The crash is going to collapse the stock market and when that happens companies will do Mass layoffs to get quick cash for stock BuyBacks to pump their stock.

A lot of us are not going to survive that. Even if you think you're a critical you're not.

I'm on a prescription antihistamine and my drugs get delivered and they just kind of stopped. I sometimes forget to take it so I had a little extra so I hadn't noticed immediately.

So I go in and see my doctor and it turns out the rep who makes sure the doctor is re-upping everybody's prescriptions got fired. In fact the company that makes the drug fired everybody in their sales staff.

What the fucking hell kind of thing is that? That's what you're up against. It literally does not matter if you are bringing in actual money for your company and are absolutely critical they are just stupid and crazy and they will just start firing people like crazy whether they need them or not.

Once Wall Street it starts the firings nobody is safe. And if you're a small business owner good luck keeping your clients in that chaos.

It's big news because the insurers aren't even willing to take the premiums. Normally they take your money and they don't pay out. But that only works for working stiffs like you and me. When it comes to a trillion dollar corporation you can bet your ass the insurance company is going to get stuck paying out if they trigger the policy.

The crash that's coming is going to hurt. It's going to make 2008 look like the .com boom.

I don't think anyone has realized the scale of our fuck up yet. Better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food that you're going to live off of. And better have a dry option has a backup.

That's my preferred version of that story. Alexander the Great captures a pirate and he's getting ready to kill him and the pirate says what I do with three ships you do with a thousand so it's okay.

So far the judges that have looked at it have ruled in favor of the AI companies saying that it's transformative.

Of course you can bet your ass if you or I stored millions of terabytes of copyrighted material in a modified database in order to produce derivative works we'd be in prison right and with a sentence now longer than most murderers.

But these are trillion dollar companies so they get a pass.

The I stands for Intranet. Don't buy crap that relies on the cloud.

Every manager I have had has had line work duties in addition to management. And management basically meant keeping track of my time cards and filling out a bunch of paperwork so that reports could be built for the CEO and CFO.

Basically they were doing double duty the entire time.

What I see a lot of is companies that promote people into management roles for small raises with large increases in pay and then as those people get older they fire them all with the excuse that they are cutting management when in actuality it's just good old fashioned age discrimination.

I think IBM began the process back in the late seventies and early '80s and I've noticed a lot of old farts like to celebrate it without knowing what the fuck was going on there.

Remember that actual management was invented for the purposes of Union busting. Seriously look it up and maybe learn a little American history while you're at it.

After factory automation basically decimated unions combined with Ronnie raygun you didn't really need management like that anymore so they were gradually converted into line workers that you can fire without cause and get away with it.

There are some devices that phone home and/or are cloud enabled, but do not require the cloud to function. Though in a lot of cases that does mean you have to set up an alternative app to control it, for instance something like Home Assistant or Apple HomeKit; it's pretty rare for the vendor's app to work locally without access to the cloud (Philips Hue used to, for instance, though I'm not sure if it still does).

AFAIK the Ecobee WiFi thermostat works with HomeKit or whatever Google's equivalent is. Should be able to isolate it on a VLAN, and as long as your phone can see it, you can control it locally.

Amd's biggest problem is getting people to use their software so they can get a foot in the door and take over from cuda.

Open AI is huge and getting them to use AMD software will be a huge leg up in the entire industry.

It's less about hardware and more about software adoption that leads into hardware sales. The only surprising thing is AMD figured that out.

A buddy of mine made the point that every single hobby now has to be monetized and we can't have any joy in our lives anymore. If you're playing video games you're supposed to be streaming them and begging for donations hoping to make a living off of it...

It is extremely hard to start a small business. When you look at people who start businesses most of the time they did it because they either used to have a extremely high paying job and have a ton of savings and/or they have family backing them.

Jeff bezos had a $350,000 loan from his parents and the general understanding that they could bail him out.

So no somebody working 50 hours a week at Walmart for just enough money to pay their share of rent with three other guys who occasionally have to drive Uber on the weekends is not going to be starting a small business.

You can't adapt to complete total economic collapses every 5 to 10 years. You can't adapt to stuff like that ice age into crashed into a woman, screamed "do something bitch!" At her and then unloaded his sidearm in her five times. And you can't adapt to a healthcare system that bankrupts have the country.

You can get lucky, very very lucky and maybe you will avoid all those little disasters until you get to die peacefully in your sleep. But that's not adaption that's blind dumb luck.

And every year as things get worse the odds of your luck running out increase.

You are way too obsessed with individualism and that's on purpose. The elites want you to be so that you don't actually try to solve the problem with any meaningful solutions.

Anyway good luck. Maybe your luck will hold out. It just depends on how old you are. If you're over 60 you have a good chance of dying before all these systemic problems run into you like a truck.

Nobody is talking about doing anything about all the bad things that keep happening. We are just bitching about it.

Large companies have too much power to go up against with anything except government or massive amounts of organization AKA unions.

About half the country has laid down their arms and chosen to comply in advance rather than fight back with the only weapons they have. A little bit of voter suppression and a little bit of threats of violence is enough to keep the other half in line.

For the time being there letting us bitch and moan but it won't be long before we lose even that privilege.

I would be curious to get honest answers from the half that has given up on what they think they got in return. But that's kind of a moot point.

Anything we could use to stop everything from getting worse isn't on the table and all that's left are fools fantasizing about fighting back against heavily armed and trained and supplied soldiers and militarized police with their little semi-automatic rifles. Maybe fully automatic if they know how to use a machine shop...

I would love for somebody to explain specifically what they expect us to do against large tech companies. You could say don't buy their products but let's not kid ourselves here. Boycotts don't work in the face of mega corporations that control basically every market. You dropping Linux on a few of your home computers doesn't stop Facebook from materially affecting your life in a negative way.

I'm open to solutions but I've yet to have anyone give me anything useful or concrete. Just a lot of cope and a lot of bitching

Google it. 70% of middle class jobs got taken by industrial robots and process improvements not outsourcing. Detroit is a blasted out hellhole not because of the radical left but because their industrial base of manufacturing jobs went poof. America produces more manufactured goods than at any time in history we just do it with a fraction of the labor.

As other people have pointed out we have been wallpapering over that with a series of boom and bust cycles. In addition to that we have a military empire that we enforce with a variety of underhanded economic tricks or what the cool kitties call soft power. Basically we prop up the US dollar with our debt and treasury bonds in order to bring in trillions of dollars of cheap imports to maintain our quality of life. It's a kind of imperial tribute but it's not immediately obvious that is what it is...

This new push for automation though is basically wrecking the boom bust cycle because it's undermining what's left of the working class. The center cannot hold. There will not be enough left to maintain any of it.

The billionaires know this and they are planning to transition to a post capitalist economy where they are still in charge and we live like feudal peasants but without the handful of Rights those peasants had. Techno feudalism.

I don't know a way to avoid that because the only rational path forward is some form of socialism but the majority of the country has been programmed during the critical 4 to 14 demographic to view socialism as slightly worse than Nazis...

I'm open for a third solution but pretending the problem doesn't exist isn't one of them.

I've heard that but I'm expecting them to close that loophole before long just like Microsoft is currently closing all the loopholes that let you install Windows 11 without a online account.

And even before they do that it basically stops 95% of users. I know everyone here is laughing at that but that's just a reality of it. ADB install is beyond most users.

And it's a massive bubble. In the very near future the winners will shake out and we're going to have a enormous economic collapse.

If we had competent leadership in Washington they would be getting ready for that but well, you know.

Meanwhile the trade war is hammering manufacturing jobs. It turns out that just cranking tariffs doesn't magically create jobs. It costs us jobs because other countries do retaliatory tariffs cutting off our access to their markets. Corn and soybean Farmers might get bailed out but nobody else does. And fun fact those corn and soybean Farmers aren't salt of the earth they're millionaires who have been buying up land from small family farms going out of business for ages.

Basically it's a classic case of a combination of an unsustainable bubble and a weak economy that was barely recovering from the last round of damage done to it by incompetent stewardship. This next crash is going to hurt