It's a taxi union.

Congratulations.

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

nd they're raking in cash thanks to the massive increase in the price of oil from Trump's war in the Middle East.

Ukraine is seeing to it they don't by destroying oil refineries. Right now there are at least 5 big refineries out of commission for the next month or more. That doesn't include reduced loading capacity at several different terminals which have been struck or pumping stations which no longer work.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?

Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.

Sorry, I thought you would understand that I meant that the resources that money represents appear, once you've solved the automation problems that currently make mass-production difficult. That's why you can buy a pocket computer today for $300 that would have your cost you billions of dollars twenty years ago, if you could have obtained it at all.

I bet you'd have more interesting conversations if you made a good-faith effort to understand what the other person was saying, rather than just jumping straight to the part where you get to throw insults at them and tell them how dumb they are. Doesn't that get boring?

I have yet to hear of a remotely plausible business case for putting data centers into space. The only benefit is 24/7 solar power, but that benefit is more than offset by the cost of launching everything into orbit, plus the cost of keeping everything properly cooled, plus the cost of radiation-hardening everything, and finally the cost of maintaining hardware in space (or, more likely, the cost of periodically having to write off the entire investment and build and launch new replacement hardware).

Unless Musk is trying to corner the market for AI-generated kiddie-porn (or something similarly illegal that needs to be operated beyond the reach of Earthly authorities), his ground-based competitors will undercut his pricing by a factor of 100, and he therefore won't have a viable product to sell.

Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?

Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -- it's unlikely that our tech-bro overlords are going to hire people simply on humanitarian grounds, if they can get an unquestioning machine to do the same work cheaper.

I agree that UBI is unlikely, but only because the billionaires don't like sharing and therefore won't support it. The money does "just appear" when you have mass automation doing the work to make it appear, but it will go into Bezos' checking account, not to the general public.

Well, technically that is the entire point of some of the major sports in the world, and it would be problematic to say that deliberately causing brain damage for competition is ok in one sport but not in another.

On the other hand, I am not altogether convinced it should be openly encouraged in any sport.

This is a tricky one, because I would also argue that I should have no say in what a person does to their own body for their own reasons, that my firm belief that people should have bodily autonomy when it causes no actual harm to others does not permit me to condemn others for doing stuff to their own body for their own reasons when it does no actual harm to others even if it's a context I don't agree with.

Given that (ethically) I cannot condone wilful irreversable damage but (ethically) cannot condemn personal choises that harm nobody else, the obvious conclusion is that I don't believe such sports should be actively promoted or encouraged, but that what individuals do in the privacy of a private sporting event should not concern those outside until or unless actual harm outside of those events occurs.

Yes, and that's the problem for Disney -- theme parks can only physically accept so many people per year, and they can't (easily) build more of them. So theme parks can't be more than a small amount of their total income; to really make the big money, the Mouse has to ship products that can and will be purchased by everyone. In practice, that means movies; ideally good movies, but at a minimum, popular movies.

Treadmill? That can be optimistic.

One place I worked for, I was hired to do DB and coding. Sped their database up by a factor of 60, and resolved tickets efficiently.

Another place I worked for, I was hired to do QA. Found numerous performance issues and dangerous security holes.

Didn't last in either, because politics are more important than people, and revenue is more important than wages. Once all the factors that seriously impacted profit were removed, keeping me would merely have meant a better product, not more cash. The market is only so big, and once you've taken all the share you're going to, being better won't increase it. Companies don't think beyond the next quarter.

Two other places I worked for, the CEO was using it to scam money off investors and get cheaper healthcare. They never intended to produce a product.

If you're forced to treat employees well, these things will still happen but they'll happen less often. Because the risks are higher, the payoff is lower, and penalties for getting caught are a whole lot worse.

That's how it works in a coupled system.

Agreed. There's deliberate undercounting for the long-term unemployed, and a failure to account for the fact that firing seasoned workers with acquired skills isn't the same as hiring inexperienced yoofs who have no meaningful experience in producing robust, high quality products. Although, to be fair, corporations don't seem keen on producing those.

However, there's another factor to consider. The number of retirees is smaller than the number of people entering work for the first time. Due to Covid, a LOT smaller than usual. This means that the markets are expanding. If the markets are expanding but the numer of people being added is only keeping pace with job circulation and retirement, then the job market (as a percentage of those who can work) must be smaller relative to both the markets and the work that needs to be done.

This is the most misleading part of employment statistics. Whilst total unemployment is important (but only useful if not deliberately undercounted), you also need to know the employment:activity ratio and the employment:expected employment in a fully functional market of that size ratio.

FFT didn't exist for another decade.