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Comment Re:What a horrible idea. (Score 3, Insightful) 115

"To cease all production and consign us all to a pre-industrial way of living? "

This is weapons level stupid and or disingenuous. Do you actually think a) that's the point of the suit b) the person who filed it wants that?

It's mostly a bad idea because it will not succeed, and in the current judicial climate (no pun intended) of the USA may very well set some kind of precent at complete odds with the goal of the lawsuit.

And I say this as somebody who thinks the people behind such a lawsuit are not in it for money or notoriety or whatever. People can be driven by emotion for certain things that are right - you know, like if your mom died on a night that was substantially warmer than you remember experiencing when you were a kid. Suing oil companies could *very well* help with "the transition" as you call it, if only to decimate their ability to lobby for policy - people really don't understand how subsidized their industry is.

None the less, what appears to really sell right now in the US is antagonization so here we are. It's somehow "our fault" witch to me smacks of somebody who really isn't particularly interested in the larger scale details.

Comment Re:That is not a good sign (Score 1) 141

Uh, debit cards do all those things. Only you don't have to engage in all the "make work" that middlemen loyalty programs incur. You spend money, it comes out of the money you have, it's a card. The merchant doesn't have to pay anybody to run a loyalty program, and then pass the costs on to you. The end.

Comment Re:That is not a good sign (Score 1) 141

So what do you get from using a credit card if you always pay it off? Are you magically always one month behind being able to afford anything?

I'm guessing it's not that. Do you get points? Services? Goodies? I wonder how credit card companies pay for those? Oh yeah, you pay for them - and that's even if you use the stuff that comes "with" credit cards. Truly the ultimate middleman/redistribution scheme.

Comment The Firefly (Score 1) 47

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Comment Re:Yes, but no.. (Score 4, Insightful) 116

It's not clear to me that the people making the hiring/firing decisions, and deciding how many programmers can be replaced by AI, know the difference between the copy-paste coders you're talking about and the people who are doing the harder things.

And, given the way they think, and given the fact that all of us are subject to a whole host of cognitive biases, some places at least are likely to want to keep on the cheap copy-paste types than the more expensive senior programmers.

Short term, things will look good. Quarterly reports will be up. It will take longer for companies to realize that they've made a mistake and everything is going to shit, but because of the emphasis on quarterly returns, plus because all of these companies are caught up on the groupthink bandwagon of the AI evangilists, a lot of them as institutions may not be able to properly diagnose why things went to shit. (Even if individuals within the institutions do.)

I'm in science (astronomy) myself, and the push here is not quite as overwhelming as it is in the private sector. Still, I've seen people who should know better say "an AI can just do that more efficiently".

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