People compete for jobs and jobs also compete for workers. Nearly anyone will work any job for the right price. That's called free-market capitalism or supply and demand. Please stop the corporatist, Chamber of Commerce propaganda. We've been hearing this for longer than I've been alive by business owners who bitch to old-school business-friendly Republicans and their local Chamber of Commerce about not being able to find workers willing to work sub-market wage jobs. All you have to do is pay more and people will apply. They give BULLSHIT lines like "Americans don't want to..." You're either really full of shit or fully duped if you're repeating this stupidity. Please stop!!! So anytime you say "young people don't WANT" some job...please kindly go fuck yourself. Pay me more money than I am making as a software engineer and I'll gladly go out in a field and pick strawberries.

This is a simple free market situation. You pay minimum wage to pick produce and Starbucks pays $1 over minimum wage to work in air conditioning at your local strip mall and what the fuck do you think would happen???? Sorry, jobs compete for workers as much as workers compete for jobs. Saying "young people don't WANT" to work some job is complete bullshit.

It's like me going around and saying "No one will hire me as a heart surgeon because I'm black." (when I didn't even go to medical school and have no relevant experience).

Seeing how after 30 years my wife and I still don't agree upon dishes placement in the dishwasher, I don't want ai to get into the fight !

As the kids get older, a LOT are going to want to ditch the chromebook because they see richer kids doing the same. It's similar to the green vs blue bubble phenomena where kids make fun of students without ios devices. Kids are shitty...I think they were actually shittier in my day...my kids and their peers seem to be better. However, nearly EVERY middle schooler plays Roblox these days...and the experience sucks on most chromebooks.

As others stated, it's a chromebook running IOS. I don't think many will buy it as their primary work laptop. However, I can picture every family with small kids buying this instead of giving their kids Mommy/Daddy's old laptop. If it has enough power to run Roblox, it will be one of their biggest hits of all time.

I am surprised Apple hasn't done this before. In our house, my wife and I run macs. One kid has a chromebook. One has a cheap Windows laptop. Why? because macs are expensive and the chromebook barely gets use and the windows laptop is just a gaming machine and honestly mostly runs Roblox Studio, occasionally games that are also available on consoles.

We'd love to replace both with these and just run Apple stuff...single family iCloud account, share peripherals more easily...no need to troubleshoot windows stupidity...no need to worry about what ads Windows is serving my kids.

This is the smartest thing I've read about Apple in a long time. It's smart to focus on luxury, but given how weak Windows and Android are ATM, why not make a power play to expand the userbase...especially for families like ours where we gladly pay for premium Apple devices for ourselves and professional use, but stick to budget devices for kids...ensuring that we're locked in even longer and moreso.

Their concern is they won't have the soldiers or economy to invade Taiwan as easily in the future. For them, it's an act now or regret it in the future calculus...and to your point, the only reason I can see for them to want to own Taiwan is as a manipulation of the population and national identity. "Don't question that you property is under water and your job prospects are shrinking and everyone you know is getting poorer...One China!! One China!! One China!!!...support the troops!!!"

Fair criticism, but Ji has explicitly made serious threats and China has been building up it's Navy...and they're getting more desperate due to a demographic collapse as well as a trade war which they're losing (we're not winning...we're losing as well)...but things are dire for China. Their window of a successful invasion keeps shrinking. In fact, it could be a piece of cake if it wasn't for TSMC. So while they've been planning on invading since before I was born, they're actually taking unprecedented steps to prepare.

If anything, prosperity and growth was the main thing keeping them from invading, IMHO. They can grab Taiwan...or be in the good graces of the international community who was tripping over themselves to do business with them and help them grow their economy. Their growth is an unprecedented economic miracle. No one has ever grown that much and changed so profoundly so fast. But...now that the growth is slowing and there's a probable trend of deglobalization, highly linked to COVID...they're less dependent on the international community. Also, their population keeps shrinking...their coffers are shrinking...and most scarily, the people, accustomed to 3 decades of growth and expansion and seeing their prosperity diminish rapidly and are at huge risk of getting upset.

While China is authoritarian, it's a fuckton easier to be a despot when the people love you. How do you distract a population from their economic issues?...a war!!!

Most of the prestige TV came well after reality shows became popular. The Real World premiered in 1992. Since then, we've had Dexter, Game of Thrones, Sopranos, Stranger Things, Yellowstone, Alien Earth, Peacemaker...whatever your favorite show was probably came after Reality TV started taking over in the early 2000s. Some theorize it was a response to network TV showing garbage reality shows in prime time....you can watch Big Brother or Biggest Loser on broadcast TV or watch Game of Thrones or Stranger things on cable or streaming...they stepped in when the networks were trying to force The Apprentice down our throats.

It was banned in 1974 and caused a bunch of fatalities by parents dropping their kids off in darkness. You can read about it.. Yeah DST sucks...but so does going to work in total darkness in Nov/December. Which sucks worse?....IDFK. I wasn't alive for the first one. I think I'd go for no timechange like Arizona, personally, but I do kinda get why some felt it wasn't worth it.

For those who aren't parents or forgot what it's like...you're FUCKING TIRED nearly every morning dropping your kids off. (I live in the city and there's no bus system). You barely make it out of the house. You have a million things on your mind ranging from thinking of all the ways you're underserving your kids to the reasons why your coworkers without kids are doing a better job making your boss happy...or how are you going to get done the many domestic chores you need to...so couple that with darkness...and even if you're alert and watching the road 100%...are the other parents?....and even if they are, young kids are kinda idiots...a kid WILL run in front of your car without looking. And for those that don't have kids, commuting in darkness will be less safe for them...even people without kids can be distracted drivers.

Again, I'd prefer it be permanent. I just see the other side, so I don't have 100% confidence I'm right.

Yeh, the UK government will pay $50 billion to use that $15 billion (which was inflated to justify the $50 billion expenditure) technology.

The UK got a great deal. The US always pays more.

If China wants to invest In space and constructive things instead of using their military as a way of employing a huge part of their country, they should.

The US doesn't need constructive things. That's socialism which is bad. Instead, the US can hire a few million children to swing around guns and pick fights. China just teaches their kids how to mass produce drone swarms so they don't have to give their babies guns.

Hopefully for the US China will play nice and try to look scary so the US can hire more children and teach them to swing around guns.

I've been buying Huawei SSD and hard disk. I buy tape in tens of petabytes, disk in petabytes and SSD in hundreds of terabytes. Huawei is shipping cheap 64TB SSDs, but they need Huawei backplanes. So $120k gets you started with 100TB across 3 controllers and dual hundred gig switches. Growth is much cheaper. It looks like about $260k per petabyte. I'm paying about $100K per PB for hard disk but on 18TB drives. I expect $80K for 30TB drives when we switch. But that will put 3PB in a single chassis which at 20GB/s is somewhat impractical for evacuating or migrating.

IBM tape by comparison is closer to $18K per PB when adding a new drive per PB. But it really doesn't make sense until 10PB

No, it won't. The numbers ultimately published are massaged by agencies run by political appointees. Formulae are tailored to fit narratives and ultimately what we get is propaganda.

Your scheme, for instance: Who will be participating, and who will be eligible for a reward? These calls will be made by political forces.

Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

That number is not credible. The prompts I write for "personal" purposes are literally indistinguishable from what a worker might make: for all ChatGPT knows I'm an auto mechanic. Location isn't a valid metric either, given WFH, mobile devices, etc. They can't possibly distinguish between work and personal to a one digit of precision. Obviously they can see whether prompts are coming from commercial accounts, paid personal accounts or free tier, but even that gets fuzzy at the low end.