Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)

The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.

On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lower-maintenance for me.

The really funny thing about that particular case is that my father-in-law was a retired Full Professor of Computer Science! His problem wasn't that he didn't have the background or ability to manage a system himself, it was that he didn't want to. At his life-stage, the computer was a tool that he used, mostly as a web browser to buy parts for the farming and antique furniture refinishing that were his passions. Also, he had very thick fingers and constantly fat-fingered stuff, literally. What he really needed was a Chromebook with a full-sized laptop keyboard (a bigger-than-normal keyboard would have been even better), but Chromebooks didn't exist yet.

I'm a grandpa and I'm using a computer. My wife is a grandma and she's using a computer, too.

and fix known bugs. Search can some later. The "Backroom" panel that interrupts Save operations is an example. I want to see File Explorer and only File Explorer, not your damned Spam Panel!

Even if the bubble bursts, AI will still be radically more powerful in a decade

The bottleneck may be training data, only so much can be wrung out of it even with hyper-training. Until bots actually understand shit, this may limit them for a good while.

So, $22.50 per day, or $113 per week. How much does one of your people cost, all-in, including benefits? It's unlikely that it's less than $100k per year, and very likely at least double or triple that, if not five times or more. At $200k/year for 50 weeks, that's $4k/week. At the current token price, the AI makes a $200k engineer 3% more productive, the company is breaking even. If it makes them 1.5X or 2X as productive it's a clear and unquestionable win, even with higher token prices.

As for me, think AI makes me about 5X more productive than I would be without it, and that's just considering volume of work. Honestly, I think the quality is a little higher than I'd do myself -- not because the AI writes better code than I do (it definitely does not), but because I'm able to be pickier and do more and larger refactors than I would if I had to do the grunt work myself. Also because I have Claude write documentation that, frankly, I just wouldn't get around to if it were me. The documentation is not nearly as good as if you gave me a dedicated technical writer... but the $2500 I spend per month in tokens would come nowhere close to paying a writer, even if we ignored the coding productivity.

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Somewhat, yes (and this most definitely includes the federal government!). On the other hand, small organizations don't have the same opportunities for economies of scale. This is what drives consolidation in most markets; the bigger players can outcompete the small ones because they have efficiency opportunities the small ones just don't, and greater consolidation increases that... up until it gets balanced and then exceeded by bloat, which lets smaller players back in.

That's what happens in competitive markets, anyway. The healthcare market is so heavily regulated that it may not work the same way.

You can only move workers by paying more, either moving them from one job to another or from being unemployed to being employed. But if you're already very close to full employment (which we are; prime-age employment is 83.3%), then in order to get more workers you have to get more people.

Executives, maybe, but "top shareholders" don't make any more than "bottom shareholders", not on a percentage basis. And for all of the shareholders the fact is that they'd be better off selling their shares and buying into a more profitable industry. I'd guess that investors buy health insurance stocks because it's a pretty reliable industry -- it doesn't make much money, but it keeps making money even when the rest of the economy tanks.

You're right, of course, that the ACA establishes a perverse incentive for insurers (similar to the cost-plus funding model NASA used to use), but this doesn't seem to have affected overall costs much. It's most problematic with vertically-integrated companies (like UHC). There is data that shows that they pay more for services that their own subsidiaries deliver -- UHC pays more to doctors in its own groups than to doctors outside of its groups, for example. But overall, the evidence that the ACA had any effect on the trajectory of healthcare prices is weak at best. Which makes sense, because the ACA tinkered with the insurance side of the problem, and that's not where the high costs come from. M4A wouldn't do any better, not unless it used its increased bargaining power to force pay cuts on the provider side.

In a closed system, yes, it means that the current price is too low, so demand is higher than can be filled, which means that the price should be raised, both for labor and for the product of that labor, until the excess demand is destroyed (i.e. buyers can't afford it). However, the system isn't closed. So what it actually means is that the suppliers will move to where the labor is, so they can continue meeting the demand at the current price.

What this means for the US is that US business will at least not be able to grow, and will likely have to shrink.

Which, I have to grant, will fix the labor shortage. Businesses will shrink or close, fewer jobs will be available and labor will no longer be in short supply.

You mean they shouldn't be made here.

Your questions only address one side of the equation, which makes them meaningless overall.

If there is huge excess profit in the system you can expect to see labor shortages causing wages to shoot up astronomically. If there isn't, then what happens instead is the shortage is addressed by businesses scaling back, simply making less and selling less. Ideally, this just results in hobbled growth, but more often it results in businesses trying to do more with less, and failing. That, of course, results in layoffs, which addresses the labor shortage a different way.

And keep in mind that this happens in a sector-by-sector and business-by-business way. So you can't look at Jeff Bezos's wealth and assume that means there is excess profit in lots of industries, just because Amazon is doing well. (And definitely don't look at Elon Musk's wealth and use that to assume there's lots of excess profit; Musk is insanely wealthy because people think his companies will generate incredible profits in the future, not because they're doing it now).

It doesn't really matter what you call workers, if there aren't enough of them, there aren't enough of them.

The rest of your post was just a reasonably-accurate characterization of part of what is causing the potential problem. The fact is that the US economy has always been driven by immigration, and by shutting off the flow of immigrants, the current administration is strangling the economy. It'll take a generation or so to really take full effect, but if we don't reverse course we'll end up with economic stagnation.

This is my read as well. Surveillance has nothing to with what's driving it, though surveillance will almost certainly take advantage of it.

Sure, but that requires positing that this isn't actually Chinese activity at all, but US entities pretending to be Chinese entities pretending to be US people. That's possible, but it seems like it would require some evidence.

The progression in the link isn't what was taught in universities, it was what a programmer learned growing up, and I don't know anyone who learned FORTRAN in elementary and Junior High. BASIC was where it was at (my first code was BASIC to run on a local bank's mainframe -- they were letting my fifth grade "Talented and Gifted" class run stuff -- and then later on a friend's TRS-80; that was all in the late 70s). Then Pascal in high school or college, and so on. Java came later; I'm not sure what the kids who got Java in college learned before college.