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

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.

But they're too awful people with hundreds of billions of dollars at their disposal.

They get to decide how you live your life. So that's why we have to pay attention to what they say

Are bickering like children in public. At a certain point you take the gun away from the children. That gun is the stupid amount of money that they have.

You don't have to take the gun away from the child but you don't get to complain when the kids shoots you.

In this case the metaphor means they are going to load your 401K with bogus crap stock that's going to collapse and you're going to be working until you drop dead.

You can only think in terms of individuals owning individual property for individual reasons. That's where you're broken. You probably picked it up from old Cold War propaganda. If you're not in your 60s you're acting like you are...

United States has gobs and gobs and gobs of land and we have these things called power lines where we can have the power generated in one place and used in another. We could easily build massive wind and solar farms that would be quiet, no matter how many times orange people tell you don't kill birds, and could give you all the electricity you could ever want for so little money that it's effectively free because the economic output from that much cheap electricity far exceeds the cost of the taxes needed to maintain it.

That's the other thing I can't seem to get folks with your line of thinking to understand. Yes it is free. If I do something to cost me $100 and I make $1,000 because of it that's free. The laws of thermodynamics don't apply in A system that isn't closed.

And that is the other problem with your thinking that is being exploited by people who want to steal your property. Rich people who want to steal your property. You're thinking in terms of black and white and simple straightforward cause and effect and results. You've been encouraged to think like this. By the aforementioned Cold War propaganda.

I've seen a lot of different figures thrown around but it's definitely under 20 million in total. Wildly successful game, no Wall Street doubling the budget so they can pocket 20 or 30 million dollars off of somebody else's work.

The problem here is we have parasites who have taken over our economy. Grifters like Elon Musk. The scale of the grift has gotten too big. Kleptocracy combined with kekistocracy. It's not sustainable. You can't have a trillionaire who is never invented anything in his life and has a team of people at each of his businesses whose job is to prevent him from making decisions. That kind of incompetence is basically Nero burning Rome.

At some point we are either going to have everything collapse after everything is taken away from us and our property is stolen or we're going to put adults in charge again. Boring annoying frustrating adults.

It's a holdover from the 60s. It was one part of a much broader movement that included a shitload of effort fighting voter suppression.

The current tactic for the corporations and the Epstein class is to just prevent just enough people from voting to get whatever the hell they want.

Because of winner take off first past the post voting all they have to do is get 51% of the vote and they can have anyone they want running the show and it doesn't matter what you think or what you want.

About 30% of any given country is batshit insane. There are studies showing why basically it's overactive fear responses. Another 15% can easily be confused by propaganda. From there you just need 7 hour wait times to vote, periodically arresting people on minor drug charges and taking away their rights, and a small army of old people with nothing better to do challenging signatures and registrations illegally. Blammo you're at 51%.

So politically it literally does not matter what you do or all you're dumb little protests. But shit those protests are fun aren't they?

I see this from the left wing all the time. They throw a block party and they call it a protest and they act like they've actually accomplished something. Remember those new Kings protests? The only thing anyone remembers from those is they got to work late that day....

It's the difference between professionals and hobbyists. The people in this article are just hobbyists having fun. So they are completely ineffective because they're using tactics from the 1960s that are opposition adapted to in the 1970s.

What's frustrating is the sheer number of people especially around here who somehow think they're in the in group. Everybody keeps forgetting, it's a big club but you ain't in it