Between established coders with careers and the folks already nearly through the pipe, we're staffed up. It's not that I agree that coding is dead... I just think we're saturated, and the demand will decrease.
HR: "We're doing a RIF, and unfortunately, we're going to have to let you go".
Worker: "What am I going to do?"
HR: "Learn to co... oh, fuck, I'm so sorry".
Low sperm only matters if you are trying to have a child. If you have no desire then who cares about sperm counts?
For the women that DO want to have children it's certainly an increasing problem.
Easy contraceptives availability is part of it but not the most important one. There are 3 main reasons:
1) Economics. Kids cannot be used as cheap labour from around age 8 as it was in the past. Instead they are costing a lot of money to around age 18-24. Parents have retirement - kids are not that important from the point of view of taking care for aging people.
2) Fun. There are a lot of sources of fun besides sex now. TV, games, sports, carrier building
3) And the most important one: women do not want kids as much any more. The studies have shown that the best correlation is between how much women want kids and how many kids they end up to have. Women have many alternative sources of activities when compared to 9 months of carrying a "parasite" around in their belly PLUS additional around 18-24 years of resource drainage. Kids are great fun to have but they are costly as hell. They cost resources which can be spend on alternatives which are fun as well and which are not such a long time commitment.
So, to sum up your argument, we've become weak, hedonistic, and uncaring about our own civilization.
"Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries?"
Because they can afford contraceptives.
That doesn't explain everything. Fertility takes two to make babies. It doesn't explain why male fertility is also dropping. Testosterone and sperm counts have been steadily dropping in first world countries for decades now. And everyone notices. Men are getting more boyish-looking and less rugged. There's more guys firing blanks. Women complain that men are less attractive than they used to be. That surely has something to do with the lower testosterone. So something else is going on. It's not just economics.
I'm kind of mystified by the absolute visceral hostility of a large number of Americans towards recycling.
It comes mainly from three reasons:
One, only some kinds of recycling make sense. Aluminum? Of course? Steel? Certainly. Glass? Mostly. But many materials simply don't make sense to recycle. I WISH plastics could be recycled more, but in all practicality, they can't, at least not in a commercially desirable form. And recycling paper is the biggest fucking scam in the whole business. It takes far more energy and water to recycle paper that it does to make it from fast growing virgin softwoods like pine, of which there is no shortage.
Second, there's the utterly arrogant attitude from the evangelists of recycling. You know the type. Infamously holier-than-thou types that want to know what sacrifices you've made today to Save Mother Earth. It really is their religion.
And then, there are affluent types that wave recycling around as a status symbol, signaling that they're the right kind of people, and you aren't. George Carlin infamously pillaged the fuck out of them:
" I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of fucking Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced."
Washington DC on the other hand is beautiful
No Washington is mostly an ugly shit hole on swamp land.
Outside of a handful of Beaux-Arts buildings that are truly lovely (the Library of Congress, for one), DC is mostly a collection of Brutalist monstrosities that regularly make the list of ugliest buildings. When the Great Society programs starting kicking in during the sixties, it set off a wave of ugly, soul-sucking concrete construction that consumed DC.
Huston. I have no issue with Huston
Who the fuck gave Zod net access?
From what I've read, nothing was going to help. Kids in csmos, probably scattered doing activities - and the river rose around 30 feet in less than an hour?
Upstream was a weird storm that remained stationary while dropping 2 feet of rain. Impossible to predict, and once it happened, there was basically no time to warn folks.
The river that swept away those girls actually rose by up to 45ft in an hour. And the NWS had extra staff on hand as they knew there was a possibility of flooding. Flash Flood watches went out at least 3 hours prior. It was just one of those situations where a number of things combined quickly to make a tragedy. The storm grew fast. The camp was in a valley that used to have flooding problems but, since there hadn't been one in years, people got complacent. And of course, it happened in the middle of the night, while everyone is asleep. In Summer Camp. It was, pardon the expression, a perfect storm of things.
What about when AI designs a toilet that doesn't need unclogging, or pipes that require less maintenance in the ocean...?
You can definitely design high end toilets and better pipes. You can buy a "smart toilet" now, but for between $8 and $12k, the vast majority of people are going to stick with good ole' simple shitters that rely on Isaac Newton. But you're still never going to not need someone to work on them physically from time to time. High and Low end.
"Wow, eggs sure are expensive. Let's put a guy who bankrupted five casinos in charge," isn't the masterful stratagem Fox News told you it was.
I wouldn't know. I don't watch Fox News. Or CNN or MSNBC for that matter. But by all means, keep being an arrogant ass and implying that your opponents are mindless rubes that take marching orders from a TV screen. It's worked out so well for you, after all.
Tan said Intel will instead focus on "edge" AI that operates directly on devices rather than centralized computers.
This is precisely the wrong approach. No one wants AI on their device. It makes them expensive and slow.
That is a absolutely pointless metric. The vast majority of Government employees spend most of the time doing some kind of record keeping, or record evaluating activity.
Obviously the exposition of digital technology should have dramatically reduced the number of people needed on a per capita basis vs eras 60-70s where even putting a dumb terminal on the desks of most public servants would have prohibitively expensive.
The 80s would be the start of when you could start to make some rational comparisons but even in the 80s the process of digitizing a lot of operations was only just starting.
I've been making the argument for years now that the kind of computerized automation that's coming will be an asteroid-kills-the-dinosaurs level of change in the white collar workforce. I was told from many quarters here at Slashdot that I was wrong, and that all I had to do was look at how past increases in technology always ended up with higher employment levels eventually. And my reply to that argument is still the same: all those previous improvements created jobs because they made workers more productive (on paper, at least), and so they were a good investment for employers. The computerized automation coming now (that actually began more than a decade ago but is just now really picking up steam) is different because the profitability for employers comes from the fact that it outright replaces workers rather than making them "better". It replaces that work better and faster, to a price point that it simply makes no sense to employ a human when this fancy script will do it at low cost.
Bottom line, if you work with your hands in a task that takes skill and training, then you're fine. AI is never going to turn a wrench, weld a pipe in the ocean, or unclog your toilet. But if your job is 75% glorified data entry, well, you've got dark days ahead.
The government has excess staff. Bill Clinton cut 400,000 employees back in the day. Perhaps we bloated back up and need another such slimming down?
Al Gore ran the Reinventing Government program. Yes, they cut more than 400,000 jobs, but it took the better part of two terms to complete it. Nothing like what President Asshole & his minions have done with just taking an axe & cutting people, offering expensive buyouts to the most experienced workers.
Planet Money has a great episode on this called The last time we shrank the federal workforce.
I was assured just six months ago by Very Smart People that our economy was never hurting, thank you, and that the previous administration did a gangbusters job, and all the crying about eggs was for "nothing". And now you're telling me that cutting the federal workforce by a small amount was enough tank that robust economy?
I mean, its simply couldn't be that not only the US, but the whole first world's economy is starting to show the cracks from too much debt (both government and personal), high COVID prices that never came down, and a labor participation rate that's been steadily dropping since the Dot Bomb in 2000-2001, especially for men. It simply couldn't be that all of your seemingly prosperous neighbors with new cars and big houses have been living an illusion financed by maxed-out credit card accounts and 84 month car notes at high interest rates, and now that AI automation has arrived, all those middle-level office jobs that paid those credit card bills are about to be replaced by glorified scripts?
When I worked at an unnamed company, this was the rule. HR said, "If someone else isn't sticking their neck out and employing them, then why should we?" In fact, candidates were screened by if they were actively working or not.
This is very common. Was common for 5+ years after 2000, 4+ years after 2008.
Men have been steadily dropping out of the workforce since the 1960's. It's a gradual descent, but still constantly downward. Right now we have a male non-labor participation rate that's extraordinarily high for a non-depression economy. A lot of men have simply decided they're not going to work if someone else... family, government, whoever... can support them. So a male applying for a job that hasn't worked in years throws up all kinds of work-ethic red flags to HR departments. No one wants to be the workplace where that guy struggles to become productive again.
No, this is a much more pedestrian situation.
Trump, being the pettiest shitgibbon alive, likes to get even with people who have refused to provide him with favors.
Since Ukraine refused to provide him with fake dirt on Biden in 2019, he's been waiting for a chance to "get even" with them.
Now he's got a chance, and he's more than happy to leave them to the boss of his KGB handlers.
Oh for fucks sake. Trump ran on pulling back from Ukraine involvement. It was loudly and clearly part of his campaign. Average people want less involvement with foreign conflicts, not more:
According to Morning Consult’s U.S. Foreign Policy Tracker Index from January of 2023, nearly 40% of voters favor isolationism, while 30% want stability, and 17% want engagement. Among Democrats, 33% favor isolationism, 33% want stability, and 20% want engagement. Among Republicans, 45% favor isolationism, 28% want stability, and 15% want engagement. While these findings do indicate a divide between the parties on the issue, in both cases isolationism was the top answer or tied for the top answer. Neither side wants to be the world’s police.
Pause for storage relocation.
