The Junk Drawer
- Thread starter Jimdamick
- Start date
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
That explains the probing: revenge
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
A.I. is on a collision course with white-collar, high-paid jobs — and with unknown impact
Technology has disrupted many workplaces. Artificial intelligence like ChatGPT may have an outsized impact on higher-paid office jobs, experts said.
go go kid
Well-Known Member
makes me laugh that a preservative has an exploration date
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
I remember some republicans were starting to panic when they thought their propaganda was killing off their base so much it would affect the election. No one will be indicted for mass murder of the stupid by using bullshit as the weapon.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
it’s the cheap-ass container that’s expiring, perhaps.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
Now this is some bullshit.
www.theverge.com
The future of cars is a subscription nightmare
Most customers hate having to pay recurring fees.
CANON_Grow
Well-Known Member
Parasites. Paying to be able to use something you have already purchased, sounds like it's right up to the limit before extortion.Now this is some bullshit.
The future of cars is a subscription nightmare
Most customers hate having to pay recurring fees.
Almost as bad is what VinFast tried to do with ONLY allowing battery leases with their EV's, until they had to back down. We have got to a point where an auto manufacturer thought they could get away with forcing people to pay a monthly fee to use what is essentially the gas tank. It wasn't cheap either, the larger SUV battery was $349/month in Canada but bit cheaper in the US at $219/month, electricity not included.
John Deere and the right to repair fiasco. It's all bullshit.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
The real money is in subscriptions for a monthly revenue stream, many forget they are automatically debited from their bank accounts and forget to cancel their subscriptions. It's like rebates on advertised prices where the customer sends in to get money back, only 10 or 20% did and it amounted to false advertising. If you have an internet product or service that can reach tens of millions, then soaking a few million teens for a music or gaming service can lead to millions a month in steady revenue, they even do it with smart watches and fitness tracking programs.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
What makes actors and writers think they are different than anybody else in a capitalist society with rapidly advancing technology. They will eventually be replaced by machines AI and virtual actors made to order. In a international market as AI makes language differences disappear like the startrek universal communicator the work will be globalized. Office workers and all sorts of people one might not suspect will be out of a job or competing with an AI, or robot. The wealthy are the ones who can afford the technology that displaces workers and in 20 years it could be a humanoid robot or a virtual actor making movies, or even an AI writing scripts. They may employ a few people whose efforts are enhanced and greatly amplified by technology.
Before computers, if you were designing the empire state building, you had to employ hundreds of draftsmen to make the blueprints. If you needed to change the location of an elevator shaft after the plans were drawn up, then the staff of draftsmen would have to make new drawings for each floor. When computers and CAD came along it replaced hundreds of draftsmen and if you needed to make a change it was much faster and easier, done in minutes or hours and then press print. One person trained on CAD replaces hundreds of draftsmen and often the engineer doing the design is working directly with the CAD program and now even 3D printing the prototype parts using file formats from it.
Before computers, if you were designing the empire state building, you had to employ hundreds of draftsmen to make the blueprints. If you needed to change the location of an elevator shaft after the plans were drawn up, then the staff of draftsmen would have to make new drawings for each floor. When computers and CAD came along it replaced hundreds of draftsmen and if you needed to make a change it was much faster and easier, done in minutes or hours and then press print. One person trained on CAD replaces hundreds of draftsmen and often the engineer doing the design is working directly with the CAD program and now even 3D printing the prototype parts using file formats from it.
GenericEnigma
Well-Known Member
This article came across to me like blaming Ukraine and NATO for the Russian invasion, but it does illuminate a frame of mind within Trumpism (and other forms of populism). It also agrees with my theory that the fundamental underlying condition of current Republican/conservative panic is tied to rapid social change.
David Brooks: What if the anti-Trumpers are the real bad guys? (msn.com)
Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?
We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. As University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington said recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”
In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
Another story
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
Ethos of exclusion
The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies must be stupid.
Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.
Only 0.8% of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50% of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”
Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin, Texas, and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71% of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29%. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.
Helping ourselves
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent”: “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10% to women with a university degree.” That matters because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
Threatening workers
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.
But there’s a larger context here. As sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
David Brooks: What if the anti-Trumpers are the real bad guys? (msn.com)
Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe Biden in the general election surveys. Trump’s poll numbers are stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What’s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after all he’s done?
We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. As University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington said recently: “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an LGBT person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.”
In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what, according to this story, because at the end of the day he’s still the bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments, and that’s what matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story; but it’s also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.
Another story
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that “we’re all in this together” was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
Ethos of exclusion
The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency, Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies must be stupid.
Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.
Only 0.8% of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50% of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”
Or, as Markovits puts it, “Elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin, Texas, and so on. In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71% of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29%. Once we find our cliques, we don’t get out much. In the book “Social Class in the 21st Century,” sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.
Helping ourselves
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside of marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent”: “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10% to women with a university degree.” That matters because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject.
Threatening workers
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. Trump understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments seem as just another skirmish on the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them. Of course, the indictments don’t cause Trump supporters to abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That’s the polling story of the last six months.
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.
But there’s a larger context here. As sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
The one thing that does not compute for me is that, if the populist movement is based on economic frustration,
why do they keep electing supply-siders who untax the rich and oppose the programs that actually help the little guy?
Article does not touch that glaring contradiction.
DIY-HP-LED
Well-Known Member
Brooks is an apologist for the conservative right and his party was pulled out from under his feet by Trump, he ignores the endemic racism and bigotry that drive the modern republican base. The fact is Obama filled a racist leaning republican party with more racists and bigots and then Trump drove out the remaining good people and the white trash took over. Trump is an asshole and idiot magnet, and he sucked in every asshole and idiot in America and drove them to the polls with hearts full of hate and fear. It's not about the economy or policy for the republicans, it's about culture wars and bullshit. If Brooks wants to talk policy he should join the democratic party, that is where the classic battle between left and right economic policy will be fought, not in the clown show that the republicans have become.
cannabineer
Ursus marijanus
Since the conservative right is all about empowering the elite in the first place, this is a classic instance of the shameless cognitive dissonance currently defining the GOP.