I don't know about multiplan but word was terrible up through around 97 when it became just barely usable. It wasn't anything I would actually want to use until sometime around 2004 or 2006...

America is in a deep deep recession and we drag the rest of the world down with us. I mentioned it on another comment but Microsoft CEO admitted that they are only expecting 3 to 5% to take the buy out which is about 2 to 3,000 employees. This is cover for firing those 3,000 employees who will be exclusively older employees. In other words it's run of the middle age discrimination. There might be some H1B swaps in there too.

We put in Orange pedophile in charge of the country. Bad things are going to happen and we've got at least two more years of it. After that we need 12 to 16 years of blue rule to clean up this mess and we aren't going to get it...

I found some articles where the CEO talks about the percentage of people he expects to take the deal and it's only 3 to 5%. With 60,000 people even at the top of the range that's only 3000.

That is still significant layoffs clearly indicating we are in a recession. But it's not the insanity of laying off a quarter of your staff.

So what they're doing is they are targeting older employees but they know they're going to get sued and they've been sued several times for targeting older employees and lost. They are hoping the triple whammy of announcing 60,000 offers combined with AI combined with the fact that frankly we are in a recession and you can prove that in court provided you take out the AI spending and that those three things combined will prevent them from getting hit with another judgment for age discrimination.

There is probably also some insourcing and outsourcing going on. Microsoft has been caught multiple times firing American employees and hiring h-1bs.

One of the problems that's stuck out for me when I read the article was that they use layers and layers of contractors before somebody is actually driving a truck.

The reason for that is to avoid legal liability and paying benefits. I think especially the legal liability although it does help that they can underpay the driver's massively. There are examples of drivers making pennies a week because of the scams they run them through.

And God help you if you get hit by a semi.

Every single company involved in it will play a game of not if to avoid paying for your injuries and the shell company that the driver actually is legally working for gets folded immediately. If you get any money out of it it will be much less than you are due, you will settle and you will settle with a company that is a little worried about bad press but not much else.

Is probably already on Firefox. You get the same problem with left-wing politics where they are always preaching to the converted. You do need a little bit of that but it doesn't get you new converts.

What part of one time bonanza didn't you understand?

Also I didn't bring it up but it is telling that most of the plates are out of state...

If I automate 20% of welding jobs wages drop. Supply and demand works both ways

We don't build anything but data centers and that's a one time bonanza at best.

Blue collar guys don't hire other blue collar guys to do jobs they can do themselves, you need white collar guys to keep them employed or you need government infrastructure programs.

We already did away with the latter and now we're killing the former

Legalized age discrimination

Like SpaceX this is structured to drain your 401k. It's not hard to find how and why. No path to profitability and a structure that makes sure the profits are privatized and the losses public.

This is a massive automation push after decades of automation pushes. What's worse this is a massive automation push that goes after high paying White collar jobs.

Furthermore this isn't us building a bunch of washing machines and using a bit more water (I say a bit because hand washing only uses less water if you're being careful about how much you use) Facebook's data center is alone or going to use more electricity than every single household in America. And there is a half dozen other companies planning on doing the same or more. And that's before we talk about water usage. Over and over and over again data centers have lied about how much water they use. It is perfectly possible for them to use less water but it costs more so they don't.

So we have a tech that is going to devour middle class jobs while taking all the water and electricity. Also it's going to spew shitloads of poison into the air because when the inevitably crash the power grid they switch over to gas generators.

I think one of the things folks don't realize is that the reason we were able to stay ahead of the automation curve as long as we did is that we had all this land we could keep expanding into and we were building new cities using government money.

Neither of those two things are true anymore. We are out of land. There is land but it's not usable at least not without massive amounts of what can only be described as terraforming. Nobody is going to pay for that. A private business won't make the money back for a century and nobody's going to take that long to get a return on investment and the government can't do anything anymore because we cut all the billionaire taxes and you can't get taxes from the working class because they're broke after four decades of non-stop automation and outsourcing.

We can't just expand our way out of this mess there's nowhere left to expand into. So we are either going to figure out how to create a cooperative society that doesn't constantly fall for moral panics or we're going to start world War 3 blow up absolutely everything and kill half the population maybe the entire population given that we are about the hand the nukes to religious lunatics.

Oh and while this is happening the tax base is going to collapse from the lack of jobs that pay enough to fund governments and you can say bye-bye to the police that maintain some semblance of order in your community. Always remember you're going to run out of bullets before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose

John Oliver covered the guy he was running against and the guy in question is an open fascist whose father attempted to overthrow the government when he lost his election. This isn't a matter of politics this is a matter of Brazil's democracy surviving one more round. Now it's just a question of whether or not America's will.

Especially in america. The most obvious thing is that the bells were there to train people to work in factories.

But it's pretty well known that the education system was built to make useful workers for the Epstein class. The reason it's sometimes doesn't feel that way is that it's modeled after the education system the Epstein class maintains for themselves which is very much not designed for that purpose. The Epstein class has a completely different education system for their kids designed to teach them critical thinking and a variety of skills associated with stealing money from the lower classes. The critical thinking is especially important to prevent their kids from being taken advantage of and having their money stolen since every member of the ruling elite are crooks and psychopaths.

This is how and why guys like Kim jong-un went to school overseas at fancy schools and it's the same reason mitt Romney went to fancy schools. They're being taught to function in a aristocracy where everyone is going to stab everyone in the back because they are all complete total psychopaths. The ones who aren't get weeded out pretty quick at that level.

Getting back on point the school system has some elements where it's designed to make smarter people with critical thinking skills but those elements are blunted because of a combination of religious parents who don't want their kids coming home with an actual understanding of the holy books and as well as the ruling class wanting pliable useful tools instead of people who can think.

Information is out there if you care to look it up but I warned you it's very very boring. If you think world history is dull try reading the history of the American education system.

This is been extremely well researched. Homework is essentially worthless. There's a very very small amount of homework you can give out each week, not each night each week, that has been shown to be moderately useful.

The real problem here is we have too many people who could be doing useful things but not profitable things.

The homework system and our school system is a sorting system. It's designed to pick out who is going to be useful to the Epstein class. But when you have too many people and the Epstein class just doesn't need that many for their purposes you start introducing shit like homework to decide who gets to be useful in society and who gets to spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid homelessness.

On the other hand it could just be all that avocado toast to those kids are eating. I mean screw experts in education whether they know anyway?

America in 2026 is best summed up with that old Isaac Asimov quote, the one about your ignorance being just as good as my knowledge...

If AI works and it probably eventually will you can basically get rid of every white collar worker in the country except the epstein-class CEOs.

That is trillions of dollars in value. But even ignoring the raw economic value the control and power it gives you is worth any expense.

People keep asking if you don't have jobs who's going to buy their products?

What in Christ's name makes you think that they want to sell you a product? Think about that.

These are borderline gods who are completely dependent on your fickle whims as a consumer. Imagine a king or an emperor living like that. They couldn't it's why they lost to the merchant class.

This level of automation is the first step to putting us back to feudalism and the divine right of kings. It eliminates the connection between the Epstein class and you as a consumer and employee.

This is why Facebook is planning on more data center energy use then every single house in this country. They are sick and tired of you having civilization and having any say in Civilization. It belongs to them. They are Gods.

All of this is so far beyond your daily life that you can't even understand the words I'm saying. Almost nobody can. I do but that's because I'm neurotic. I can see all the bad stuff coming and because I'm already broken I can face it head on. Normal human beings can't get out of bed knowing the state of the world.

This doesn't make me tough by the way. It's the exact opposite it makes me a nervous wreck. Ignorance is bliss.