Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you are feeling less miserable now.

Automation replaced hand knitters, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but most people now value mass produced socks more than they value paying a premium for hand knit. Automation replaced telephone operators, and people in that career suffered for a generation, but no one now wants their phone call to be manually switched by a person.

The pain of automation is real and lasts the length of the career of everyone impacted, but the societal benefit lasts many generations. More support is needed for people who are displaced, but I don’t see fighting the technology as the effective way to achieve that.

I hope the AI-chat companies really get a handle on this. They are making helpful sounding noises, but it’s hard to know how much they are prioritizing it.

OpenAI has acknowledged that its existing guardrails work well in shorter conversations, but that they may become unreliable in lengthy interactions… The company also announced on Tuesday that it will try to improve the way ChatGPT responds to users exhibiting signs of “acute distress” by routing conversations showing such moments to its reasoning models, which the company says follow and apply safety guidelines more consistently.

I’ve occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.

My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don’t have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven’t carved out time to do that.

So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.

The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.

Amid the racism and misogyny is published work that recessions are when the opposition party is in power. Presumably “economic boom” is when the “correct” party is in power, regardless of “traditional” economic data. Oh, and he’d like to see the US deploy nukes. Bolding is mine.

Antoni’s academic work is also sparse, causing concern from prominent economists. Last year, he co-published a report that purported “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” which economists across the political spectrum have criticized.

Sometime in mid-2019… the account’s username changed to “phdofbombsaway” with the display name “Dr. Curtis LeMay.” The profile image also changed to what looks to be a nuclear explosion. The username and display name appear to be a reference to “Bombs Away LeMay,” a reference to the Cold War general and his controversial stance promoting the use of nuclear weapons. LeMay ran alongside segregationist George Wallace on his 1968 presidential ticket for the far-right American Independent Party.

My father falls hard for pig butchering and romance and job scams. On top of the social engineering where he sent various people all his life savings, they also sold his account information and repeatedly drained his accounts. He noticed and reported as fraud the non-voluntary transactions (remaining impervious to all their red-flag communications on the voluntary transactions), on at least a weekly basis for like a year before the banks iced him out. I can’t really blame the banks there.

Credit unions can be predatory, too. The US’s largest credit union, Navy Federal, has one of the highest rates of fees charged per customer, even compared to banks. https://www.nclc.org/resources/top-overdraft-fee-offenders-hitting-civilian-military-families/

Are there any progressives you are hoping will run? I’m not familiar with most politicians, would be helpful to know who’s worth learning more about.

When the underlying problem is insufficient supply in the locations people want to live, anything that gives average person more purchasing power (such as making banks comfortable with larger loans) just drives up the price even higher.

Densifying metro areas (the places people are moving to) is the only real solution. Otherwise the price has to be unaffordable for the average person, to drive them into finding a way to live in a more rural area or to put up with a multiple-roommate living arrangement.

It’s a war of attrition at this point, with Ukraine providing almost all the people to become casualties but highly dependent on foreign aid for weapons, ammunition, intelligence, and continued sanctions enforcement on Russia. If either the foreign support or the domestic supply of soldiers falls short before the Russian economy collapses, Russia gets to keep the occupied land. If the first break is the ruble tanks to the point desperate poor foreigners stop signing up en masse to be cannon fodder in the Russian army, Ukraine could realistically take back the territory they lost.

I think I have learned about seven separate ticketing systems at my work, so far. The specialized ones are associated with small teams I know and can go harass if they don’t answer in a reasonable time frame. The big main one, the associates reliably answer quickly, to let me know they can’t help me. It all feels very broken.

Different people and relationships can have different solutions that work for them. That’s OK!