aaronbaugher

Immigration and guest worker programs aren't the only reason, but they're a big reason. It's been happening since the 90s, when the neo-conservative Bush Republicans and the Clinton "It's the economy, stupid" Democrats really agreed for the first time on making the economy the issue that overrode everything else. Unfortunately, by "the economy" they meant Wall Street and global corporations, not small businesses and workers. So they pushed for any trade deal or migration or in/outsourcing that meant more money for their corporate friends and more graft for themselves. Ross Perot was right, but he greatly underestimated what they would do.

If you've been in the business long enough, you've seen it happening. I've heard managers talking about how they're sick of citizen employees with their unreasonable demands about health care and vacation time, and how those hard-working foreigners don't annoy them with such nonsense. I've seen the gleam in owners' eyes when they talk about how they can hire ten nameless cogs through some company that will bring them in for the same price as one native, and as long as they're at least 11% as productive as a native worker on average, hey, profit. And that's not just in software; that's in everything from construction to food processing to service work.

Several years ago, a client asked if I wanted to join his startup that was going to sell foreign tech services to US companies. I would have been the "face" who sold our services to US executives and collected the money, and then passed the work on to $1/day workers he'd found somewhere. Were they well-trained? Who knows; he didn't care and I wasn't supposed to either. I passed, but that offer was a microcosm of what's been happening to the US software industry for the past few decades, and the US job market in general.

There's a town near me that has a population of 1100 and a nice small library. And there's state-wide interlibrary loan, so small-town libraries can get you anything the bigger ones have.

I've found that they struggle with understanding time and dates, and are sometimes weird about numbers. I asked Grok to guess the likelihood of something happening, and it gave me percentages for that day, the next day, the next week, and so on. Good enough. But the next day it was still predicting a 5-10% chance of the thing happening the previous day. I had to explain to it that the percentage for yesterday should now be 0%, since it was in the past.

In another example, I asked it to turn one of its bullet-point answers into a conversational summary that I could turn into an audio file to listen to later. It kicked out something that converted into about 6 minutes of audio, so I asked if it could expand on the details and give me something about 20 minutes. It kicked out a text that made about 7 minutes. So I explained that that was X words and only lasted 7 minutes, so I needed about 3X words. It kicked out about half that but claimed it was giving me 3X words or 20 minutes.

It's the little stuff like that that makes me think that, no matter how useful it might be for some things, it's a long way from being able to just hand it tasks and expect them to be done as reliably as a fairly dim human intern. If an intern kept coming up with half the job I asked for, I'd assume he was being lazy and let him go, but these things are just dumb in certain odd ways.

I'll bet kitchen tools are big on this. How many people buy a specialized appliance like a bread maker and then use it once or never at all? If you don't use something regularly, it's easy for it to end up tucked away in a cabinet where you never think of it again.

It's funny how many people still think sloppy, mistake-filled writing is a sign of AI, as if their writing is at the same level as the image generators giving people six fingers, when the truth is the current LLMs use better English grammar than 99% of humans. Their writing may be kind of boring and standard, but they don't confuse "their" and "there."

Yeah, it's not a significant amount of land. But it does seem like these companies prefer to take quality farmland instead of unused land. There's something similar happening near my town, where a company wants to put a big solar array on some prime farmland, and the locals are asking why that spot and not getting an answer. It might save a small amount on development, as farmland is fairly flat and has no trees to remove, but that's miniscule in the overall budget for these things, and rough ground would be much cheaper to buy. But the corporation behind it and the government entities involved are digging in their heels and insisting on using farmland, without any explanation why.

So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.

It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.

In my Midwestern US town, there are still lots of third spaces. The mall, bars, bowling alleys, an arcade, and even some new things like a trampoline place. People just aren't using them nearly as much, to the point that the mall is a tomb and the stores are going away. But the people stopped showing up first.

It kind of surprises me that they never confuse "it's" and "its" and common mistakes like that, when it seems like most human writers today swap them randomly. I suppose that's thanks to a lot of the text in the training data predating the collapse of English education.

I'm not sure why em dashes are so popular, though. I don't think I've ever seen human writing that had as many em dashes as LLMs use.

Legacy media's audience is shrinking so fast they're reduced to clickbait farming at this point. They're going to get even more shrill and bombastic as they fight for enough attention to keep getting paid.

Yeah, the idea that you have to buy anything from Amazon is puzzling to me. I sometimes look things up on Amazon to see the reviews, but then I buy from Ebay, if I'm not able to shop for it locally. But I know people who act like they wouldn't have toilet paper if Amazon stopped working.

A convenience store might like having the customers hanging around for 10 minutes instead of 5, but not for the 30+ minutes that the Internet tells me it takes even at a Level 3 charging station. That would probably mean spending a bunch of money to put in entertainment or a restaurant or something to keep the customers busy longer-term. That might be profitable, but not necessarily.

Maybe it'll go the other way: restaurants and theaters and the like will put in charging stations that you can hook up to while you're there as a paying customer.

Acidic foods went in glass containers. I have old books on food preservation, and they talk about which foods can't be stored in metal cans, which must be pickled (or later pressure canned) to prevent botulism, and so on. There used to be a lot of knowledge involved in storing and preserving food, because the method had to be suited to the food in question.

That's exactly what my climatist friends tell me when the weather is nice, and they're correct. Climate change, as described by the scientists, is not about day-to-day, or even year-to-year, weather patterns.

But when the weather is nasty, they say "Look at the climate change, denier!"

On forums where women talk about attractive male actors, there's a heavy emphasis on shoulders and arms. It's definitely a thing.

That's not to say they don't care about the face or other features, but those don't get nearly as much attention.

I remember discovering Beavis and Butthead in the 90s and showing it to my parents, and their being more confused than offended by the short (for the time) and scattered 15-minute episodes. I'm pretty sure if you went back 50 years and showed TikTok to people who were used to things like Columbo and Loveboat, they'd just be confused and wonder what the point is.

If anything, I'd say the people who enjoy absorbing entertainment in 7-second chunks have been reprogrammed and desensitized in a way that's not normal, though I wouldn't slap any psych labels on them either.

In my working class rural area, if you see a man on a bike, and he's not dressed like Lance Armstrong, it means he lost his license to a DUI.

History, especially the industrial age, says that attitude leads to a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's willing to work for a little less, in a little shittier conditions, to pack a few more family members into a shitty apartment to make do.

If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.

I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.

Meh. I'll agree that chatbots shouldn't be allowed to claim they have credentials, like anyone else. But a lot of therapists do nothing except sit there and listen to you, tell you what you want to hear, give some standard advice you could have gotten from a self-help book, and hand you a bill. An LLM can replace the first three functions just fine.

If you can get your money's worth from talking to most therapists, you're probably self-aware enough to get it from bouncing your thoughts off an LLM.

It also has a lot more competition in the Evil Big Tech Co space than it used to.

That's exactly how it is for me. If I can visualize the whole task from start to finish, it's generally easy to go ahead and knock it out. If there's a part I'm unsure of, I can put it off forever. That's also true if one of the steps is "call so-and-so and ask about such-and-such," if I don't know what the answer is going to be. That uncertainty blocks the whole project in my mind.

Starting to write this comment was easy, because I knew what I was going to say before I started typing; but writing a book seems impossible, because I can't hold the whole thing in my mind at once. Funny thing is, this comment has changed and expanded since I started it, but since I didn't expect that, there was no uncertainty and I didn't hesitate to start it. Now if I could just find a way to fool myself about bigger projects.

Yeah, the labor cost of food has been a blip for a long time. The claims that grocery bills would triple if we paid Americans enough to work the fields are just agitprop from Big Ag processors. In reality the bump would range from something like a high of 10% for labor-intensive foods like fresh strawberries, down to 1% or less for grain foods like cereal.

Also, whenever headlines say "Farmers [something]," they're not talking about actual farmers. They're talking about farm organizations like Farm Bureau that claim to speak for farmers but really speak for the ag industry.

No, most people have never found themselves staring at a pile of unpaid bills and collection notices, while knowing there's work they should be doing that would pay those bills...and feeling physically and mentally incapable of starting that work. Not "I don't wanna" or "I'd rather play games right now," but "I know I should do that, I know it would make my life better and I want that so bad...but I just can't."

It's horrible, and definitely not something that applies to just about everyone.

I'm going to try that too. An ongoing todo list just starts to slip from my mind. I have a whiteboard in my kitchen, where I figured I'd write tasks I needed to do and erase them off when I finished them, so it'd be a continuous todo list. But after a while, it'd slip my mind and I'd go weeks without even seeing the whiteboard in my awareness, and then when I did remember it was there, it'd be half outdated and I'd have to start all over.

Getting into the daily habit of using any tool/method in the first place is the hard part for me, so making it as tangible as possible and not-too-convenient might help.

That's the funny thing, I'm not out of the loop. When friends bring up current issues that matter, I'm generally better informed than they are, but I'm clueless if they bring up the latest controversial TV show or whatever is today's outrage narrative that will be replaced by the next outrage narrative tomorrow.

It turns out that by letting the people around me sort of curate the "news," and reading thinkers who write about bigger topics rather than what's in the headlines, I wind up with a pretty good filtered news feed.

I remember thinking it couldn't be true when the local schools first put in soda machines. Yes, banning the sale of soda and junk food in taxpayer-funded schools is an obvious, easy way to improve health. It would get major pushback from school boards which would cry about the lost funds, but they're always doing that anyway.

My girlfriend says she doesn't trust the media, but she has to follow it to know what they're lying to us about. I've pointed out that the problem goes deeper than just whether they tell truth or lies. They don't just tell you what to think; they tell you what you're even supposed to be thinking about, and by omission what you shouldn't be thinking about. You can take the opposite position on every issue to the one they're pushing, but you're still letting them frame the window of what you are and aren't thinking and forming opinions about.

The only way to take that control away from them is to cut the primary "news" sources out of your life entirely. I still hear about important events from people around me, and I can see what people are hyperventilating about at forums like this, which is more than enough to know what the media is hyping each day and why.

My first comments may have sounded pessimistic, but I do think you've found a couple interesting ideas that I haven't seen before, in making individual notes for your daily habits and throwing the crumpled notes in a jar. I have a couple pads of sticky notes in front of me right now, to get started on items for tomorrow, so thanks for the inspiration.

I've tried sticky notes before, but tended to use those just for the bigger tasks, while thinking I should put my regular daily habits on a single sheet that I could check off, to keep the sticky notes from becoming an unruly mess. But then the daily list always got neglected. I still got the dishes done, but I wouldn't get it checked off, so the overall system fell apart. Putting every task in the same single-note format may feel like overkill, but may be what it takes to work.

Yep. Right now I'm trying to start an instructional video series. I know that I need to break it down into tasks and sub-tasks, and I've done that. So I could go pick a sub-task off the list, like "design a thumbnail image," and just work on that. But as soon as I think of doing that, the entire project looms over me, and I freeze up thinking about the whole thing, including even thoughts like "What do I do in 6 months if I'm out of ideas and I have paying subscribers expecting new content?"

I don't know how to zoom in mentally on a tiny, manageable task and block out the rest. I'm usually unable to start on any part of a project until I can comfortably hold the whole project in my mind.

Nothing helps me procrastinate like trying out a new trick, a new tool, a new list-making method, etc. I've killed time on dozens of different solutions, and some of them were pretty good at getting me to focus and work hard on implementing that new method, but none translated much into getting more actual work done earlier.

Nothing really helped with that until one day I realized I was getting too old to keep being broke because I wouldn't finish work until I absolutely had to, so I got a job where other people give me stuff to do and expect it within a reasonable time frame. I still procrastinate more than I should, but there's too much to do for me to do nothing, so I'm always getting through something, and maybe that will become a habit.

But I hope tools and methods like this help others. It seems like every new method is a great fit for someone out there.

The dodge is that the real experts always admitted the shots wouldn't prevent transmission; it was just the talking heads and media who said it would, and that's where most people get their information. So now, years later when people aren't freaking out and fearing for their jobs, we're supposed to have all known all along what the real scientists behind the scenes were saying.

I was told by family and friends that the shots were 100% safe and effective, and that if I didn't take the shot I wanted grandma to die, because that's what the TV told them; and when I tried to show them quotes from the actual scientists creating the shots that contradicted that, they said it was misinformation.