It's almost like the solution is to strip away all of the automation and do this stuff in person! If it's not worth employers meeting applicants IRL, maybe their jobs aren't worth filling in the first place?
Flying around the country to apply in person costs a lot of money, and I'd be surprised if most recent graduates can afford that plus the minimum student payment on Walmart wages.
The only way to hire is to interview candidates and then see how they do in the 90-day probationary period. An in-person interview is the only way you are going to be able to get a feeling for how someone is going to integrate into your team anyway.
"In-person"? How do most companies afford to fly candidates in for an in-person interview?
See: "Old Western TV Show Predicts Trump"
Excerpts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"A 1958 episode of the Western TV show "Trackdown" features a con man named Trump who comes to town and promises that he alone can save the townspeople from the end of the world. He is accused of being a fear-mongering snake oil salesman and they try to stop him, but Trump threatens to sue. Then the high priest of fraud promises to build a wall! The episode is called "The End of the World"."
Sounds a lot like what some AI company CEOs are also doing according to the article -- by using fear mongering to control the narrative and concentrate wealth? Of course, sometimes fears are well-founded, so it is a complex issue. AI could become a destructive force -- even as Alfie Kohn suggests more nuance and understanding "projection":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/blog...
"Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
"Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?...When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.... Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that's the attitude they adopted....The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own."
The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they're warning us about AI, but what they're actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches."
That said, some of the Trump administration's ostensible initiatives or ideals make sense to me (e.g. questioning the H1-B visa, emphasizing re-shoring manufacturing, questioning a dysfunctional sick-care system, questioning the ~65 million aborted US Americans and more for kids they might have had in turn since Roe v. Wade -- even as there is legitimate debate about what to do about all these issues and whether Trump administration (and "Project 2025") policies might make ultimately make some of these concerns worse -- same as with AI as in this article).
Dialogue Mapping with IBIS (perhaps AI-assisted) is a way for small groups of people to productively visualize and explore the thought landscape of such "wicked problems" in a productive way. A talk I gave on that:
https://cognitive-science.info...
And Trump undoubtedly has been over the years a very smart, charismatic, and humorous guy -- even if his humor is sadly often of the harming variety instead of the healing variety. From:
https://www.humorproject.com/d...
"Taking Humor Seriously
By Joel Goodman
"There are three things which are real:
God, human folly, and laughter.
The first two are beyond our comprehension.
So we must do what we can with the third." (John F. Kennedy)"
Although joke-telling is one way to transmit humor, it's not the only way. In fact, there are literally thousands of ways to invite smiles and laughter in addition to joke-telling. So, if joke-telling is not your forte or if it is inappropriate for you to become the stand-up comic on-the-job, then there are alternatives. Here are four tips to get you going:
Humor is often an antidote to excessive fear. We've had the potential to become a humor-powered post-scarcity society for decades or maybe even centuries or millennia, but politically-rooted scarcity fears have held humanity back (for good or bad).
Related is my ironic-humor-pivoting sig which applies to AI as well as many other technologies ranging from nuclear energy to just the humble transistor: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Although, as the book "Abundance" written "by liberals, for liberals" suggests, there are many aspects of the current US political order that impede effective solutions by emphasizing legalistic process over desirable results (and a different approach to making such decisions is one reason China is pulling way ahead of the USA in many areas). The book's authors suggest providing subsidies to people using systems unable to grow due to dysfunctional rules just results in essentially artificial scarcity and inflation (examples include housing, transportation, energy, and medical care):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, there is some legitimate righteous anger at bureaucratic dysfunction which Trump has harnessed for political gain. The deep question is, as Mr. Fred Rodgers' sang, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" Something similar could be sang about "fear". Trump is one answer to such a question, but there are presumably other possible answers...
A Twitter-branded Mastodon instance
It'd have to support full-text search by default. Mastodon, last I checked, was still in practice stuck with tags-only search that fails unless both the poster and searcher manage to correctly #GuessTheHashtag. I've read that Mastodon added in version 4.2.0, but I've never got it to work because it's not the default: the posting user has to deliberately seek out how to opt into full-text search before sending posts, and the administrator of the searcher's instance has to spend a lot more money for a much larger VPS with the RAM for Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
As John Taylor Gatto suggests in "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher": https://www.informationliberat...
"
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day it should be little wonder we have a real national crisis, the nature of which is very different from that proclaimed by the national media. Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the twenty-first century cannot concentrate on anything for very long; they have a poor sense of time past and time to come. They are mistrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we have divorced them from significant parental attention); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which, through its hidden curriculum, prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children, our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that actually dared to teach the use of critical thinking tools -- like the dialectic, the heuristic, or other devices that free minds should employ -- would last very long before being torn to pieces. School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith."
So most teachers earn their money doing well what it is teachers are supposed to do (as planned in Prussia in the 1800s when compulsory schooling was introduced to make Prussia a military power).
https://odyssey-fm.com/why-sch...
https://metropolis.cafe/2017/0...
https://dukereportbooks.com/bo...
"The Prussian Blueprint
In tracing the roots of American education, Gatto illuminates the foundational influence of Prussian schooling. In 19th-century Prussia, the state constructed a comprehensive education system to mold loyal, obedient subjects. The purpose was explicit: to instill uniformity, suppress individuality, and ensure that children would grow into citizens who followed orders. America adopted this model eagerly, not because it worked educationally, but because it aligned with elite interests.
This importation was neither organic nor public-driven. It was orchestrated by a coalition of industrialists, politicians, and academic theorists who viewed schooling as a tool to engineer society. They believed in planned progress and social stability, achieved not through democratic participation but through controlled upbringing."
So, the big -- and usually unacknowledged -- issue is that what teachers (and schools) are supposed to do (turn kids into obedient dumbed-down low-initiative robots for industry and warfare cannot fodder) is no longer something our society needs (if it ever did) or wants.
Until people accept compulsory schools are doing exactly what they were designed to do, and are doing it very well, it is hard to have a productive discussion about changing -- or abolishing -- them. And likewise, it is hard to have a productive discussion about how educational computing should be used in schools when compulsory schooling has very little to do with education.
As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?"
AI is just one more aspect of that trend of post-scarcity technological change, as (AI-based) one-on-one tutoring is now cheap (or effectively free if you are paying for AI access for other reasons).
Indeed, educational videos on-demand to reflect current interests and needs via YouTube or elsewhere are another example of how compulsory schooling is increasingly obsolete.
Thanks for the Alfie Kohn link. He is an amazing insightful compassionate writer whose words have shaped some of my beliefs. John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Pat Farenga, and Grace Llewelyn are some other writers who have shaped my beliefs on education -- as are stories from sci-fi writers like James P. Hogan (e.g. "Voyage from Yesteryear"), R.A. Lafferty ("Primary Education of the Camiroi"), and Ursula K. Le Guin ("Always Coming Home", "A Wizard of Earthsea") and others.
Almost everything has pros and cons, and it is true that free schools or progressive schools have some benefits. Sadly, as I wrote here circa 2009:
https://pdfernhout.net/towards...
"See, that is the false choice -- suggesting you either confine a child to [school as] prison or they will commit their first violent crime and have to be imprisoned [as a truant]. That is a very dim view of human nature, neighborhoods and families. Yet, it is a self justifying view, in part destroying the very neighborhood fabric it claims to be defending. So, we are left with streets that are safe because there are no people on them. We have successfully destroyed the village in order to save it, using compulsory schooling instead of napalm."
One reason given for sending a child to compulsory school is so they will be around kids their own age -- ignoring that the only reason there are not kids their own age around during the weekday is precisely because of compulsory school (and even on weekends there is homework and then making up for missed family time during the week due to schooling which tend to keep kids indoors).
As a former high school debater, I especially like this point by Aife Kohn on the dark side of debate training from the page you linked to:
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
"Kohn: I grew up in Miami Beach, Florida, a very odd place, where the median age was deceased. I went to a large public high school, which was an intellectual wasteland. I didn't do sports. I had elements of competitiveness to be sure - in punning, for example. But in high school I was a nationally ranked debater. And although I was winning and liking it, it took me years to unlearn the poisonous messages I was taught: that any argument can be successfully defended if you're clever enough. And that winning is what counts most. I still describe myself today as a recovering debater. Sports carries with it its own set of problems, but competition is not limited to that. So when people say we need academic awards, debates, science competitions, and national spelling bees, what I hear them saying is, "Well, we destroy the athletes by turning their lives into an attempt to defeat everyone in sight - why shouldn't we do that to everyone else, too?""
And from the end:
"Thuermer: If you had to reinvent yourself tomorrow, Alfie, what would you do?
Kohn: I think if my career takes a turn in the next ten years, it's likely that I'll be thinking about raising kids and helping parents rethink the tendency to treat kids like pets. People have come up with cleverer ways of getting compliance - getting the kids to do what the parents want - as opposed to helping kids become responsible, caring, reflective people who can make decisions, who are socially skilled. Now that I'm a parent, this is increasingly an issue for me. A lot of it just deals with the fundamental lack of respect for children in this culture."
I quoted Alfie Kohn here (in 2008) from his "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" book in "Post-Scarcity Princeton" critiquing Princeton University and suggesting how that institution could improve:
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"[Alfie Kohn's words:] If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities.
I get the impression that a company like ADP requires that an employer employ at least some minimum number of employees in an area. Otherwise, ADP appears to fall back to printing paper checks for the employer to mail. I don't know the specifics; I just know that I got ADP paper at one job after a bunch of layoffs, and I got ADP paper when I was the only remote worker in a particular state.
as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
"... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change.
That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks.
Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit?
However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators.
Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do?
So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)?
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
In my experience at my last three jobs (in the midwestern USA), small businesses that don't have enough employees in an area have to print and mail paper payroll checks instead of paying their employees through direct deposit.
Their financials certainly look like they're in dire straits.
It seems Warner can't catch a break. Time Warner's financials were in dire straits in 2004 as well with a load of debt from the AOL merger. That time, they paid their debt by selling Dire Straits and the rest of Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman Jr.
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned) with manually-tuned slight variations to their shapes to make them fit next to each other in a character.
you could still [write Japanese] in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.
Exclusive use of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) was common in games for MSX, Famicom, and other 8-bit platforms. The one problem with that is the sheer number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese, words spoken the same and written differently. Kana normally don't even distinguish which syllable a word is accented on, which would be like writing Chinese without its tones. Yet somehow Korean avoided this and switched from Chinese characters (Hanja) to a suitable phonetic alphabet (Hangul).
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man. -- Kronecker
