Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 (Score 1) 90

Exactly. What we are going to is that a somewhat small part of the work force will be in high demand (mostly STEM people that are good at what they do), but only a small part of the rest will have jobs. It is a novel situation. Most leaders are hard at work to try to ignore it and some are trying old recipes (like war or religion) to deal with it.

Comment Re:70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 (Score 1) 90

I agree to that analysis. The point is not to stop the job loss to automation. The point is what to do with the effects and that does include two critical questions:
(1) How are the jobless going to live decently enough financially to not raise up and destroy everything?
(2) What are jobless going to do with their time so that they do not raise up and destroy everything from sheer boredom and desire to have an impact?

At this time, both (1) and (2) are unsolved. (1) because of unfettered greed, stupidity, arrogance and some scum that has to get even richer when they are already rich beyond all reason. (2) is unsolved because we actually do not know. This is the first time the human race has encountered this issue. When it happened to some
"high class" groups in the past, they mostly became self-destructive.

Comment Re:70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 (Score 1) 90

Yes. While LLM-type AI will probably not cause a job apocalypse (it looks more and more problematic every day and the business numbers basically have zero chance to work in the foreseeable future), automation and things like simulation and design software are drastically reducing the need for manual labor and that is an ongoing and successful process. It is also a slow process, which is probably why the not-so-smart majority are trying denial as a coping strategy, with predictable results.

We need to face it sooner or later: Only talented people are going to have work in the future. Education can enable these but it cannot create them. Whether it is STEM graduates that are actually good (!) at what they do or tradespeople that are. Obviously, some service and entertainment jobs will remain, but these will not make a large difference. Now, how do you design a society where something like 50% or more of the population is basically not employable? You cannot go back to the old model where women got no education and stayed at home. You cannot imprison them all. You cannot just give them an UBI and let them rot (an UBI with a decent level will be necessary, but not sufficient). You cannot kill most of them by doing large land-wars (which was the historic way to get rid of an abundance of unruly men). You cannot make them into a cult and have them pray away their lives, because that does not work large-scale.

So, what to do? Interesting times are ahead, no doubt.

Comment Re:No-ranium (TM) Radiative Nuclear Fusion Capture (Score 1) 80

My take is this is a lie by misdirection, used to keep certain loud nil wits quiet. There is no way Carney does not know the abysmal economic numbers and the horrible external dependencies of nuclear power. Also, maybe they want one or two reactors to build up a nuclear weapons capability in case the US goes completely down the drains.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 80

There is no way the businessmen involved in building these reactors are going to want to spend the time and money to properly maintain them let alone decommission and shut them down when they are no longer safe to run.

This is the actual problem with nuclear power. And by the time it comes around, the people who made the decisions have already safely moved elsewhere or into pension.

Comment Re:What's the motivation? (Score 1) 80

Probably just some magic thinking and maybe some political tactics. I do expect the Canadian leadership knows quite well that nuclear power makes no sense whatsoever at this time and that SMRs are worse and entirely unproven. But note the timeline and that it is all SMRs. Make the right type of contract, have the first SMR deliverer not perform, point out that the projects are not needed anymore, and the financial damage stays quite limited.

Comment Just one asshole with really bad OpSec (Score 1) 71

There are obviously tons of people offering services like that, because there are tons of "students" that do not actually want to learn anything. Most just never get caught. Also, obviously, the students graduating this way will find their "expertise" to be worthless.

Fortunately, there are still (and probably always will be) enough students that actually want to learn and evolve their skills. We educators owe it to them to separate them from the dross though.

Comment Re:Must be mostly slop then (Score 1) 29

It gets a bit better when you systematically do "do not recommend channel" on all the YouTube slop, but it is still bad. In particular, channels pushing complete fabrications vor views are apparently totally fine for YT these days. Personally, I just have a small number of people for whom I look at content, and apart from the (rare) doom-scrolling, I ignore the rest.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you can't get your work done in the first 24 hours, work nights.

Working...