In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.

Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.

In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.

So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.

The one I loved was a pancake machine at a hotel breakfast buffet. You pressed the pancake button and batter was dispensed onto a slowly rolling large heated cylinder. When your pancake made it to the edge of the cylinder, it peeled off and flipped onto another counter-rotating cylinder. Then it was peeled off and slid down a chute onto a plate. Perfectly round, perfectly cooked.

I ate a few more pancakes than I should have just to see it work. Then against the protests of my wife I lifted the hinged side panel to see how the batter was loaded and dispensed (it was squeezed out of a bag by a screw jack)

The girl at the buffet asked if I was a process engineer (yup) and assured me that I was far from the first to peek under the hood 😅

Honestly it sounds like Canada (minus the transgender panic). Trump is a POS but that doesn’t mean that the declining quality of education is not a real problem.

My wife teaches college and trade school and the quality of incoming students declines every year as since Covid for some reason the public schools have had very low requirements for passing a grade level. Some can’t even add fractions. Most can’t rearrange an equation. A large fraction panic and have anxiety attacks when taking tests, and just stare at the paper like a deer in the headlights.

My daughter is now in grade 5 and they were teaching them practically nothing and not even grading them. Just “good” “adequate” or “poor” based on how well the teacher “thinks they know the material”. No discipline, no challenge. And it honestly seems true that they’re teaching more cultural topics and less core math/science/English.

Thankfully she has a teacher and an engineer for parents, is a voracious reader and we’ve taught her math and programming at home. Pulled her out of the public system this year and she’s suddenly telling us what she learned and is excited to go to school…

beats dealing with android studio

It’s been years since I went near Android for this reason, I’ve had some decent ideas for stuff I’d like to do on mobile but was so turned off on developing for the entire platform. Maybe I’ll have to take a look at some of the new frameworks.

My trouble is I would prefer to write in an embedded style C/C++ for the agricultural stuff I want to do, and all this Java/JS stuff and heavy focus on fancy UX is really not my vibe.

Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren’t) as you’d need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.

Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren’t on the public net, they don’t even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.

Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.

For the readers that don’t realize exactly how old school, Sam & Fuzzy has been around since the dialup era.

It’s been through just about every phase a comic can go through, he used to write decade-long story arcs, lately he seems to be enjoying drawing simple cute dog comics. I suppose a guy needs a break sometimes from a career like that!

If he follows through he’ll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess

You don’t understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are “self-cleaning”.

Kessler Syndrome doesn’t even mean that we can’t fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.

In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.

I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I’m able to post this. It’s been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I’m all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I’m less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.

That’s practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)

They are barn cats though and that’s their job so it’s a little different from the pet cat situation.

I picked up some gel airsoft guns and have been playing steady with my kid.

Anyways I just picked up a rifle which freed up both pistols we had for one person to wield. And let me tell you, dual wielding automatic pistols not only is completely non-functional but also makes you feel like an idiot just holding them. Completely the opposite of Halo.

It’s even referenced in the Bible, showing that the writers had a good idea of the maximum human lifespan even back then.

[Genesis 6:3] Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.”

Just try it the other way. Random face punching today, years of medical and psychological treatment later!

The problem is the “race to the bottom”. Sure, some grindy desk jobs can gladly be taken by AI.

What about the jobs that AI does poorly, but when the low cost is taken into account it’s still seen as feasible?

Think of all the horrid DTMF phone menus and barely functioning voice recognition systems. We hated these as customers, colleagues, anyone who had to use them despised them

Cheaper than a receptionist, though.

Now imagine that level of frustration and poor service spread across every industry at every level. We’re talking about a total collapse of productivity across the entire economy. Not only do people lose their jobs, but the work isn’t even getting done to any standard, either.

You can also swim at the pool, that sounds like fun

Well nuts I was considering Ireland as a nice place to flee Canada for. Shame to hear that they’re doing the same to you. I know there’s a demographic issue but I don’t see why they couldn’t have made the countries livable enough that the people living there could afford to have children, instead of importing people en masse from regions with little education.

We are just creating another demographic problem anyways as at least here all of our migrants are suspiciously young working age men. We don’t see many families “fleeing regions in conflict” which seems very odd, doesn’t it.

I should probably clarify what I mean by that. Unlike most countries, most of Canada is probably best described as “a barely habitable hellscape”

Even the pioneers relied heavily on existing supply chains, and in most regions aside from southern BC and Ontario the natives lived an unenviable hand to mouth existence.

So while working harder for the same cheque is a bad idea, if everyone stops working at all (which feels like it’s on the brink of happening, some days) the collapse of our society actually means losing our ability to survive in a country that actively wants to kill you on most days.

I live way out in the country in a mostly self reliant community, but the amount of material and energy we need to bring in just to survive always worries me.

Looks at what happened in Canada too, we had big structural problems with our economy so our government dumped a huge volume of immigrants into the country, almost entirely from a group known to not integrate well and who share little values and culture with the existing citizens.

Now everyone blames the immigrants for everything. Success! And wages have also been depressed, and housing and rent prices elevated. The rich get richer and the poor get a scapegoat. Everyone… wins?

And there’s literally nothing we can do about it, except effectively the whole country has taken on the “lay flat” movement as a protest after Covid pulled the mask off the villain. Very few working class people put any effort into their work anymore, figuring to collect their check but not generate any wealth for the robber barons.

The trouble is we will burn our country down while we do it, because ultimately some work does need to be done to sustain our society.

Actually come to think of it, I don’t think Pert is actually gendered. But everyone knows it’s a “man’s shampoo”, because it isn’t actively marketed as a “women’s shampoo”… Yeah, pretty stupid, isn’t it.

If the man gets his hair really dirty, like farm dirty with diesel and moly grease and itchy chaff bits, then it means it probably doesn’t have what it takes to do the job.

My wife bought endless shampoos, I tried them for sport and none ever impressed me. Our hard water laughs at fancy shampoos and soaps.

I always told her to forget it and use my big jug of Pert. A classic that says something on the back like “Pert wasn’t designed to waste your time and money. Pert was designed to get your hair clean” but she was sure there was something wrong with it because it was only 5 bucks.

Finally one day she gave it a try and has used Pert ever since. It made her hair smooth and soft, it even washes moly grease out and it smells “fine”, men’s shampoo is the winner IMO

And now my shower is so tidy with only one jug of shampoo

Out here in hard water country we just call that “Dove”

Seriously if you’re looking for a soap that just plain works in ANY water and doesn’t leave your skin feeling like it shrank a size, a good old bar of Dove is the answer.