I don't think there is anything wrong with using a hydraulic exoskeleton to deadlift 24,000lbs and run 200 miles a day, as long as you actually keep up your muscle tone and maintain glucose/caloric stores and usage and make sure your bone density isn't rapidly dropping from outsourcing the biological work of being alive.
 

What does that last sentence mean? What is "register with a new doctor" and what are the circumstances you're having where you're waiting almost a year for that?

Agree completely.
The biggest problem with our continuing drift away from the founding Constitution and toward a heavy concentration of power in the Federal government is that ~550 people absolutely cannot both represent and govern every detail of 350,000,000.people's lives. Apportionment is where the REAL protests and reforms ought to be happening, not this tired red-blue debate over the Electoral College v. a straight popular vote for the Presidency. If the Executive branch has grown so powerful that you break down crying and start looking for jobs in other countries out of fear of what will happen, the election method itself is not the real problem. The people have already lost control of their government.

Correct.

We are entering a civilization where most of the things one person of average to below-average intellect might be able to learn in 24 months, automation/software engineers can systematize and deploy at scale to the economy's biggest employers in 24 months.

They will not find something they can learn to do which will also be valued enough to get paid for doing. And what they do find today will be gone tomorrow. It's the story of The Three (billion) Little Pigs, with the one in the straw house running to its sibling's stick house when the Straw Disruptors come along and blow their house down, and before the two pigs can settle into their shared home and divide up the space and resources into smaller portions to both survive on, along comes the Stick Disruptors and blow the stick house down, so the first two run to the Paralegal House and start dividing the resources three ways when that one gets blown down, so then they all run to the Learn To Code Bootcamp House and shrink the resources down to 1/4th each when that one gets blown down, etc. etc.

It isn't about whether people can learn something "useful". It's about the fact that - by definition - if a human being at below-to-average cognitive ability can learn that skill, then that skill can be "learned", or entirely obviated, by software. For businesses, the opportunity cost of recruiting, hiring, and training a person instead of leveraging an automation product will be too large to justify. Why would you ever spend money to grow your human workforce? There's no value add for your business.

We are going to have a planet full of beings who have literally $0.00 monetary-wage value on the labor market.
But they all still want to eat food, live indoors, get surgery when their appendix bursts, and so on.

I think your belief is a rational approach; it's just not where I draw the line, because I think it rests on a presumption of both domain competence and transferred-competence which is not warranted.

First off, the presumption of domain competence: There are lots of people who've been in a job for decades, have all the degrees/certs and titles, and yet are anywhere from ineffective to incompetent at the actual JOB. We've all worked with/for people like that. At some point we've all hired a candidate who looked great on paper and sounded awesome during the interview, and then 6 months after onboarding you realize they're just really really skilled at taking tests and presenting themselves well, but their fundamental understanding of the concepts is as deep as a body of water on the surface of Mars.

Second, expertise I have been in too many situations where someone has expertise in the relevant knowledge domain and still makes terrible leadership decisions -- especially when it pertains to process/policy management or project implementation. There is no inherent connection between domain competence and managerial/administrative competence. And conversely, I've seen excellent division/organizational performance brought out by someone who has merely casual knowledge of the nitty gritty, but is an excellent communicator, has a knack for process/flowchart visualization that helps them oversee change-management, and has the kind of commitment-keeping integrity which both earns respect from other stakeholders and influences those stakeholders to perform higher quality work.

You are right that, all other things being equal between two people, the one with additional expertise in the relevant domain is preferred.
But that isn't the same thing as saying "A person must have experience, education, and expertise in their organization's field to be qualified to lead that organization". How many hours of video games does someone need to play in a year before they are qualified to be CEO of Nintendo? How many years as an mechanical engineer/machinist does someone need to have before they are qualified to be CEO of Toyota? And, a bit tongue-in-cheek, but how many years of running a large federal regulatory body do you and I need to have before we are qualified to state whether someone else is qualified to run a large federal regulatory body?

We have a civilian government, selected by mere popularity, whose entire existence is there to be of, by, and for the hundreds of millions of civilians. To say "Only domain experts should ever be elected/appointed to" these kinds of positions is well-intentioned but also inherently elitist, because it is exactly the same set of social-psychology forces which create the incestuous and self-protecting cadre of C-suite Execs and Board Members that dominate the corporate ruling class. That is -- someone who spent 25 years as a high-level neurosurgeon ought to be extremely knowledgeable about medicine and healthcare (again, ought to be; there are plenty of doctors who were brilliant students but suck at clinical practice). But paradoxically, someone who spends 25 years as a high-level neurosurgeon has a life whose circumstances, income, choices, etc. are far removed from the other 300 million civilian Americans that person will be in charge of regulating. It's the Senator effect. Can someone who has the resources (or sociopathic sellout willingness) to become a US Senator, and then spends 24 years as a continuosly reelected Senator, TRULY represent the 24yo kid working Chipotle during the day and driving Uber in the evening to barely make rent on a 1br apartment in the city where the jobs are?

Again, I'm not saying you're wrong. You may be more right than I am. But my life experiences have given me a profound distrust of mere experts. I've seen the havoc they often wreak on regular people's lives.

Please restrict your comments to things I have actually said, not things you assume can be projected onto all people who aren't exactly like you.
There are no monoliths.
Be more open-minded.
Find the courage to believe that nuances exist, that different people have sincere, authentic differences in where they draw the lines, even though this exposes you to risk because you might find yourself occasionally in common cause with a world that is more robustly varied than your perception of it can contain.
Rather than assuming someone's political/philosophical gender, just ask them which pronouncements they identify with.

There is nowhere you will ever find in any of my comments (going back decades) saying people should not have the right to make the personal decision not to work for whomever they choose, because that pronouncement would be the exact opposite of everything I support.
There is nowhere you will ever find in any of my comments (going back decades - looooong before most of the American Left found it popular enough to be suddenly convenient ~10 years ago) where I have pronounced anything other than complete, unreserved, uncompromised support for same-sex marriage. To me it is such a self-evidently rational position. So long as government provides legal recognition to marriages, it has no compelling reason to single out same-sex marriages as unequal -- all the exclusionary reasons people bring up inevitably either require an explicit enshrinement of religious dogma into federal power (something I strongly oppose), or rely on poorly formed definitions of "the purpose for marriage" which would end up applying just as well to other groups, like men who've had testicular cancer or postmenopausal women.

Go back and re-read my comment. Notice that I questioned no one's right to take any action they choose, nor did I say people should be free from consequences (which would be impossible in a zero-sum conservation-encoded universe anyway).

On the contrary, my questions were all directed, just like many of your comments in this story, toward the consequences of people's choices within the context of this story. The GP post to mine asserted a causal link between the cancellation of Eich as the leader of Mozilla, and the degradation of Mozilla software as an alternative to billionaire-enriching monopolists like Microsoft and Google. If that assertion has merit, then it is reasonable to ask if those who pushed out Eich may have won a small, temporary moral victory for a particular set of the population, while inadvertently triggering consequences which are steadily degrading the lives of billions (which is a set that includes the subset of those who won the aforementioned moral victory) as we rush headlong into an enshittified techbro corporate hellscape.

The argument you appear to be wanting to have with me, is something you have constructed on your own. I would prefer you join me in an authentic discussion instead. But the choice, and the consequences, remain yours.

Keeping people and ideas at arm's length, in Othered monoliths, has the benefit of increasing your win percentage in arguments, because you can hone your argumentation techniques and deploy them in clusterbombs all over threads like these. But don't you ever get tired of winning, that way? What if there were a way to win by connecting and negotiating rather than Othering and negating? Wouldn't the consequences of that choice be highly desirable?

It's such a contorted way to flip the script and make him responsible for wearing that dress and walking in that neighborhood at night.
Exclusion of same-sex marriage was and has been an official position of the Republican Party.
Granting the right to abortion was and has been an official position of the Democrat Party.

So by the same rationale being presented in this thread, every Republican should, today, right now, quit their jobs at any company with any Democrat in significant leadership roles, and every Democrat should, today, right now, quit their jobs at any company with any Republican in significant leadership roles. How in the world could you expect an accountant to not feel existentially terrified to build spreadsheet formulas on a computer at a desk in an office in a building leased by a company whose CEO believes something different about one particular aspect of state regulations?

It's that CEO's own fault for "stepping on his ****" by... believing in different things. By him believing differently, and spending a tiny fraction of his own personal paycheck to support his beliefs, he caused people to feel things.

As we all know, feelings don't come from within. Feelings are put into you by others. Your feelings are just one more way you are victimized by outside forces. You're just going about your day being calm and neutral and self-regulated and stable, then *BOOM* someone hits you with a blowdart that injects feelings into you, feelings you desperately wish you didn't have to feel, but there's no known cognitive-behavioral system for owning, processing, and regulating your emotional condition. That control is located externally to you. For example, your emotional control is located inside Brendan Eich. It's so sad that we are being held hostage to the feelings he controls and forces upon us. What a cruel world, to give one man so much control over how you and I feel inside ourselves.

He donated an incredibly large amount of [pinkie-to-lips]... $3,000 of his personal money to some political issues he personally cared about.
Some board members and employees felt offended by the way he spent his paycheck. It wasn't how they wanted him to spend his personal income.
So they sent a clear signal.
Other than that signal's virtue, what tangible benefit did it create for their cause?
Are the principles that motivated those people stronger in June 2025 than they were 10 years ago?
Did their signal successfully cancel the effects of that enormous sum of... $3,000?
What is the cost to society of the steady entrenchment of Google/Microsoft as controllers of computing and the Internet, as Mozilla has steadily weakened during that same time period.

Yep. In the 1998-2005 era I'll admit I was an idealist who thought Information Wants To Be Free and the automated future would be like Star Trek where molecular resources can be manufactured into anything on demand, leaving humans free to be poets and philosophers or whatever. By the end of that decade - 2010 - the trend extrapolations were unmistakable to anyone paying attention. If old industries can be "disrupted" and automated/distributed with appy apps that love apps, then after a short expansion period the making of appier apps will become the largest remaining labor-market of the economy, and thus automation itself will become so valuable that it is the must lucrative next target for the Disruption gold-rushers.

That "knowledge economy" we were promised in the 1990s simply cannot be sustained for more than a bubble interval. A knowledge economy in actual practice is just another MLM. Which is also how college costs exploded even as college benefits imploded. We subsidized/incentivized a system where people are employed to sell wholesale supplies of information to other people who, after leaving college, find there's not much they can DO with that information other than become a professor and resell their wholesale supplies to the next Knowledge Distributor. The non-college version of this is the thousands of YouTubers generating YT revenue from telling you how to make $60,000/month setting up an Etsy shop, which was swiftly followed by YTers telling you how to make $60,000/month generating YT content about setting up a YT account to tell people who to set up an Etsy shop.

The entire "gig economy" of the past 10 years - which so often was presented as an answer to my predictions of permanent structural unemployment because it supposedly showed how appy apps were generating new employment - was in fact to me the clearest evidence that I was right. The gig economy is also ultimately an MLM. We can't all get paid to Uber each other to the grocery store on our day off from driving for Uber. We can't all use our OnlyFans income to subscribe to everyone else's OnlyFans. Markets consume resources as fuel, and conservation of matter/energy applies. At some point someone has to import new resources to the economy, whether that's materials, or knowledge, or people, or technology, or, usually, conquering another territory and thereby acquiring its resources for "free".

Thus, a "knowledge economy" isn't strengthened by recursively self-accelerating technology automation. Automation is actually the Achilles Heel of a knowledge economy. It is the runaway nanites that consume nearly all possible labor-value and turn every potential worker - the white collar lady with the Ph.D. and the blue collar dude driving a cab into indistinguishable grey goo, incapable of generating/injecting any more fuel into the economy and therefore summarily discarded.

You're correct on proximity but you're ignoring the stakes.

The FDA chief can issue directives that make your blood pressure meds harder to get.
The Commander In Chief can unilaterally make decisions that result in tens of millions of human deaths within the next 10 days.

If the CIC needs zero training/experience to hold tens of millions of lives in his hand, why would the FDA chief - with smaller scope and lower stakes - need more than the CIC in their respective theater of action?

I started predicting a near future of software-induced permanent structural unemployment ~15 years ago on this and other discussion platforms, only to be deluged with "but, but... buggy whip manufacturers!!!!!!"

It's inevitable. It's not that there won't be any work. It's that there won't be enough work 8 billion humans are capable of doing or reskilling to within their lifespan, and the wages for the remaining unskilled labor will collapse below survivability. Especially because, even already in 2025, the jobs of the upper labor market become primarily centered around creating/licensing technology to eliminate all the jobs of the lower market.

Next prediction -- after some global wars (assuming there is any meaningful survival) in 50-100 years this will be what leads to the removal of taboos on Eugenics (and after that, human cloning). Just like you can't afford to spawn processes that eat up RAM/CPU without an intended, valuable outcome, we will come to view human conception as something that needs a plan/purpose, which must be built into the architecture of the embryo.

Yes, that's the point. If the person who decides whether we send millions of people to their death, or go Nuclear with Putin, can be a reality TV star or an intern-cigar aficionado who needs zero military/war experience, why does the head of the FDA need an MD + years of experience as a clinician?

This is known as Democracy and strong Federal/Executive power. Two things which millions of people have worked hard to expand.

Having listened to the past 25 years of people strenuously arguing that the popular vote - and not any sort of structured distribution of balanced opposing powers - ought to be the way we determine who gets to make government policy - and that federal/executive departments ought to be what govern the people, I admit to being somewhat less sympathetic to their dismay when a popular vote selects a federal/executive leader who uses the powers he inherited from decades of federal/executive expansion (and in that word "powers" I include the actions which may later in court be found illegitimate, because while no one should steal your property, if the popular vote in your family is that your kids want to leave their bicycles in the driveway so its more convenient to get them rather than opening the garage door, well, when someone drives by day after day and decides to try taking your bicycle, well... you got the inevitable outcome of your choices).

I would also like to question the role of Commander In Chief.
Where did our last 4 U.S. Presidents obtain their military history and battlefield tactics PhDs?