When the new options are demonstrably worse, the change has no clear motivation other than just being for change's sake, and the outcome will lead to a worsening of already poor ability to communicate, then, the answer is, "yes."

No, no, no.

This, this right here, this is enshittification.

There have been many studies at this point showing that exposure to dirt, dust, and dander early in childhood results in low rates of asthma. I'm personally fondest of the one a friend of mine (Hi Dubes!) worked on in Papua New Guinea where they found the westernization of formerly isolated cultures where dirt floors are replaced by cement results in an increase in asthma.

I recall recently hearing of a study where it was determined that when an infant's pacifier falls on the ground, and the parent cleans it by putting it in their own mouth first before returning it to the child, the children end up with substantially stronger immune systems than if the pacifier is cleaned more vigorously.

As with many aspects of developmental biology, we are born with scaffolding that needs to be trained in order to function properly. A lack of that training leads to disease. So, yes, let your kids play in the dirt.

Whether or not workers in a particular segment are unionized is entirely orthogonal to the quality of goods being produced and services being provided.

Enshittification is happening because of many factors, but perhaps the biggest single idea is "move fast and break things." When a company no longer values the customer experience, the customer experience is shitty. That effect has nothing to do with the organizational structure of the company.

Yes, that is true, but the grandparent perhaps was referring to the fact that the user interface on phones is excruciatingly bad for anything other than entertainment and communication. Sure, you might be able to use it in a pinch to do actual work, but for general-purpose productivity, a modern phone would be left in the dust compared even to a laptop from 25 years ago. CPU and memory in a device are not the only factors for productivity. In fact, I'd argue for general use (e.g., writing, spreadsheets, light computations), screen size and keyboard will be the primary factors driving productivity. For anything specialized (e.g., photo / video editing, data analysis, visualization, CAD, etc.), there's no question that the screen size of phones is crippling.

I believe you have that backwards. UBI is exactly about creating dependence; that's why the B stands for "basic", and not S for "standard". UBI is about creating a new version of welfare, larger and more extensive, that will keep even more of society placated in servitude.

I'd normally ignore such a bone-headed comment, but as my career is focused on improving the lives of people with a specific disability, I find I cannot sit idly by.

People in positions like the ones described are not the part of society that can increase their skill set. As a segment, they typically have very, very high unemployment. The particular demographic I work with currently has 75% unemployment in the US. Their disability fundamentally precludes an increasing of their skill sets.

So, instead of assuming that every person can be trained to the New Reality, please seek out products created by or with people who are disabled in one way or another. In doing so, you are improving the lives of people whom the rest of society has quietly forgotten about.

The functionality of both kinds of diapers were comparable for us, especially with a plastic diaper cover over the resuable kind one the kid was active. After a few washes, the cloth diapers become incredibly soft and absorbant. We kept a few that are still used to polish or protect precious items.

For our first kid, we used resuable. Reusable diapers mean you must do laundry every day. Even if you have enough diapers that you can skip a day, longer than that, and the odor becomes intolerable. So, for the most part, it's laundry every frelling day, and you cannot do something like forget to move it to the dryer.

That relentlessness, on top of sleeplessness, on top of full-time job, meant hubby put his foot down for kid number 2, and we switched to disposables. It wasn't about convenience, it was about sanity.

Now, if you are fortunate enough to have someone helping you with your kids for an extended period, perhaps a professional housekeeper, then washables are a viable option.

A book / web site will give you likely better training on new algorithms than an overpriced, needlessly complex gadget (should they ever release a 3x3), and will be more cost-effective. In all, this is a product that won't have much of a market. ... but you'd think about spending hundreds of dollars to get a little better at cube solving? Why not take that money and do something really good with it, like give it to some charitable organization? Even if you just give it to your local elementary school science / tech teacher for supplies, you'll be improving the lives of dozens of kids. You'd be surprised what they can do with a few hundred dollars.

You've got the elements of the answer right in your comment. Workers in Asia mold plastic with machines at the rates of thousands of pieces an hour. Your hypothetical American putz is making widgets by hand.

Manufacturing costs are no longer primarily driven by labor. They're driven by level of automation, where America has fallen far behind.

We can argue until the cows come home as to the effectiveness of an isolationist stance for bringing manufacturing back to the US. The only thing that will drive on-shoring for certain is a sea change in the way US corporations are managed, by de-incentivising short-term gains. There may be some good ideas in that realm, but I haven't heard them yet.

Those are great hypotheses. Now prove them likely true with preliminary evidence that is rigorously collected so that it might be duplicated by others, and then you get a shot at research money. With that research money, you then need to perform additional data collection and hypothesis testing in a way that, again, is rigorous, using tools and techniques that are widely available, so that others can duplicate and extend your findings. And if the additional data you collect shows that you were wrong, then go back to square one.

Why? Because we need to be certain that the answers are correct before spending massive resources on addressing them. Otherwise we're just pissing in the wind.

Additional hypotheses that have been tossed around here include the massive increase in sedentary behaviors that are well-documented, the reduced vitamin D that comes with lack of sunlight exposure, the lower immunological development that comes from reduced social contact, etc. There are lots and lots of hypotheses. Let's see some data.

Me? My money is on low-grade vitamin D deficiency, weakening the immune system.

It's hard to imagine that their stance will survive legal challenge, but with essentially infinite money, they must have good lawyers who have done the relevant risk analyses.

One aspect of which I can imaging being that once they have trained on copyrighted work, it's effectively impossible to *untrain* the network, so they might be required to pay some modest royalty, but will be able to argue that it is technically / financially infeasible to remove said material.

Well, that sounds very much like, "I can't think of a way it could be otherwise, so it must be true." Here are some counter-examples:

Smoked and dried meat keeps indefinitely.
Salted meat keeps indefinitely.
Water in a slightly porous jug is cooled from evaporation, making it more refreshing.
Snow and ice in a clay pot melts into water when near a fire.
Clay pots are excellent for carrying things from point A to point B, no matter what they are.

And that's with 30 seconds of thinking. Thus, I assert that your assumptions are incorrect.

Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."