it's going to work out for them but in the meantime my computer runs like shit unless I run Linux or Windows 10 and both of them have issues with games and other complex software...

The basic idea, which their own people have admitted, came from a old Japanese live action TV series called ultra 7 which is in the Ultraman series.

So it's patently ridiculous, pun intended, for them to be trying to get patents on something they didn't come up with on their own. Never mind the obvious ridiculousness of everything about this.

Window 11 is painful to use. Things draw in like I'm on a Pentium 3 with 256mb of RAM.

If you can't spy on me without killing performance don't do it.

You are probably Gen x. Or at least younger boomer. I say that because what you probably experienced is a unique phenomenon only Gen x saw which was a lot of crappy teachers because there was a whole bunch of people who went to college to get out of the Vietnam draft and they just hung out in college until the war was over. When they were done they had to cobble together a degree and a bunch of them went into teaching and they really suck that it. Most of them became history teachers which is why Americans suck so much at knowing history...

Those guys are long gone and anyone left in education is extraordinarily dedicated because the pay really really really sucks especially after that much education. Also you work a lot. You don't have a choice you can't function as a teacher unless you are working your ass off. You are constantly busting your ass on lesson plans and you spend Summers putting them together. The state gives you guidelines not a complete guide and plan to follow. You still have an enormous amount of work to do there on top of grading all the papers and providing tutoring.

Yeah back in the late 80s and early 90s we had a small rash of bad teachers. They are long long gone but as usual old people cannot comprehend the idea of that change happens and it's something that occurred when they were young isn't occurring anymore. Not sure why old people do that but they all do. I do it too I just try to catch myself doing it and I sometimes fail.

Our institutions have broken down and our democracy is collapsing. We have had several major Court rulings that stripped voting rights from millions and millions of Americans. Our courts have repeatedly ruled that the right wing extremists in charge right now can gerrymander but the moderates who oppose them cannot.

If you have a national Congress and one state steals votes from millions of their voters it's up to the other states to correct that. But the courts of course have been captured by those right wing extremists so here we are.

More importantly you have county level voters suppression. Basically you have a network of volunteers made up of little old ladies and little men combined with middle-aged dudes trying to climb the ladder in the Republican party. They do things like millions of illegal challenges to voter signatures or registrations and take over local voting infrastructure and send broken voting machines to Blue districts resulting in multi-hour wait times to vote on election Day.

Basically at the moment America is barely a democracy. If the right wing really fucks the economy up then the public at large can still take them out of power but it requires a super majority to do it.

It's possible that the right wing will fuck up so fast and so hard that the public won't finish letting them have everything and finish killing democracy but it's still a long shot right now. If the rest of the world wants to help you could spend a few hundred million or billion on propaganda to counteract Russian media propaganda... But you're ruling class doesn't want that. The collapse of the American democracy is also collapsing America hegemony and Europe is hoping to take over as the leader of the world and get their currency to replace the dollar. If that happens their guys get to be the first trillionaires instead of ours. And at the end of the day that's what all this is about

Iran has demonstrated they can take 1/5 of the global economic output off the table and there is fuck all anyone can do about it.

We haven't quite got to the point where we are willing to use nuclear weapons for the sake of convenience. As terrible as we can be we aren't really willing to let Trump genocide an entire country and I don't think the rest of the world is either. And nothing else would allow us to stop them from closing the straight.

Trump gave them something better than a nuclear bomb. He showed the world that Iran is in control of the street and that there isn't really a hell of a lot anyone can do about that unless we are willing to kill millions of women and children.

I know there are some people here that absolutely are. Especially if it means affordable gas. But they are very much still the minority.

Iran won't just sit on its thumbs either. The United States really fucked up when it took out Iraq and Afghanistan for no particularly good reason. It really showed the world unless you have something on the order of a nuclear weapon that you're not a country you're a vassal state. The same thing happened with Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.

What I ran has shown here is that you can have something just as if not more devastating than a nuclear weapon and we have Trump to thank for that.

Honestly by the time the great negotiator is done I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't a vassal state of the Islamic Republic. This is the guy who bankrupted casinos and couldn't sell alcohol and gambling to Americans after all.

Why did you make a pedophile president of the United States?

Anyway as for how it'll be turned against you, have you not noticed all your civil rights being eroded? Like how did gerrymandering is making it so they don't need to care about how you vote anymore. Eventually you're going to want to try to do something more radical like protest or just some generic violence and none of that's going to work because with a 24/7 surveillance state you won't be able to use any of the traditional mechanisms for dealing with the collapse of democracy and getting things back on track.

Your ruling class that you seem to think you're a member of for some reason is going to use all that tracking to make sure you stay in your lane like a good little slave. Like in China you'll be woken up at 3:00 in the morning and given some weak tea and biscuit for your 14-hour shift.

Eventually they'll be completely tired of using you at all having replaced you with machines and he will be relegated to the kind of life the American Indians had on the reservations before the casinos. If you get uppity they will send drones to blow you in the kingdom come. If you even show signs of developing past bronze age technology they will wipe you out just to be on the safe side. Basically treating you like vermin at that point.

But it's fine I'm sure any day now you're going to get rich and be hobnobbing in the Jeffrey Epstein memorial ballroom at the White House... And you'll be able to join Trump and company on the new Epstein Island. You're certainly not just some schlub posting to a dying or frankly dead website

Catching the occasional murderer isn't worth a 24/7 super surveillance Network right?

The thing is people who think that it is worth it aren't going to speak up here or even look at the comments.

One of the things I'm seeing among the right wing is that they know that their beliefs are wrong and that they will be hurt by implementing them but they want them so badly that they are withdrawing into safe spaces where their never challenged.

And I mean never challenged. Not even for a brief second. Because the right wing has become so cartoonishly evil that the slightest challenge breaks the spell like The emperor's New clothes.

You can't reach them anymore. Maybe their families could but they've cut themselves off from their families too. It's why people keep calling the right wing a cult.

So when you are an adult you don't go pointing fingers at a problem you just fix the goddamn problem.

Accountability sounds cool until everybody starts fighting amongst themselves uselessly like crabs in a bucket.

You don't go blaming people you recognize the problem and fix it.

Only as I described on another post we can't do that because the problem is structural.

Specifically we used to just kick low academic achievers to the curb and that was okay because we had factories for them to work in where they could make a living. Those factories are stuffed with robots or overseas. So we can't do that anymore.

So we aren't abandoning them because we frankly can't, you can't have millions of young kids with absolutely nothing to do sitting around waiting for nothing. If all else fails they'll get violent. And you don't have the testicle fortitude to just kill them out right.

So here we are with the problem and absolutely no solution. Any solution that actually would solve the problem isn't acceptable to you

So you point fingers. Doesn't solve the problem but it does let you temporarily avoid facing real solutions for a bit longer. Keep it up for another few decades and you'll get to die without actually having to recognize the problem or its potential solutions. And that's basically the American dream now.

A lot of times you're going to find kids are using social media because they don't have opportunities to interact in the real world.

Suburbs are isolating as are cars and car based cities. At least for anyone who doesn't themselves own a car.

Cars have become ludicrously expensive so that fewer and fewer kids actually have access to them. Remember it's not enough to have your license you need to actually have reliable and ready access to an automobile so you can get around. It doesn't help that your parents probably can't lend you the car on Saturday because they're at work picking up an extra shift to make rent this month.

You can't even tell the little shits to just go get a part-time job because they're competing with people in their 50s to work at McDonald's and McDonald's is going to pick the 50-year-old because they know that person has to show up to work whether they want to or not.

So what you are most likely seeing is just poor kids versus the rich kids. The poor kids make heavy use of social media because that's the only mechanism for socialization they have outside of lunch time or a 3-hour bus ride.

Honestly it's always been a bit of a problem we've complained about teenagers hogging the phone for years. It's another one of those problems we don't like to acknowledge because fixing it will require huge structural changes that would bite into the profits of car companies and fuck if we're going to do that.