...would somehow also cause Slashdot to seethe in fury.

You guys are hilarious.

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

Generally speaking ..."Against the GP: the plan IS to have robots do those sorts of things. And there's real progress being made." ... replacing human labor with machines is no progress. The wealthy have ALWAYS understood this ... for example ...  butlers, tailors, men-of-business, lawyers , secretaries, chauffeurs . Against the GP: the plan IS to have robots do those sorts of things. And there's real progress being made. Wealthy engage an entire class of personal , human assistants .  OTOH grifters,  strivers ,  hustlers and wanna-Beez pretend silly machines can substitute -- a humanist inhuman touch  like  self-driving autos OMG -- and consciously try forcing all to the same pretense. More honest and more "agentic"  leaving  "service"  to your betters  while practicing DIY tasking.

It took sixty years to move from comics to reality. Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. first appeared in 1963, published by Gold Key Comics.

Who says I'm NOT outraged by that? Why the simplistic binary?

Personally, I believe that anyone getting a dime of government $ should be banned from voting / donating politically due to conflict of interest.
This includes the welfare poor BUT ALSO the management (c-suites, I'd guess) of ANY company with
- federal contracts
- using public resources (ie oil companies on federal lands)
- in-law tax benefits.

I also believe corporations should have escalating tax rates for owned dwellings; that is, like people they can have that single homestead property, but the next is full-tax, the next 150% tax, the next 200% etc.

Make no mistake, yes, I do object to LONG TERM free ride programs for the poor as an alternative to sorting their lives out. But I'm even MORE aggressive about taxation of corporations that want to enjoy the upside of capitalism but be fully socialist on the downsides. "Too big to fail" is bullshit; capitalism REQUIRES companies to die like forests need fires.

So....no answer, confirmed.
I have read about UBI, extensively, because its advocates never tire of begging for other people's money.

Which is pretty funny, since the only major difference between the two these days is "Is Google spying on you, or is Microsoft?"

I mean...the people who have for decades fought long and hard to inform people about the catastrophic threats facing corals should be DELIGHTED that there is a serious, significant prospect of improving their survival.
This is, very clearly, a pure, intrinsic good.

Right?

Because if they're not delighted then one might question whether they really were that concerned about the corals themselves in the first place. One might even speculate that 'teh coRalz are DyIng!" was really about just a useful poster-child for an ideology or something less salutary....

Corals are literally one of the oldest lifeforms on the planet. They evolved >500m years ago, when the earth was vastly warmer. (It's about 15-16C now, 500m yr ago it was 30C or higher).
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

They survived even warmer times - 36C in the mesozoic - and cooler, as low as 11C.

And - contrary to the "but it's changing FASTER!" meme, that's not true: global temps have changed occasionally **much** more rapidly than what we see today. Chicxulub caused 20-30C drops that lasted for decades, followed by vaporized carbonates and global wildfires that raised planetary temps as much as +5C for 100,000 years.

So please stop believing the bullshit that corals 'are on the verge of extinction' or such nonsense. Corals have AMPLE opportunities (moreso than most species) to mitigate climate swings - they populate other latitudes (Too warm? Cooler/deeper corals flourish as their latitudes become more amenable. Too cool? Shallow corals in equatorial seas survive to repopulate the ocean quickly.)

I don't know what you mean. Look at the improvement in hiring when you can advertise an open position on LinkedIn and get maybe 100x as many applicants as before! OK, probably 99% of them will be completely unqualified for the role and barely capable of pushing the instant application button, but how is that a problem, really? Surely hiring managers can easily filter them out and no qualified applicant will ever get lost in the noise?

It's like a video I saw on YouTube the other week. Someone was talking all about "skills" for their AI agents and how they'd automated so much of their workflow using them. They started the video by kicking off four different tasks for separate agents to show how productive it was to have all this stuff happening in parallel and how it was so quick and easy to organise.

One of the tasks involved producing an infographic about a certain topic, and the AI duly produced one based on a one-liner prompt, taking only a few seconds of the presenter's time and with no further input from them about the content. The infographic had exactly the level of quality you'd expect from this: a load of boxes and arrows (with some of those arrows starting or finishing floating in space without connecting anything) and some words (a few of which might have been related to the topic mentioned in the prompt).

That infographic was the only substantial output from the whole exercise. It was the worst kind of AI slop imaginable, generated with literally no thought or oversight from the presenter beyond a couple of words about the topic as part of that one-liner prompt. This was probably about the average level of the LinkedIn posts I used to see before I left as well. As you said, I'm not sure you can be a "thought leader" without doing any thinking.

I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn't about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That's not going to happen, so I just don't use the site any longer.

As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it's one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I'm not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.

So you just want a free ride for everyone.

And still want people to think you're sane? Where precisely does this free ride come from? "The rich"?
Let's do some quick math (I know I've already lost you here): Musk is worth a $trn. The US with it's shitty social systems, spends $5trn per year.
Us+EU spends $12trn (and that's only on 10% of the world population). Let's laughably pretend net wealth means cash: the wealth ripped from the entire top 1% could cover the world at the (crummy) level of "Western" social systems for about 2 years.

What happens next, Einstein? You've eaten all your seed corn and turned your milk cows into sandwich meat. Who -precisely- is going to have $10trn needed for the next month?

Because the goal is not to be on the public tit forever?

Here's the blunt truth:
- we can't all be rich
- life is hard fucking work for most people
- sometimes people make bad choices
- sometimes there isn't a "do over" option
- the ostensible goal of a considerate society is to safety-net people through hard times *to get them back on their feet*, not to make it so some lazy people don't ever have to work because they don't want to. This is why Democrats want all public assistance to channel through big faceless government; former systems of community aid tended to be judgemental: if the local church helped Otto sober up and get a job and Otto goes right back on the sauce, well, tough shit Otto, there are other people who CAN use that help instead of him.

The moment you hand free money to most poor people, they (mostly) lose/spend/waste it. This has been known since Roman times.

  "It's a lot to ask of someone to get their life together in 12 months, when a lot of these issues are structural or systemic," OR PERSONAL. I like how they left that out.

Funny that ... Nixon Republicans thought a guaranteed annual income would change no social structures or generate self-propagating personal change; I believe at-the-time $7100 was proposed.  Humphrey Democrats thought  such a guaranteed income would fundamentally change  America ... and consequently refused to pass the Republican sponsored bill.