There is such a thing as a hands-free kit. Fix that phone someplace accessible with such a kit, and you're good to go. But hold it to your ear for phoning, and you'll get fined. At least, that's pretty much it for most, if not all of Europe.

The *real* problem is with people who aren't skilled enough at operating a motor vehicle while manipulating a device or controls. Long before cellphones existed, we had people accidentally rear-ending other cars because they were trying to change their radio station or volume. Yet, we didn't pass laws banning car stereos. (We collectively acknowledged the benefits of a car stereo while driving and decided people just needed to learn how to work the radio controls in a safe manner while driving -- which most people figured out how to do.)

People used to manage to unfold paper maps and refer to them while driving, back in the 1970's and earlier, without wrecking into people, too.

I'm amazed at how lax the drivers' ed testing has become in recent years. My daughter went to get her license last year and the entirety of the practical part of her exam was having her drive around the block, out of the shopping center the motor vehicle dept. was located in, and back into the lot to park in a parking space next to it. They didn't so much as get her out on the highway! I have a hard time rationalizing that as ok, while worrying about good/experienced drivers who multitask glancing at smartphone screens.

As long as he's referring to his own field (creation of animations/art for film or video), I think he's essentially correct. AI will become a required tool you need to be familiar with as part of your career. It won't take people's jobs, except for people who refuse to learn how to utilize AI as part of it.

I'm FAR from convinced AI usage will play out the same way in all industries. For example? If you work in law, it makes sense AI could replace your lower-paid paralegals who essentially just open Word templates and fill out fields with appropriate info for each client. However, AI isn't at all likely to take jobs of many attorneys out there because that line of work involves showing up in courts in person, and presenting things to other people in a persuasive way.

If you're paid to publish ad copy, then AI is likely to reduce the number of employees needed, but again? The ones retained will need to know how to utilize AI tools well (and how to supplement or revise what they churn out).

AI isn't going to do anything meaningful in most "blue collar" fields like construction, IMO. It might help an architect out with the design stages of a project, but people getting paid to build things won't get anything done by some software code running in the cloud.

My feelings don't necessarily prove or validate anything... but they're based on the reality I've witnessed unfolding all around me over the years, plus statistics and data I've seen over time that corroborates it.

What are "the numbers" you speak of, anyway? You act as though there's some definitive set of numbers out there that proves everything I said as untrue?
All you have to do is study your recent American history to see changes in corporate America like creating the job description of "Human Resources", where no such department used to exist. This was strictly a move to give excuses to hire more women in white collar career office settings. (Companies got along just fine before that by letting management handle personnel issues directly, on their own. Issues related to insurance or benefits were probably handled by the same Finance team that paid those bills.)

I agree with the people pointing out how Canada eliminated the penny and it's worked fine to round up or down to the nearest 5 cents.

But it seems to me the value of the penny in U.S. currency has more to do with enabling the psychological "mind games"? EG. Promising people can get an item or service for only a penny, because people equate that with "pretty much no cost". While sheer volume of customers accepting the deal means it adds up to at least a sum that's worth collecting vs. just giving the same thing away free. Also encourages the mind game of wanting $10 for a product but pricing it at $9.99 instead to make it feel cheaper.

I guess over time, people will just view a nickel the same way, mentally, as a penny is viewed now.

Those are claims. What's the actual reality of the facts?

Hartmut Zohm, a german plasma physicist who's deep into fusion research, regularly provides updates on the status of fusion research. While not saying it in so many words, he is quite clearly giving impression that the claims by all those fusion startups are overly optimistic and basically a "give me all your venture money" call. They may have specific partial solutions for certain problems, but are nowhere near a full-scale operation.

That's certainly right, but only up to a point. When you're e.g. running a mainframe platform and losing the last people that still know it, and all the code running there, to retirement, and even the maker of that (non-IBM) platform obviously has less and less people who know how to keep that platform running, it's definitely time to move on. Unlike Elon / DOGE want to make you believe, no, it's not a 5 month job to migrate, even 5 years won't suffice to do it properly. It's not simply about knowing COBOL.

We're still caught up in this big political/cultural war, where the more "liberal leaning" half of our population is still sold on the idea that we need to keep making more "opportunities" for women in the workplace, and secondarily? There was blatant sexism against women up till now, preventing them from obtaining workplace equality.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The core issue at hand is really a level deeper. In my lifetime, I've witnessed a big shift in focus away from valuing the "stay at home mom" and the idea of the man being the "breadwinner" of the relationship/marriage. Unfortunately, this resulted in a whole generation of women who believed they should/could "do it all". Raise the kid/kids but ALSO get the full-time demanding career job.

If we're honest about it though? This results in basically doubling the number of applicants for given career job openings across the country. All of a sudden, the work that was traditionally done by men has just as many women applying to do it. The basic rules of supply and demand dictate this brings down wages and makes it harder to obtain a given job. So what happens next is, you get families who suddenly find they need 2 incomes instead of just 1 to survive. Both people go to work and wind up bringing in little more than what just the man would have earned if things were different. (And because women can't *really* give full focus to raising kids AND a demanding job, it results in more income spent on nannies, babysitters, daycare costs, etc. to get through it all.)

I'm not denying there were women out there not interested at all in raising kids who got a raw deal trying to work in a career field. But I'm saying, we went too far in the opposite direction and we're collectively paying the price. Yet, a big chunk of the population still wants things to continue full steam ahead.

You've got the developers of the phone operating system not providing a usable option for people trying to develop this type of application. On one hand, they're complaining that the "All files access" permission is unacceptable to use, as a security risk .Yet on the other hand, you're talking about an application that's supposed to allow syncing much of your phone's content to your remote server (your photo collection, music collection, calendar info, etc.), and allows general uploading and downloading of files between the phone and server.

If Google doesn't want someone like Nextcloud using "All files access", then they should design an acceptable alternative. Perhaps a special permission for file management and syncing type software that allows all of the needed data to be accessed while logging it someplace secure, in case there really is some kind of security issue to be researched with an app's behavior?

The idea of a 125% plus fee slapped on imports or exports to and from a couple of nations producing huge volumes of goods each other need is simply unsustainable.

At the same time? I don't really think even the MAGA crowd ever believed this was supposed to be some kind of long-term solution to anything? It was blatantly obvious to me from the start that Trump was throwing out these insane percentages to force real negotiations to happen. And here we are.

I mean, to use an ever-popular car analogy? Say you want to buy a guy's vintage Mustang. You've always wanted one but you're also sensible enough to know you're going to drive it regularly so it's going to be a constant drain on your finances keeping it running. The seller wants over twice the price you envision as sane/doable. If you go into things asking the seller to consider selling to you for $1000-2000 less than his asking price? You're still going to wind up paying FAR more than where you wanted to be on it, EVEN if he just accepts your offer at face value.

To have any hope of getting the car near your desired price point, you're going to have to completely "lowball" the guy, saying "Hey... if you get tired of trying to sell it and want to get rid of it? I'm willing to pay X price." A lot of people would tell you, "Well - you just can't afford a Mustang, my friend. He's going to ignore you and sell it to someone else paying his asking price!"

BUT ... maybe he lives in an area where there's not much demand for one? Maybe he needs the money and was only pricing it so high because he heard other people got that much at auto auctions before for similar ones and was just hoping he'd have the same luck? The point is, at least now, the buyer has his cards on the table and it's in the sellers' court to consider entertaining his much lower offer.

America has been screwing around for decades, complaining about China stealing our intellectual property every time we have them manufacture items for us, China polluting without any controls on it, Chinese government subsidizing the cost to make products just so they can flood the American market with them below cost to make it uneconomical for a US company to stay in business making the same things, etc. etc. Our negotiations have amounted to real specific complaints and relatively insignificant tariffs applied selectively. None of this moves the needle for substantial changes.
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But with glass, you can get plenty of sand with very little effort along any beach or in a desert.... I don't see how there's much savings if you're driving around big, inefficient garbage collection trucks to get used glass from recycling bins and then having to have people sort it out to ready it for re-use?

For all the talk of landfills being some kind of "last resort"? I remember one statistic saying the entire nation's garbage disposal needs for 100 years being able to be handled by putting it all in a 250 square mile area. That's "a lot", subjectively.... yet with 3.8 million square miles of land in America, it's not much at all.

Exactly! It's been said many times that one of the only items that makes any economic sense to recycle is aluminum. Aluminum cans are cheaper to recycle than the cost of mining for more aluminum ore and refining it.

I bet if the truth was told, most of your city-wide recycling programs count on capturing those aluminum cans as the main/only item that makes the program profitable on their books?

Most other material I see going into recycling bins are glass or paper/cardboard items, plus your random plastic containers that likely don't get recycled at all but people mistakenly believe they do so they toss them in. (Laundry soap jugs, etc.)

I know at one time, they claimed they made money selling the recycled cardboard and paper after compressing it into bales. But most of that went overseas, before other nations stopped accepting more of them from us in the U.S. Anyone who ever lived near a paper mill can attest to the horrible stench it gives off from the chemicals needed to process the pulp into paper products. Recycled paper/cardboard is of a lesser grade than fresh lumber so it has limited uses and demand. It's fine to make more cardboard shipping boxes, but does you no good for making a good quality greeting card. If you're dealing with nasty polluting chemicals to process paper either way? You usually may as well make higher grade paper instead of low grade stuff from recyclables, while you're at it. The big environmental impact is from the processing; not the fact you had to use fresh cut trees instead of scrap paper/cardboard. The trees are a renewable resource.

I absolutely agree with you. But the problem is, you're talking about your smaller companies and not the big names that the general public is familiar with.
"Golden parachutes" aside? The CEO of any company with a household name is paid exponentially times more compensation than the rank and file employee working there.

People are generally fed up with the disparity there -- especially when these businesses are so large, many of the workers doing the customer-facing work may be managed by several bosses above them and never interact directly with the CEO once. In these situations, it becomes obvious that most business decisions that matter are being made by other individuals. Only the real general, highest-level stuff gets determined by the CEO, and when he/she makes a poor decision? It's typical to see him/her change course with some platitudes like "better to act quickly but be wrong than get paralyzed by inaction". A bunch of rank and file workers get punished by way of reduced raises the next year to cover for the mistake, and it's business as usual.

I've always had FAR more respect for smaller operations, where it's clear that the top level people are really keeping a pulse on everything happening in the company, and they really DO call all the shots, taking full responsibility for mistakes along the way.

Like someone else posted here, the salary has a lot to do with things. I'd agree Reddit should maybe "go back to the old days", except it's a fair complaint if your staff was all well-compensated and yet not getting much done out of arrogance they were "irreplaceable" or entitled to the money because of where they worked.

The idea you're going to start a company and then deny it's really a company? That's just foolish idealism.

At the end of the day, you either have a business entity or a non-profit / charity of some sort. Either one winds up with a lot of structure and expectations of the workforce. What else were you proposing it would be? A play place for adults? A second family for all the employees and contractors? It doesn't make sense.

Optimistic, perhaps? But there's also the assumption in play that computing power keeps increasing with time, and what's called "enormous" today might be insignificant in a decade. The huge processing demands for all this AI stuff will surely drive some innovation in this space?