So I've known people that can do this and at the very least they can make it into their 40s like this without any noticeable issues. It really is just a free four or five hours a day to them.

After 40 I'm not sure I lost track of them but the thing is once you hit 40 years old our corporate system is done with you. So honestly who cares?

Is that if you've got somebody who can sleep 3 hours a day and be perfectly healthy that person gets an extra five productive working hours a day and suddenly we're all expected to work an extra 5 hours a day.

We take these borderline superhuman freaks of nature with literal genetic mutations and then we act like that's the norm and anyone who can't do that has something wrong with them and they're lazy and stupid and they just need to work harder.

The bar is always set to the highest level. For us anyway. For the upper crust they can goof off as much as they want. I remember an article where a newspaper followed a bunch of CEOs on their day. The CEO spent the day hanging out with their kids, goofing off in meetings and generally taking it easy. But if you read the tone of the article it sounded like they were working their asses off. It was freaking hilarious.

And to be honest there's plenty of malware on the official Google store and I don't just mean apps that do dodgy things that are technically allowed or legal I mean just out and out malware. Google does not do a great job of policing the store, it's better than it was but it's still pretty much the wild West.

The main problem with Google is to sideload an app you have to change a setting with a scary name and that's going to scare off a lot of people, which of course is by design.

Apple is a whole another kettle of fish. Not quite as terrible as Google but not great.

All that said I can install whatever software I want on my Windows PC and if I had a Mac I could do the same and the world hasn't come to an end.

So if you live in apartments then a few years ago you were forced to switch to a low flow shower head.

They suck. A lot. You barely get any water out of them. It takes two or three times as long to take a simple freaking shower because there's so little water coming out. I've been stuck in apartments because of one thing after another, I replaced the low flow shower head but there's plenty of people who either can't do that or it doesn't occur to them.

Low Flow shower heads are a pretty major inconvenience and regular people's lives put forward by obnoxious centrist bureaucrats. It has very little impact on water savings but it looks good on paper. And of course it only applies to lower working class types, if you've got money you can buy fancy shower heads or even just playing a fancy shower with plenty of water flow. So it very quickly becomes a sore spot for a lot of people.

The same is true for when they took phosphates out of dish soap. Very little impact on the environment because they didn't do anything about the massive amount of phosphates manufacturing dumps into the water supply but a huge inconvenience for everyone involved. Since then my dishes have never really came out clean.

It's basically trump, or more likely his handlers, figuring out an issue that resonates with voters and hitting on it. And left wingers being dipshits can't see that. Most of them tend to be much better off because they graduated college and have better careers so they don't have to put up with these frustrating Little things.

That's what newt Gingrich called it. It was a plan to obstruct anything that was positive for the American people so that the American people would blame government for their problems. A form of economic terrorism. You can pretty easily find the Republicans talking about this, or you used to be able to honestly they've taken so much control of the media I'm not so sure that's true anymore. The little googling of the phrase contract with America and newt Gingrich and you'll find it.

The Republican party has been sabotaging America for going on 40 years at least and then taking advantage of the chaos and confusion. It was a core part of project 2025. They call it shock and awe now.

The purpose of government is to enrich Trump and Elon musk and Peter thiel. There is no other purpose of government.

All other purposes went straight out the window when we elected a child rapist who steals classified documents to be president a second time.

He didn't even lie to us this time. He told us he was going to do a nasty trade war it's just 77 million Americans were too lazy and stupid to figure out what that meant and 7 million Americans were just flat out denied the right to vote for Kamala Harris.

Looks like Elon musk got his mod points.

Based on the primary election at best he's got about 25 million.

That is still way too many people desperate to vote for a convicted rapist who stole classified documents and has 34 felony convictions and 26 credible rape accusations...

As for Biden, one of the saddest moments of our entire country was one election day came around and Google searches for Kamala Harris spiked because so many people didn't realize Biden wasn't running.

And even with all that we still have Rock solid evidence that 7 million Americans were denied the right to vote the vast majority of which would have been democrats. With the power of gerrymandering maps probably 90% although there would have been a little friendly fire in there.

Trump cheated. Trump always cheats. He has to because when you actually run polls Republican policies are incredibly unpopular. So the Republican party has to rely on people who don't believe the Republicans will do the things they say they will do combined with people willing to trade critical economic security for social issues and fighting the "woke mob" (or sjws, or the politically correct, or whatever the hell we are calling progressives this week).

And I can get you only so far. So at some point the fascists are going to fascist and they're going to stop letting people vote.

Is going to cost us trillions. Ignoring the fact that the people musk fired are mostly are there being hired back or are in places that musk is planning on setting himself up to get juicy government contracts for the cuts to the IRS mean that even if we Bank the $150 billion dollars in cost cutting and pretends there isn't going to be any downstream impacts, we're still going to lose a trillion a year in collected taxes.

But you know bureaucrats are bad m'kay.

When I learned what a thought terminating cliche was it made everything in the world so simple. If I point out everything above somebody will just say the word bureaucrat and the phrase government waste and all thought goes out the window.

Back in the day Reagan did his debate with Carter and Carter was asked a question and gave a detailed and useful response.

Reagan responded "there he goes again" and everybody had a good laugh and completely ignored Carter's detailed and valuable response.

That was a thought terminating cliche. Once you learn to spot them it's amazing how it opens up your thinking. I first was informed of them from some of the nastier religious apologists. The kind who tell you that slavery isn't all that bad...

They have images of replacing thousands of workers dancing in their heads. Especially since the whole world is going into a recession.

Whether AI actually works or not is irrelevant. Every single one of the upper middle managers, guys below c level, is now looking top to bottom in their organization for anything and everything that can be automated. The word AI is going to get tossed around for common automation processes. You're going to see large increases in productivity but you're not going to see more jobs or better pay.

If we still had a competitive economy with antitrust law enforcement then firing all those highly skilled workers would result in them starting new businesses and competition would drive down prices. But we don't do antitrust law enforcement anymore because those are bureaucrats and we hate bureaucrats. So any attempt to compete with the big boys just gets you smacked down. If you're really really really really lucky they buy you out.

And if none of the automation or the AI or whatever works then thanks to the mass layoffs that are coming because of the recession we put ourselves in on purpose you can expect to be forced to pick up the slack.

Never had a co-worker that was completely useless and didn't do their job? well congrats you've now got an AI co-worker that's completely useless and refuses to do their job. You still have to get the work done or you get fired and since there aren't any other jobs you're just going to have to suck it down.

The last 55 years of America has been working people sucking it down because of stupid reasons

Then llms are going to make them basically irrelevant except for the kind that got OJ Simpson off.

They'll always be a need for a lawyer that can throw a prosecutor off their game but that's a tiny amount of cases. Most people simply can't afford those kind of lawyers.

The vast majority of lawyers basically look at police procedures and find where the cops did something dodgy or outright illegal and get the case thrown out over that. Otherwise they basically tell you to plea because the way our system works if you don't accept a plea you're going to jail for a very very long time.

And that's not including any of the paperwork stuff that lawyers use to keep the lights turned on.

I'm reminded back in the day when Microsoft shut down a bunch of the bot networks by directly engaging law enforcement. I watched a couple of small computer shops immediately go tits up and the other shops around town had to do all sorts of diversifying to stay in business because they're bread and butter, virus removals, was just suddenly gone.

I suspect lawyers are smart enough to know this, I know judges are, and that we will see the use of AI in legal work more or less banned.

and if not it's going to get even worse out there for us regular folk because you're going to have hundreds of thousands of lawyers with no work to do and a understanding of how to file lawsuits. Expect all sorts of harassment lawsuits directed towards regular people. There's only so many large corporations you can sue to make a good living off of.

It's winner take off first passed post voting that's the problem. That creates the two party system. Although honestly while it would help to have something like ranked choice voting to eliminate the two-party system from what I've seen in other countries incompetent fools and still come to power even with parliamentary systems.

America's main problem right now is voter suppression. We have solid evidence that 7 million Americans tried to vote against Trump and just couldn't

Millions of illegal voter registration and voter signature challenges, multi-hour wait times to vote in person and of course no vote by mail in many states. And frankly not everyone is going to vote by mail. All of this was targeted at voting districts leaning Democrat using commonly available gerrymandering maps.

As it stands voter suppression is going to give Trump a third term. There's a bunch of idiots on this forum to think that's the coolest thing in the world. Right up until the bank takes their house. Then they will blame Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden but they still won't have a house

Not yet. That's coming and not that far off but we're probably at least a few years away. Right now the focus on AI isn't to replace College grads it's to replace rank and file customer service reps.

The real problem is everybody knows a massive recession is coming because the United States is engineering one. So every company is going to be batting down the hatches. There's going to be less hiring. When people retire they're not going to be replaced or if they are replaced it's going to be with somebody offshore.

The worst thing is if you're American you probably did this to yourself. Mind you with the way voter suppression works this wasn't what Americans actually wanted it was forced on us but still 77 million people thought it was a good idea to elect a senile old man who ran completely on tariffs and then those voters didn't bother to look up what a tariff was let alone what it would mean.

To be fair our media completely failed them. And they did it on purpose. It was so bad we had to create a new word to describe it, sane washing

If the money spent is offset by increased productivity than it is in fact free.

If I spend $10 on weather reports from my taxes but I get back $100 in increased productivity from things like increased food production, fewer deaths due to weather events, and even something as mundane as people not wasting the gasoline to drive out for a picnic on a rainy day then I made a net $90.

That $10 is effectively free.

People like to focus on government waste because that's a trick people that want to steal taxpayer money use in order to make you look in another direction while they steal taxpayer money. Every time you see somebody talking about government waste you need to ask what their ulterior motives are because they are never good.

If you want to see people actually fighting waste those are the people going after thieves stealing from the taxpayer directly. Stuff like Medicare and Medicaid fraud. That dwarfs any waste. Then again Americans elected a convicted Medicaid fraudster to be a member of the US Senate...

We don't really think things through around here. Nation of 12-year-olds and all.

I just think they have completely different goals.

So Trump is just a senile old man. Nothing he says or does has any meaning. What matters is the people behind him actually pulling his strings. That's going to be Elon musk, Peter thiel and a handful of other billionaires.

They are deeply opposed to widespread college education because a well-educated citizenry is a threat to their power. Most of them aren't very competent or skilled they've just gotten extremely lucky. When they've been forced to do something that didn't directly involve the money they blundered into or the government contracts that sustain them they have generally failed spectacularly. Look at Elon musk in the cybertruck and Mark Zuckerberg with all of that VR nonsense he spent $60 billion on.

For thousands of years we kept education of any kind away from the rabble. Being able to read and especially reading holy books was something that could get you killed if you weren't part of the ruling class. That was absolutely not an accident. The widespread printing of the Bible in English was a political movement. The dissemination of knowledge and the ability to obtain that knowledge has always been a threat to people in power. One of the easiest ways to obtain absolute powers to place yourself in the role of having control of the absolute truth.

And if you know anything about dictatorships the first people they start killing after whichever minority they used as a scapegoat is always going to be the intelligencia and members of the universities. Mao, Hitler, Pol pot and Stalin all did it.

So the Trump administration isn't destroying public education by accident or just for the sake of the money but because it's an active threat.

Reagan's own people admited they couldn't control an educated population and so they wanted to eliminate higher education. And the people in Trump's administration who are actually in charge are just an outgrowth from that cancer