Raw data is here: Department of labor raw data
Here is a paper on the topic
1. Expand "Disclosure Data"
2. Scroll down to "OFLC Programs and Disclosures"
3. Row titled "Prevailing Wage"
4. Download PW_Worksites_FY2025_Q3_new_form.xlsx
You can filter by job, location, and employer name. I just filtered by SOC_TITLE containing "Software" and the range is from 47,424 to 226,158, avg = 131,800.

Also: H1-B visa applications by employer.
The top are: Amazon, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Tata consulting, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Deloitte, Walmart

If you bought one of these things, you deserve it. :)

This reminds me of a story too. I was working at a place just rolling out Microsoft Office 365 and the whole 2 factor authentication thing. We started looking at the devices people had registered for MFA. Obviously, you mostly had various smartphones and a few people even used iPads or other tablets. But this one guy had a Samsung smart fridge as his device. He explained that, "I work from home and have a desk in the kitchen. So it's easy to confirm the authentication from the refrigerator screen. And this way, I know I won't just lose it someplace like I might lose my phone!"

But seriously, I really dislike this trend of making basic home appliances Internet connected and/or computerizing them needlessly. My old Black & Decker 4 slice toaster finally gave out on us last week. I was shocked by how much a new toaster costs now! I was expecting to run out and grab something for maybe $20 or so? Nope! Many of the highly rated models are well over $200! The cheapest I could find was about $45, for one at Costco that has 2 digital strips down the front. One side lights up with icons of toast, in various levels of darkness, and the other depicts all the different foods you mgiht toast; bagels, waffles, pastries, toast...

We got it home and tried it out, and guess what? When you select toast with a darkness of "3 out of 6", shown as a medium brown? It absolutely burns it! The lightest setting just ejects warm, untoasted bread. I couldn't find any point to a setting on the thing other than the second-lightest one! Highly inaccurate. All of this seems really unnecessary, when the light/dark knob on my old toaster worked just as it was supposed to.

Agreed: The first one is a policy based on real economic reality. The second one is an unsupported conspiracy theory which ignores the reality that US companies that do the exact same thing.

The machines that can run Windows 10 but not 11 really have no legitimate reasons they're incapable of using 11. It's generally artificial barriers put up by Microsoft because the chips lack a feature or two they're trying to make a new standard.

In a few cases, it's literally nothing more than an oversight! My co-worker was just telling me about a specific model of Xeon CPU he's got that has some long "sub-model" vs a simple model number like 5360 or 5500 or what-not. It has every single function in it that Microsoft says is needed by Win 11, yet you can't put 11 on it. Why? Only because Microsoft neglected to list its specific model/sub-model in its database it uses to determine the machines capable of installing 11 on them.

If they want all these people off Windows 10, they could design 11 so it runs more like 10, with a few of the features disabled that require the instructions the older CPUs lack, when it detects those processors.

Apple did this with iOS multiple times already. A new iOS version still runs on older phones but with a few features disabled if those specific features need the newer phone's CPU to work.

On one hand, every parent of kids or teens today has to feel the struggle with social media influencing their journey to adulthood. Sometimes it's just a harmless fad that generates a ton of sales for some useless toy or gadget. But often, it's about the added complexity of a world where their "friends" can be people anywhere in the world who they only communicate with online, and who parents are often powerless to "vet". It's about questions of "bullying" and how far an institution like a public school can really reach to address it, when it starts happening online. It's about uncertainties of whether all the "screen time" creates real mental or physical health threats.

But when it comes to technologies like a chat bot? I don't think there should be these legal expectations that they do such things as guiding people to other resources to get help for the issues they talk to them about. I don't even think the authors of these chat bots necessarily considered the idea a pre-teen would confide everything in one and treat it as their "only true friend"? As a rule, they're harmless as long as they're not actively suggesting adult or illegal activities, so giving them "age ratings" of 12+ makes perfect sense.

Troubled kids or teens need to be given REAL help and warned away from relying on automated AI solutions.

You are 100% correct.

For human interactions, the LLM seems random not only because most interfaces set the temperature to a nonzero value, but also because seemingly irrelevant changes such as spacing or punctuation will change the LLM output.

allo literally defined it in the post:

Ha! Same thing I thought. The reality, whether you're talking New Orleans or anyplace else is -- the money gets spent to repair and protect the areas that bring in the most continued wealth. Racism has nothing to do with this.

If you have an area that's full of tourist traffic or that continually draws in the super-wealthy for amenities like the great golf courses or waterfront or ?? You've got an area that generates enough revenue, it cost-justifies having to rebuild there occasionally when natural disasters strike.

Everyone else is living there at their own risk, really.

To be honest, I noted LONG ago that "withdrawing cash from out-of-network ATMs likely has a fairly big cost" and tried to avoid it. I never kept up with exactly what those fees were, after that. I simply learned to plan ahead better. If I need cash, I tend to take it out from my own bank or credit union and if I need it broken up into smaller bills? I try to spend it someplace that has to give me cash back on the purchase.

Last I checked though, most big credit unions are part of a cooperative network so you can use any of their ATMs without any fees (at least up to, say, 20 transactions per month).

I have a hard time seeing how this could possibly succeed as well. Yes, it feels unfair to the consumer, but also yes the seller agreed to it in exchange for being on such a huge platform.
Should we make such contracts illegal? yes. Are they already? no.

You mean Andy right? Since he replaced Bezos as CEO a while back...

Can we step back and look at a slightly bigger picture? I mean, come on.... if Trump had anywhere NEAR the amount of influence some of you pretend he does, we'd already be a very different country than we are. If anything, the fact he's been elected twice now and if I turn off the news, I hardly notice anything is different in my daily life tells me the President is far more of a "figurehead" than I used to realize.

No .... if anything? I think America may be experiencing a recession/recovery cycle that's more shallow and quicker to complete than what we had in the past. For example, we rebounded quickly from everything that happened during COVID, despite unprecedented factors there that harmed small business.

People are generally still afraid of any perceived downturn, but some of that stems from what they know happened in the past -- when a recession was deeper and longer-lived.

America is very much a service economy today, with manufacturing a distant second. That tends to stabilize things to some extent (at the cost of creating more jobs that don't lead to higher-paying career positions). EG. You might have fewer people making 6 figure salaries as tool and die experts, but you also have more people who earn a steady, predictable income doing retail sales or restaurant work, or might be self-employed as a handyman or painter. The rapid changes of supply and demand for hard goods doesn't lead to mass job losses when factories close, etc.

When I was in college (in 1995), this one guy was going on about a free OS that was incredible. All I could think of was, sure, a free OS that is good, what a joke is that going to be. So together with another friend we decided to install this free OS and have a good laugh.
The laugh was on us, it was indeed incredible, offering multitasking, multi user, memory protection, the cli was so powerful, and on top of all that, all the code was open.

they are competing against the Valve SteamDeck, which is their main worry as it could interrupt the dominance of Windows as the main pc gaming OS.

Just like what happened when the US government purchased GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac?
(I actually agree with your points, but this reply is the obligatory counter to your post and needs to be addressed.)