I've seen it over the last two years at multiple companies. The IT budget in excess of keeping the existing systems running has been taken over by spending on AI projects. Full stack application development is a much lower, if any, priority for executives now.

There is an inertia in economics. Seeking to keep things as they are so that it is easier to measure year over year data, write research papers, and get quoted on media saying the usual "economy doing X" statements.

If the economic data collection method changes (survey to government filing extracts), new economic data is collected by the BLS, or there are larger changes in tax, trade, and commerce laws; it makes it more difficult to produce news quotable research.

Factor into this, the percent of economists, government leaders / BLS staff, researchers, think tank experts, media personalities, UN, World Bank, and financial industry personalities who are in the last decade of their working career.
That group would be resistant to change since a lifetime of research papers could be shown as largely flawed and unreliable if more accurate data from government filings is used instead of a BLS survey.

That group also wants stability so that they can job hop between, finacial companies, the World Bank, US Treasury, BLS, think tanks, UN, and academia.

Hopefully, someone will collect metrics on Youtube videos produce by AI, categorize them into "entertainment including brainrot" and everything else and then estimate the electricity used for the ai produced entertainment and scale it in terms of how many life saving medical operations could be performed in poor countries

We have three generations of NGO and nonprofit institution building since WWII.

How much of the budget of individual institutions seeks to increase the size of the institution and not carry out the societal benefits purpose of the institution?

It should be acceptable for a reasoned discussion of
- How the institution's budget is spent
- The news, research, and opinion produced by the institution
- The demographics and leadership of the employees and contractors paid by the institution
- Whether an institution for all excludes half the population from its focus, money spent, research and effort
- The research methods of the institution, such as collecting data only on half the population when the statement of the institution is to server all people

Institutions who have a mission for directly improving people's lives and the institution only produces research, media interviews and promotes the career of researchers. 50 years of talking and researching a problem instead of using the budget to fund actual programs, build infrastructure, clean water and help people.

It is acceptable to have a reasoned discussion on these items. People, pundits, and agitators who seek to shut down a reasoned discussion with the "you want children to starve" would be excluded from the discussion. They seek to block forward progress, preserve the status quo and perpetuate stagnation.

People undervalue the value that librarians have with the wide knowledge of books.

It has helped me find books with different viewpoints and ideas.

It has also helped me de-prioritize story genres which have been overused (the president is missing, presidential corruption scandals), books where it is 99% a car chase and books who exist to exhibit the odd practices of a fringe group in a detective story.

There is something good about books that are able to tell a good story in less than 200 pages with existing characters, places and scenarios without using filler material (repeated description of technology, purple prose, repeated description of clothes, filling pages of material which does not advance the plot and could be reduced to a few sentences, ...).

It should be a good story and not just - bridge - filler exploitation scene - filler - filler exploitation scene - filler ... where the filler is a poor attempt at a plot and storytelling.

> "Publishing has also been male dominated for literally all of history so this also represents a long overdue swing towards equality, not away from it."

Having over 66% of the industry being women is not equality.

Calling it a "long overdue swing towards equality" is just revenge and not equality.

Favoring revenge against people under 40 who are not responsible for the past damages society.

Discrimination is good, as expressed in your statement, is a bad practice.

Google could have done it easier,

- List the newsrooms in California, number of reporters, local population size
- Pick X of them
- Setup a nonprofit to directly pay the salary + benefits of J reporters
- Set the nonprofit up so that a small portion of the funds go to pay overhead such as 5%
- Get the newsrooms to agree to keep the J reporters on staff and carry the news stories produced by them
- Review the above every year

The different nonprofits pay the Associated Press to report on certain topics such as education. So this is not a new thing.

Handing the money to a third party hungry for more budget with a of bureaucrats to pay ensures that the money will be siphoned off as overhead with each middleman.

It is odd how the news never reports the UN and other NGOs as middlemen taking their administrative cut.

Read the article and did not find any mention other than a "uses less electricity" mention.

The news should include a comparison including power usage per chip and server rack, AC cooling requirement power usage for a workload for this chip and a NVIDIA system.

The news editor could help with AI quality control by: "In this news article, remove all mentions of childhood, outdoor scenery, clothes, fashion trends, physical descriptions of people, emotional appeals, softening language, and vignettes."

Removing all of those would help to show that the article is 98% filler material (CEO personal profile + office decor + vignette) with little information.

Adding in that there was a large cross-marketing and promotion of women authors in 1970s science fiction and fantasy to try to open women readers towards that genre.

Been tried before: There were country music stars that did Beatles covers in the 1960s including Beetles haircut wigs, and also the Rolling Stones included 1 country song (more or less country) on most of their albums.

It begs the question, are those in poverty in other countries more likely to have both parents, more likely to have a strong community and extended family and less likely to overdo social media consumption?

Agree with your opinion on the statistics. It would greatly help if the many sub-optimal papers get retracted also. Those include

- Self reported surveys
- A too small (50?) sample size
- Papers with a biased starting sample (surveying only middle aged white women) and generalizing to the entire population including men
- Ones with survey questions which seek to confirm an already held conclusion (e.g., using "Is it OK to speed if you are driving a critically sick person to the hospital?" and reporting it as "Is it OK to speed?")
- Papers which are an opinion piece with no backing data

Then
- Then evaluating papers with cite them as primary sources to see if they need to be retracted also.
- Then evaluating papers from journals having a high level of retractions
- Then evaluating papers which have many self-citations, citations from the journal's staff or colleagues, or citations from a circle of academics who cite each others work for cross-promotion
- Then evaluating papers by authors and/or academic departments who have repeated retractions

It's not a liberal or conservative take here, the UN, World Bank and the usual NGOs have pushed for Europe (who doesn't approve of the president and follows socialist policies) and the USA to pay money for past events, past allegations, or unproven grievances claimed by a third-world country.

What's common with this first-world to third-world wealth transfer, the UN and NGOs get their cut of the money, keep their influence and media promotions, and get to employ lots of people.

Countering the group of people who assign collective blame and collective responsibility at birth to one group of people for some real or unproven issue in the world; and then push for those in that group to somehow pay retribution for things they could not have possibly done because it was before they were born and before they were voting age adults.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/1...

The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone
New York Times - Dec 7, 2024
-
The gist of the article is that there are less male authors and the majority of the publishing industry is women which is driving male authors and readers away.

- The comments on https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
- Podcast examining this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...\

Even when the industry is dominated by women, it's still reported as somehow unfair or discriminatory:

https://www.thebookseller.com/...
Are men being 'pushed out of publishing'? Industry insiders discuss - Jul 22, 2025 - by Heloise Wood
"Proctor also explained that many bestselling male novelists are well-known household names, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, and that, while women comprise two-thirds of the publishing workforce, only two of the five big publishers have female CEOs. "

So, the takeaway from the quote is that if women outnumber men 2 to 1 in the industry workforce it is a failure because 40% of CEOs are women.

This will upset lots of people who's job depends of the narrative that the third world was abused by Europe and the USA and perpetual restitution is needed to correct things.

Noting that it is good to hear that individual happiness and well being are not correlated to how much money you have.

The inflection point where music started going downhill was when digital recording was introduced into the studio.

It went from a recording and production process with a limited number of overdubbing due to the compounding of noise to one where you could do an infinite number of overdubs and sampling with only adding a tiny amount of noise.

The earlier analogue microphone to tape to record process meant that each person in the recording process had to be excellent at their job and produced better quality recordings, lyrics, songwriting, and musicianship.

With digital recording, mixing, mastering and playback, less of the people involved have to have the same level of job proficiency resulting in enough low quality music to be popular so as to drown out the better work. There are lots of exceptions to this.

Add in fake harmony via autotune, singers harmonizing with themselves (Taylor Swift) and lyrics right out of 3rd grade (the decade of country songs with "burning up my phone" lines) and the public is forced to embrace the decline.

Predictions:
- The largest copyright holders will have to write-down the value of their back-catalog assets due to royalty amounts declining much faster than projected and much much faster than in the past.

- AI generated music, royalty free will be 'good enough' to fill the background ambience of more and more places - restaurants first, grocery stores, malls, TV commercials, TV scene background music, movie background music and eventually second and third tier tracks on soundtracks and major albums.