Necromancy, or something.

That's one condition that can cause you to have "left the workforce". Another is that you were terminated without unemployment and haven't resumed work after a certain amount of time. Many people who lose their jobs do not qualify for unemployment at all.

At best OpenAI is offering a zero value asset. At worst they're going to use the share offering to solicit bailouts later.

No, it means they left their jobs and stopped looking for new ones. Which is muddled by the fact that some forms of self employment may show up as this sort of behavior, depending on whether its under-the-table type work.

If AI and robots are taking people's jobs such that they aren't wanted for new employment, it would certainly be consistent with large numbers of people dropping out of the workforce.

Exactly, OpenAI is in debt and produces no profits. It looks like they're trying to shift debt onto the public.

We all know you ain't bankrolling it yourself, and the people you seem to think will pay for all this wont.

Nobody's pursuing such initiatives. Doing so would be even more expensive than net zero emissions policies.

Elon doesn't actually have that much in cash. Most of his net worth is tied up in assets that would probably lose considerable value if someone killed him and confiscated his property.

For now it's a thousand here and a thousand there. Also the cited $500 million is a research grant not intended to help anyone actually losing their jobs. But $500 million would go a long way to help some laid off employees start their own businesses. Just not all of them. If the program were successful on a small scale, it would need more funding in the future.

Yeah focusing on small business startups would probably be the smart play, especially if it involves hiring a lot of other displaced workers.

Okay but people are already losing their jobs now. Also humanoid robot production is scaling up considerably while cost/unit is plummeting. It isn't just tech bros that will feel the pinch.

If workers are actually being displaced by AI, then $500 million would be a nice start towards a fund intended to help displaced workers taking lower-paying jobs and/or starting businesses of their own (where they could potentially hire other displaced workers to do something else).

At the same time, I'm sure some wage slave making $15/hr or less will be thrilled to see a laid-off tech bro working next to him getting incentive pay just to take the job. So maybe the emphasis needs to be on small business startups rather than placing people in existing industries.

In any case, handing money over to a bunch of pundits, politicians, and focus groups to study the problem is likely the second-least method for dealing with the problem of AI disruption.

No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.

Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?

Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.

(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)