There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

Seems like it would be an improvement.

Every wavelength of IR is attenuated by cloud cover to some degree, some more strongly than others. Absorption is also not the only issue.

What? You absolutely had to authenticate to administer a Netware server, unless you did it from the console in the early days. That is logging in. If you don't think so, then neither is passwordless rsh, or ssh with a key and no password.

Most of the basic behavior of the UI used in Windows was inherited from IBM CUA, and is also shared by all of the commonest DEs for Linux. They also all have an analogue of the start menu. It's unclear what you're talking about here.

Back when the OS MacOS is now based on was created, there was no distinction between workstation and server OSes. Therefore MacOS X not being intended as a server OS is a downgrade from the prior product... like many of the changes Apple made, especially the UI ones.

They chose the under-tested alpha version of an OS from a vendor who is running an attack on the GPL. What could possibly be less surprising than that? You need to recalibrate your surprise-o-meter.

Yeah that. Why not a GitGov or GovHub? It makes zero sense.

I was just going to remind IS of their password policy recommendations that everyone doing business with the feds are supposed to follow.

So much for that fucking idea.

I did a stint as an RV repair tech but I really don't want to replace more poop tanks and I can't get a good reference because my ex-boss is a POS.

Maybe it's appliance repair next I guess, that was some of the least terrible RV repair work

And it's happening whether you want it to or not. It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work. Over half of Americans are white collar workers and the prospect of replacing them with automation is to tantalizing to give up.

Even if only a third of this crap works you're looking at permanent 20% unemployment on top of the typical 5% that the economy floats around. And that's pretending we are at full employment by pretending gig work is full-time work and ignoring underemployment and the millions of people who just gave up looking for work and the ever-increasing number of homeless people.

As a reminder world War II started with 25% unemployment.

I don't think there's a solution. We are just going to put too many people out of work and we're not putting everybody out of work all at once. This means the people who still have jobs are going to fight it out with the people who are now completely economically useless to society. In the middle will be the trillionaires consolidating their power.

I suspect eventually we will hand the nuclear launch codes to some religious lunatics and then it's game over. It is possible the trillionaires will simply create their techno feudal nightmare as well.

But I do not know how you overcome the concept of, if you don't work you don't eat. That is so deeply ingrained in people and there's nothing more infuriating than watching somebody stay at home playing Xbox drinking beer and getting laid when you're putting in 60 hours a week at a shit job you hate. No amount of logic or reason and no amount of telling you to start asking why you're working so hard for so little will change the emotional knee-jerk reaction or the ability for those trillionaires to point you at the unemployable and get you the fight with them crabs in a bucket style.

And this is before all the other social problems with employment collapsing, like how men traditionally are valued as providers and that role is becoming obsolete or how we have tons and tons of people who are just not ever going to be able to hack it academically but that we have absolutely no use for... Especially in a country that refuses to fund infrastructure which is pretty much all countries.

If somebody wants to suggest a specific way out of this trap besides just dismissing this as Doom and gloom I would be happy to hear it. I have noticed that people have stopped accusing me of being a luddite. It's too obvious that the storm is coming at this point to pretend it's not.

Everyone just seems to be hoping they die before the shit hits the fan. But I think it's coming too fast. Even some of the baby boomers aren't going to escape it anymore. You can't have shit like a data center in Utah sucking down more electricity than the entire state and not have consequences that are immediate and devastating for the surrounding communities

We don't have to imagine, we have an apartheid regime including ubiquitous tracking and an ongoing genocide which we can just look at.

Some of them will. Some of them will have absolutely no clue, just like now.

To thinking people, yes. A lot of people are listening to podcasts to figure out what to think.

Bro, have you heard of the greenhouse effect?

It's a question of what you traded that money for or what your neighbors traded it for.

So when people go to vote they have a hierarchy of issues they use to pick what's most important to them.

This is why you have Trump sitting at a 40% approval rate in polling averages but a 70% disapproval rate on the economy. People prioritize different issues or just confidence in the man versus what they can see happening day-to-day with their own eyes...

The most common and Stark example of this are people who prioritize moral panics over economic issues. So somebody who votes for a political candidate who is going to cut services they desperately need because that political candidate promises to protect them from trans girls in sports or ethics in game journalism or the woke mind virus or whatever the current mortal panic is. Back in my day it was violent video games and before that satanic rock music... Kind of miss those days.



They also have a hierarchy of information. Everybody hits an information limit at some point. I haven't dug into the particulars of how the Democrat party apparatus works for example although I know I should because it's important to understand. Compare that to a much much lower information voter I'm better able to make informed decisions.

So the basic problem is people will trade money and privacy for addressing moral issues and that people have varying amounts of information they have access to and can process.

Fundamentally improves education with an emphasis on critical thinking would fix this but the problem is parents don't like that. Little Johnny gets taught how to dismantle arguments and systems and he comes home and points the skills that whatever sacred cow the parents have, most commonly religion but also a variety of incorrect political views or moral views.

Parents want their kids to have enough thinking skills that they can get a good job and avoid being scammed but not so many that they can no longer relate to their children. They don't want schools creating a generational gap. In some extreme cases like the Jehovah witnesses they have traditionally stopped their members from going to college at all because they lost them so quickly. One of the quickest ways to leave extremist American evangelism is to sit down and actually read the Bible critically...

So every time you see something like this you have to stop and think how did I vote in the last election and what did I trade and what did I get for that trade.

You might say that you did all right but the problem then becomes your neighbors.