Enshittification isn't just "products getting worse over time" - it is where companies take an existing service, and either add features that benefit another party at your expense, or remove necessary features for it to function. Ex: You buy an ad-free streaming service to stream a certain TV series. The company then puts ads on it and removes the series you were watching. Or you visit a web site regularly, but now you have to sign-up to access it. Or the site now displays a bunch of pop-ups and only works on a particular operating system or browser.

If it was capitalism, you would just switch to a different streaming provider / web site. But with enshittification, there are barriers preventing that. Ex: No one else streams that series, or all the similar web sites require a login. In capitalism someone wins and someone loses, but with enshittification everyone loses.

This is different from "You buy a new pair of jeans, and it isn't manufactured as well as their previous line of jeans."

^^ What a wonderful summary of American politics in 4 simple lines..

This is the: "It's okay if *my* party does it" approach. Conservatives believe in Federalism, democracy, and the rule of law. MAGAs are Authoritarians so they just believe in force. 1 year ago ago MAGA pundits warned that Democrats were going to send the national guard into cities, and that was Fascism! Today, Trump sends the national guard into cities and that's.... suddenly a great idea!

This is where the observer erroneously thinks there is a way to wake them up. "Well maybe the current thing is illegal Fascism that destroys nations and we fought wars against it... but.... what is important is taking action!" If they really believed that, then they would be condemning Trump and whipping out the guns. This is a tiny bit of intelligence and conscience peeking through, but they are trained to squash it with catch phrases like "grew a pair" or "get the ball rolling." Here we see both used! Understand: These people are doing this because they are afraid. Their identity is tied into their party, not some underlying fundamental believe set. If they had a pair, they would stand-up against the fascist dictators, even if they dictator was doing what they wanted.

Let me also observe that Democrats do the same BS. Democrats justified it when Biden was stretching the rules with his own executive orders too. A comparable line might be "Maybe he doesn't really have the power to forgive student debt.... but think of the children!" and "Maybe the federal government shouldn't tell social media companies what speech to shut down... but it's misinformation!" A common one on that side is "It's the billionaire's fault." Both sides can use "It's because of big (oil | pharma | whatever)" -- that works for any issue on any side.

Fake issues dominate the national discourse: Teachers making our children gay, trans people forcing drag shows on churches, pedophiles running pizza parlors, free healthcare for illegals, vaccines causing autism, partial-birth abortions. Real issues rarely come up any more.

Finish by making it black or white - "with us or agin' us" If you can get someone to think for more than 30 seconds, they realize that these black and white solutions don't work. So how to control them? Train them to fall back to one-liners and sound bites, to prevent that pesky brain from getting in the way.

What a poetic summary of why we are all completely screwed. Remember, if you have kids, the required reading list to prevent this is:
1. Pre-k: The Butter Battle Book
2. Elementary: The Giver
3. Middle: Animal Farm
4. High school: 1984

This only applies to home edition, right? Businesses won't give up their domain accounts. Well... until they move to Entra ID...

The problem here is that consumers selected for devices that used proprietary interfaces rather than standards. If iTunes used any one of the gzillion standard ways to communicate with the host device, this would not be an issue. There were plenty of such devices on the market, but a guy in a black sweater told everyone to buy his more expensive proprietary clone, and so people did. Now everyone is stuck like this.

Get real:

Someone trying to setup with a local account is doing it because they don't want the telemetry crap. Microsoft is tying the telemetry to these features, to the detriment of everyone. Microsoft does not have to do that, so don't blame the "clueless user" or "some techie" for it -- the blame is 100% on Microsoft. Even if the scenario you describe happens, Microsoft will display 10 nag screens per day reminding the clueless user that their advertising telemetry, -- oops, I mean -- the anti-ransomware isn't setup.

This is a mindset. It is a disease that predated the digital world.

When I got my first credit card, I called the company to "opt-out" of all mailings except bills. When I got junk snail mail, I wrote "return to sender" on it. If junk mail came with a pre-stamped return envelope, I put their junk into the return envelope and use their own money to mail it back to them. If I got a spam caller, I used my caller ID to call them back and demand that they remove me from their list.

In the digital world, I continue the same practice. Spam email? Ignore first one. Unsubscribe on the second. Click block on the third. The result is a managable inbox. I turn off all notifications on my phone. I don't click "follow" on social media. Click the "don't notify me of replies to my comments" on social media sites.

WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE NOTIFICATIONS?!?!?! WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW THAT YOU JUST GOT AN EMAIL? THIS IS A FRIEKING DISEASE YOU FOOLS!

I have friends and family who can't reply to my emails because they literally get hundreds of unsolicited messages a day that they can't sort through. Their spam filters don't work because 99% of what they receive is spam. This is why email apps like outlook now use AI to sort things into a "Promotions" folder. I sat with this family member years ago, and walked email by email suggesting "We could unsubscribe from this.... or this" and each time the response was "But I want to know about events at venue X!" and "What if we miss a Groupon deal?" I just can't communicate with them any more - they text me a random meme every week and that's as far as it goes. They would rather see coupons or news, than contact from friends or family.

This disease predated the tech world.

I counter your anecdote with my own, which is that each of my kids: a middle schooler and a high schooler, had one required summer reading book, and at least one optional book recommended by the school. Both kids have 4 books they are reading this year in their English classes, one per quarter. My high school student is reading a book for Spanish class too. Then they also have additional texts like you described.

A blockchain cannot be edited. It's mathematically impossible to remove an entry without invalidating every subsequent entry. If it was possible, it would completely defeat the entire purpose of the blockchain.

But refunding a transaction is trivial. Party A can send a coin to party B, then party B can send a coin back to party A. It doesn't even require consent of either party, so long as the majority of the nodes agree to it! This is even how real life ledgers work. A refunded credit card transaction doesn't just vanish. It is charged, then refunded with another entry, So this whole thing is a non-problem.

The article even says as much:

If their own people can't figure it out 18% of the time, then there is something objectively wrong with the approach.

I have been told that "very difficult" in Japan means "I will not do the thing." It isn't a reason, it is a colloquialism because direct refusal is considered ruse. So don't come back later and expect that they have started on it.

Raw data is here: Department of labor raw data
Here is a paper on the topic
1. Expand "Disclosure Data"
2. Scroll down to "OFLC Programs and Disclosures"
3. Row titled "Prevailing Wage"
4. Download PW_Worksites_FY2025_Q3_new_form.xlsx
You can filter by job, location, and employer name. I just filtered by SOC_TITLE containing "Software" and the range is from 47,424 to 226,158, avg = 131,800.

Also: H1-B visa applications by employer.
The top are: Amazon, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Tata consulting, Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Deloitte, Walmart

Agreed: The first one is a policy based on real economic reality. The second one is an unsupported conspiracy theory which ignores the reality that US companies that do the exact same thing.

You are 100% correct.

For human interactions, the LLM seems random not only because most interfaces set the temperature to a nonzero value, but also because seemingly irrelevant changes such as spacing or punctuation will change the LLM output.

allo literally defined it in the post:

Just like what happened when the US government purchased GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac?
(I actually agree with your points, but this reply is the obligatory counter to your post and needs to be addressed.)