I think this article misses the forest for the trees. The real "evil" here is capitalism, not AI. Capitalism encourages a race towards optimality with no care to what happens to workers. Just like the invention of the car put carriage makers out of business, so AI will be used to by company owners to cut costs if it serves them. It has been like this for over a 100 years, AI is just the latest technology to come along. I'm old enough to remember tons of these same doom and gloom articles about workers losing their jobs when the internet revolution hit in the late 90s. And probably many people did lose jobs, but many new jobs were created too.

Democrats and Republicans came together in a super rare and bipartisan endeavour to shut down the rights of hard working railroad workers trying to strike for sick days and time off in December 2022. The final senate vote was 85 vs 15.

That should be a pretty clear indication that at least when it comes to helping working class people where it counts (money and basic human rights), both parties are identical.

He's been doing nothing but roids the last few years, the transformation has been pretty crazy.

Am not defending this law at all, but the thinking behind it is twofold:

1. you might be handing out tainted or expired food
2. the bigger issue: you are creating a "nuisance" on the property where you're doing it, as large groups of homeless people gather there. Some would say it's a safety concern, for example handing out free food at the corner of a primary school.

Again, I'm not agreeing with either point, but these are arguments I have heard from people who back such laws.

To the second point though, I've seen it firsthand. Salt Lake City tried to do a good thing by making the public library a homeless-friendly zone by handing out free food and allowing access to WiFi. This caused a large amount of homeless to hang out there all the time, and some of them would harass and attack non-homeless patrons of the library to the point that pretty much all of them stopped coming to the library entirely, and the area became a no-go zone.

The real issue is that a large amount of homeless people have severe mental illnesses (since public sanitariums all closed in the 70s). So where there are big congregations of homeless, there will inevitably be harassment and possible violence. Cities don't want people feeding the homeless at any old public building to avoid these situations, hence the laws, which allow you to do it only at certain places the city allows.

I actually did know that, but it doesn't invalidate my point whatsoever.

If Democrats were truly supportive of working class people they wouldn't be voting to remove their collective bargaining rights via an act of Congress. Think about that for a second -- they would rather vote to send those workers to jail than allow them to exercise a core right of workers everywhere.

Doesn't matter that Biden stepped in months later, Biden is the president and I'm talking about the general party in Congress, e.g. Democrats en masse.

So a small group of workers should suffer because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

Those rail workers weren't striking for higher pay, they wanted the basic human dignity of having paid time off and paid sick days.

I'm with Amazon on this, seems a reasonable ask for employees to not wear any political/cultural/social things at work with their official uniform.

Absolutely, I'm gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

I have spoken to a few Republicans, and they just don't see any of it as treason. In their minds, Democrats being elected in any office would lead to the country being destroyed, so any sort of coup is actually saving the country, it's patriotism, not treason. It's basically the Franco mindset.

The pessimist/pragmatist in me agrees with you, that this strike probably won't come to any real meaningful changes.

However, the one big difference now is, actors and writers today have been earning such paltry amounts that almost all of them have full-time side hustles, so nobody is going hungry. I have a lot of friends who work as actors and writers in LA, and even if they do that "full-time" they all have full-time side careers too, as the pay for acting/writing is so crazy low and LA's COL is so high. So if the studios hope to wait it out until people lose their houses and can't afford food, they may be waiting a long time.

The ones hurting the most in LA are the mid-level and senior producers, who earn a good 6 figures, but not millions. They don't have side hustles, and they have mortgages on million dollar homes, and also no income coming in. And they're on the studios' side, so they may actually be the first to fall before anyone from WGA/SAG.

Capitalist/free market* economists.

Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It's only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.

Is it possible to eat those humans? If it's actually nutritious I don't see a problem, and it's less wasteful, as you said. Soylent Green operated on this principle.

Hope the driver goes to jail.

Worth it though to have working nuclear and help stop global warming. I personally don't mind paying more to get more nuclear plants up and running.

Yeah, but why should Steam be the only game in town? That's a very dangerous monopoly.

I hate to burst your bubble, but it's not just an America problem. Have you been to Paris lately and seen the homelessness situation there, especially on the Metro?

Or in Oslo, where homeless Roma people attack people in broad daylight at Nationalteatret station and steal their luggage?

It's a big problem everywhere, and attitudes like the type you describe aren't relegated solely to Americans.

Just a part of the 4th of July experience really

There are plenty of companies out there (and growing daily) who want to do AI in house, and can't (or don't want) to send their data to some monolithic, blackbox company which has no transparency. The finance industry, for example, cannot send any data to some third party company like OpenAI (ChatGPT) for compliance reasons, so they are building teams to develop and maintain their own AI models in-house (SFT, RLHF, MLOps, etc).

There are lots of jobs being created in AI daily, and they're generally high paying, but they're also very highly skilled, so it's difficult to retrain into them unless you already have a strong math and programming background. And the number of jobs being created is definitely a lot, lot less than the potential number of jobs lost to AI, but this may change over time.

I'd love to mate, but I honestly don't know how. One thing I have to come to realise is that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't work. Norway, London, NYC, and California both spends billions each year on homelessness and the problem is only getting worse every year in all those places.

Maybe a good place to start would be opening up free sanitariums again where homeless people with mental issues could be housed, as sadly the streets have become the new dumping ground for people with severe mental illness.

Beyond that, am not sure, besides a total dismantling of capitalism.

Wow:

Even eastern Europe is catching up with our sluggish GDP, while The Times pointed out this week that if the UK was a US state, it would be the poorest in the country: Mississippi wages, with Californian housing prices.