Having been both hourly (consultick) and salaried/exempt Iâ(TM)m not sure why we donâ(TM)t all just migrate to hourly.

It seems like we are stuck in a 100 y.o. employment framework for exempt v. hourly while the nature of work has changed dramatically. Farm, factory, medicine, trades all very different in 2025. With many current roles simply not existing 50-100 years ago.

Time is the one thing all jobs have in common so why not make that the common denominator. Then feel to adjust the normal work week as needed

I imagine the reticence for a change like I have proposed is that for some people there is some stigma to be âoehourlyâ. There is a fear (prob warranted) that you will get paid less annually after a switch, and lastly the exec types will find it hard to justify what they did for 1 hour to warrant $13,000/hr

These stories will pop up from time to
time on /. and elsewhere. The gist is someone forecasts a demand that the world doesnâ(TM)t seem able to meet. But just like all the others this one will be solved in due time by usual supply/demand curves. The price offered will go up encouraging expansion of supplyâ¦there will be substitutions, innovations, etc.

The add on to these stories is usually a free-market guy who is asking for government financial help to solve the âoecrisisâ

Eggs arenâ(TM)t $20, we wonâ(TM)t build nuclear power plants for AI. Civilization will be ok if the world population can decline and stabilize at about 1/2â"2/3 the current value before we âoegreat filterâ ourselves

"Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting."

This is exactly the model United uses. Here's your price...oh wait, you wanted to bring carry on luggage? That's a bunch extra $$$. ( Like who is travelling without bringing at least a carry-on....?)

Unlike Southwest (was) we let you pick your seat....oh wait there are no seats left at your fare...how about a premium seat which is exactly the same as the basic seat, except costs more. That's more $$$

Then all the other BS around change fees when they eff up, automatically cancelling your flight and rebooking you.

United straight up sux.

I flew Hawaiian Airline recently and it was a freakin' dream. A little bit of food in a meal, comfortable, reasonable sized seats. No B.S. around carry on. Free, high speed, WiFi. United, American, Delta can pound sand. I don't have the guts to fly Spirit...and sounds like Southwest is spiraling downhill for some reason.

Bad idea gets nixed once it hits the news:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2Fba...

This is especially dumb politically since just three years ago the city recalled 3 of the Board of Education members for similar shenanigans...with a plurality of like 70-75%. And they are in fiscal crisis, plummeting enrollment, school closures, bad test results/outcomes. Just a head shaking...why.

However this bit from the proponents of the "Grading for Equity" program I find humorous:

"...reconfiguring the grading scale to address inherent problems with a 100-point grading scale — which disproportionately assigns an F for 0 to 59 points, but only 10 points each for the other grades."

It's like the A, B, C, D grades are jealous that F gets to keep 59% of the scale...maybe that's the equity they are trying to remedy ; )

I find Sabinaâ(TM)s channel very informative, interesting, and frequently humourous. She also speaks at a level closer to my comfort zoneâ¦not quite PhD level, but also not rehashing the basics over and over.

I wish her success, but also wonder about âthe grindâ(TM) . Whereas before a new video would be a mandatory watch, now that they are more numerous and itâ(TM)s sometimes like âoewell itâ(TM)s Wednesday need to create content , letâ(TM)s find a ridiculous paper on Arixv to ripâ

Itâ(TM)s a tough gig I imagine.

It seems like a bunch of the administrations actions seem like they are negative...no more (Federal) police body cams, cutting off programs for toddlers, cancelling food aid for starving people in Sudan, trying to cancel Big Bird (& Oscar the Grouch) now wifi for people at the library, cancelling FEMA...before hurricane season (gusty)

But these sacrifices need to be made in order to balance the books. I'm sure after this first fiscal year the government deficit and debt will begin to fall and we can work towards government fiscal responsibility just as our Republican representatives have espoused for decades. Again, any day now we will see plans for a balanced budget. Any day now.

The X12 standards definitely had some quirks, and a bit of a learning curve, but I really came to appreciate how comprehensive it is. And how bloody efficient it was on transaction size, byte counts etc. This Franken-process I describe above is a beast in size nearly 1MB per transaction, parsing all that does take time and storage, even throwing tons of cloud-ware at it. But the underlying EDI is only like 1k Its sad that all the institutional knowledge around those concepts is being lost.

FWIW I worked for Sterling Commerce way back in the day initially as tech support, then as a "consult--tick" . Fell into EDI early on and keep boomeranging back somehow. It still lives down in the basements of most Fortune 100 firms

I work at a Fortune 50 company now. One of the primary (internal) APIs was composed by and is supported by their offshore dev team. It wraps an entire EDI 8xx transaction set within a response composed of XML tagsâ¦and I kid you not, that XML is plopped into a json. All the efficiencies of the X12 standards are âoelost in translationâ

So there is EDI work, but itâ(TM)s dirty dirty work in 2025

Somewhat tangential, but I can recommend the book âoeReligion for Atheistsâ by Alain de Botton Itâ(TM)s a light read from a now-popular author.
The tldr is that one of the roles religion also plays in a persons life is a sort of grounding, centering role. The various holidays , rituals, and gatherings provide guardrails, direction, foundation and some level of meaning. De Bottons thesis (imo) is that modern world has excised religion from core society, but not replaced it with anything that provides that same framework that human beings apparently need.

My thesis is that it has been replaced by hollow corporate framework â¦say Cinco de Mayo and St Patrickâ(TM)s day â¦buy stuff, drink stuff, etc. And our morality is now guided by social media trends . Innately we realize this is empty, meaningless, negative, but we go along because we need âoesomethingâ. Book is good, give it a read. I really like de Botton

Anyway, RIP St Francis, you brought a new, different, much needed take on the papacy. Perfection is not for mortals, but your time here was good.

This. If not DeepSeek them something else that will not exactly be the OpenAI/Nvidia duopoly. There is going to be a 'good-enough' version of AI that will work for agents, chatbots, summarizing stuff, cheating on exams...and its not clear how much people will pay. Lots of people will also just keep hitting '0' to speak to a person.

I would also say that I think the AGI ...if/when is fully realized will not be the absolute game-changer some people hope. If you use an AGI to design an automobile, it won't be dramatically different than one that is produced today given the constraints. Same thing with a couch, a CPU. Advances for sure, but unlikely (IMHO) to be anything earth-shattering.

One place that AGI might be more impactful (for better or worse) is administration of people in say municipal government management and corporations. Those are places less influenced by logic than they are by bias, relationships, beliefs, and greed. Lest anyone think this is politically charged, I would say that my comment applies across the spectrum.

Tangential comment, but what is with every CEO, big and small, opining all over the internet and media space about...well just about everything. How do they find the time when it's oh so incredibly busy being CEO, no time for anything, working 16 hour days. Or at least that's what is said.

In reality they all just want to be Tik Tok influencers with 500k subs. Lame.

Clearly a way for Musk to get out of his disastrous Twitter investment. He grossly overpaid for Twitter, super underwater. He can pretend that xAI is worth 80 billion based on some bulls--t latest round of investment. Twitter is 'bought' with the fake xAI stock, and then Musk is able to divest his money during this peak AI frenzy...and later whoever has xAI investments takes the losses. Take that Delaware Chancery court.

Super bonus that apparently financial fraud is fine if you ass-kiss the president.

Unreal that the US is turning into a banana republic right before my eyes

Plus one on that comment.

Salary/wages (incl benefits) is the motivating factor. Want more, better, electricians, pay more. But whether its the trades, programmers, laborers, 'whatevers', the manager-types are loathe to pay market rate b/c the implied results are that means less income for the manager types. So they will go through all sorts of hoops like overseas outsourcing, trying to get the govt to pay directly/indirectly, H1B, and now of course AI

Perhaps others have had this experience. Strip of fast food joints. McDonaldâ(TM)s, Carls Jr, others are empty. Line around the block for In N Outâ¦

And In N Out is price competitive if not cheaper. That line around the block moves quickly. Product is better. Service betterâ¦even w/out kiosks. Place is cleaner inside in out.

tldr; McDonalds and the like is run on a least common denominator basis. Money goes to mgmt , shareholders, consultants, everything but the product. Itâ(TM)s a poorly run company.

I'm not a proponent of USPS in particular, but I will say they are held to a much higher standard than other areas of government and private firms, in particular to their employee pension funds. Can argue back and forth about pensions being to rich, etc but that's the big gap in GAAP. (Ha!)

Certainly the only issue with USPS. A few reports have shown that the labor productivity has fallen, basically as a consequence of the same number-ish of staff delivering far less revenue generating mail/deliveries. One could easily imagine regular mail service being reduced to 3 days a week.

I've also thought that the brick and mortar footprint of the USP has gone underutilized. Those post offices can be used for social security administration functions, dept agriculture, etc. Even if it is just a kiosk in a post office with some workers that are cross trained, its a place that is close enough to its consumers to make it worthwhile when the website/phone call option isn't