Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Persians absolutely malding right now.

The thing with cats is they assume they’re the patron.

warlocks have more fun than any other class

Love to be dragged into a plane of eternal torment and subjected to the most nightmarish cruelty my patron can devise, because I failed to fulfill condition XXVI.a.243-0.1 in the infernal contract.

Love to have a creature of mad whimsy show up to cause sheer bedlam at the worst possible moment, because I stumbled in a grove half-starved and ate fruit from the wrong Fae Lord’s magical bush a lifetime ago.

Love to be forever trapped under the unblinking eye of the Divine Surveillance State with an angel’s merciless glare boring holes into the back of my neck because my great-great-great-grandfather pledged himself to the seventh generation as part of the Glorious Crusade of the Most Righteous High One.

Warlocks having so much fun right now… weee… :-(

The same cynical bullshit they pulled in Gaza. Everything that gets bombed is “Terrorist” in retrospect. And you should applaud the IDF for their “precision” strikes, because hey look how everyone under that bomb deserved to die, amirite?

I guess the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen among all my peers and social networks contradicts those numbers

Definitely possible that Silicon Valley is in some kind of IT recession. They’ve been swinging for the fences at crypto, VR, and AI going on six years and wiffing like crazy.

But if you’re just a glorified digital accountant (like me), I’m here to report that IT is doing perfectly fine. You can earn a high-five / low-six figure salary at any number of mid-cap businesses. Even basic SQL experience is in high demand. Tons of legacy infrastructure to support. Tons of interfaces to build and data to massage between systems. Tons of new applications to deploy and customize. The real work is endless. The phony baloney bullshit work is what ran out.

Currently, tech unemployment is under 3%. Salaries are 2x-5x the national average depending on specialty. If this is a slump, I’m hard pressed to imagine a boom.

You have to keep in mind we’re coming off a decade of industry growth, particularly in the wake of COVID. These 500,000 jobs are a fraction of the IT jobs created annually.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1417885/increase-reduction-of-technology-technical-jobs-globally/

Demand for IT even in 2023 is up yoy.

Those workers looking for new 100% WFH jobs are in for a rude awakening. The market is not what it was a couple of years ago.

Gotta disagree. The demand for tech workers continues to be voracious. And most employers don’t have the abysmal administrative policies of Amazon.

You’re far better off at a mid-cap firm with management that doesn’t jerk off to Ayn Rand novels than one of the AI obsessed FAANG firms. Take a small salary cut and enjoy a large improvement to your work life balance.

I watched co-workers quit over a 3/2 hybrid schedule.

Unfortunately I think the calculation Lammy is doing is how many votes and how much money Labour will lose if they took a principled stance against Israel’s actions in the Middle East.

Increasingly the entire motivation of the incoming Labour government. Just boils down to how rich they can get before they lose their jobs in the next election.

That’s not even on the table. The only thing Americans care about is the potential for Chinese surveillance. The potential for American surveillance and corporate surveillance (particularly for insurance companies) is considered a huge windfall that they’ll fight to continue.

Hell, I can see a future in which your car won’t even start without an internet connection.

Tom Cruise is a great example of love the actor, hate the man.

Tom Cruise is a mid-tier actor given top-tier roles.

they can’t imagine what actual fact finding looks like

Facts aren’t useful for setting policy if people don’t believe in them. Just ask any climatologist.

Another consequence of inflation, I suppose.

Let’s say some extremist, highly organized group manages to successfully assassinate the 10,000 richest people in the world, and then disappears without a trace.

The problem is that these billionaires profit the most from a system of resource exploitation, but they do not benefit exclusively. We’d still have hundreds of billions of dollars in fossil fuel centric infrastructure that we’d need to replace and reconfigure. And that reconfiguration would require a national organized effort.

Ultimate, you can’t just wave a wand and make Rich People Go Away. You need a national project that is both popular and efficient. One that reduces emissions while improving quality of life. You need a Green New Deal.

That’s not something you can affect purely from subtraction.

The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit.

Everyone has their area of expertise. “The common rube” at the hospital can be a professional cab driver who has half the city memorized or a sports buff who can tell you every significant baseball stat going back twenty years or a vagrant who has survived by mastering a litany of social protocols unique to the homeless population or a musician who has an entire arcane language for their craft.

As you specialize, you develop a jargon for the minutiae of your field. Which does go to your underlying point

Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.

More broadly, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to leverage the research productively. If you need an electron microscope or an industrial boiler or a large population of waterfowl to make practical use of a piece of research data, most people aren’t going to be in the position to find it useful.

That said, expanding the pool of expertise is also supposed to be a major role of the academic system. If people in or adjacent to your field have trouble understanding your research output, it isn’t easily transmissible to people who do have an opportunity to leverage it.

One of the reasons why you have these large populations of sports buffs and musical talents and cab drivers bouncing around is thanks to the improved mechanisms of education distribution. Finding a middle ground between specificity and accessibility is critical if you want to grow your population of specialists.

If I might interject.

One word mean many thing to not same people.

Use special word for special job. Special job doers no get dizzy. All know special word mean same thing.

Special words job help make many people with not same word skill talk gooder.

Oh shit, he’s good. He DDOS’d me right back.

Have they stopped?

Where should Israel go back to then?

Israel doesn’t have to go anywhere. No more than South Africa went somewhere after Apartheid ended in that state. Or Cuba vanished after the Batista government collapsed. Or Germany vanished after '45.

But the war criminals leading the current genocidal policy towards the people in their care. They need the same treatment as Milosoviec, Omar al-Bashir, and Saddam Hussein.

Drag Netanyahu to the Hague and prosecute him for crimes against humanity. Dismiss the current illegal and unconstitutional Kinesset and hold new free and fair elections in Israel. Provide reparations for the displaced Gaza and West Bank citizens, and launch a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to recover damages for the crimes committed against them.

That is the only moral path forward for Israel.