They probably are not broadly lying about AI replacement being the main factor.

Turns out… Amazon runs AWS for businesses… and also Amazon.com the online retail megastore and logistics service.

Every other business is laying people off?

Less B2B AWS demand.

Everyone is now unemployed?

Less consumer demand, downsize all aspects of Amazon.com storefront and logistics.

…

I’d actually argue that any serious modern economist should be paying attention to AWS and other enterprise level, scalable server solutions…

… That’s a leading indicator of at this point, of broad economic conditions.

If AWS and similar departments at similar companies… stop expanding so much, when the rest of the economy seems to be doing ok?

Yeah, that means growth in demand for basically core business software infrastructure is stalling, and it’ll take 6 to 18 months to filter through to the rest of the economy and become apparent in other metrics.

Or it can just defederate from UK based instances.

.zip has already been trying to figure out how to handle this law, its also UK based.

I know that as of 2024, its about 10 to 15% of Americans with a negative net worth.

More debt than savings/investments.

So… thats your floor for literal debt slaves.

But uh, hah hah HAH,… the housing market is now crashing.

And the vast majority of Americans have a their house as their largest… investment/debt liability.

So… yeah. Probably gonna be heading closer to 50%.

Oh right, and then also every one behind on their student loans is now getting sent to collections, grace period over…

Yeah its all fucked, so fucked I don’t even think anyone has a holistic view of all the precise data, at this point.

Yep.

The more layers of the onion you peel back, the more you wanna cry.

It just gets worse the greater level of detail you look at it in.

I have an Econ degree so my sense of (extremely dark) humor at this point is basically:

‘billions must die, but actually’

Like I don’t know what to do at the cuts to SNAP, Medicare, and Section 8, the resumption of student loan payments, the tariffs and destruction of our farming and construction industries via ICE raids… other than just laugh.

We’re looking at Great Depression 2.0, a Holodomor-like, engineered-through-stupidity-and-malice famine.

I am at this point expecting millions, potentially tens of millions of Americans to die or be reduced to literal, actual debt slaves, or be incarcerated for crimes deriving from being forced into utter destitution… all that within this 4 year Trump term, unless there is an actual revolution.

Maybe if the Dems sweep the midterms (if Trump/the Reps even allow them to happen without massive ratfuckery) some of the bleeding can be stopped, but this situation is looking extremely fucking bad.

Oh god. I forgot about climate disasters.

Welp, alcoholism runs in my family, so, time to go look at cute puppies or something.

So its gonna run a soft credit check on you and then give you a price?

You don’t even need AI for that, and that’d be waaaaay cheaper to implement than AI.

…

A Delta spokesperson told Fortune the airline “has zero tolerance for discrimination. Our fares are publicly filed and based solely on trip-related factors like advance purchase and cabin class, and we maintain strict safeguards to ensure compliance with federal law.”

This is horseshit.

In Economics, the entire concept of setting specific prices for specific market demographics is literally called ‘price discrimination.’

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.asp

Advance purchase and different seating classes literally are price discrimination, third degree.

Frequent flyer discounts would be second degree.

Overall adjusting seat costs per flight based on how full or empty that flight is, is first degree price discrimination.

…

This is like a company that sells chickens saying ‘we don’t sell chickens.’

This is just gobsmackingly false, so blatantly so that it is actually funny.

Airlines entire fucking business models are based on inventing new forms and strategies of price discrimination.

…

What this asshat is saying is only even interpretable as true if what he means is ‘we don’t directly factor sexuality, age, disability, ethnicity, legally protected classes into our pricing model.’

They of course do this indirectly by pulling a whole bunch of your meta data and then accurately inferring those things, and then discriminating against you based on that.

It is laughably easy to get around US discrimination laws in this way, megacorps have been regularly doing this for at least decade now, both when it comes to you as a consumer, and you as a potential employee or renter.

[taps microphone]

…

Ahem.

…

Yaccitey-Yacc, Don’t Talk Back.

…

[leaves stage]

(or i guess i wish your life is so dull and uneventful such that you never need therapy again /j)

I would entirely seriously prefer this.

You’re talking to a high functioning autist who got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and then went off to work for various Fortune 500 companies…

… who came from a dysfunctional white trash family of abusive narcissists who all gaslight each other by default, all have various drug/alcohol addiction problems… as well as criminal records, fairly extreme religious views, fairly 90s white nationalist militia types.

Last time I talked with my dad, he was explaining to me how Tom Hank’s son killed raped and ate babies for their adrenochrome (Q Anon insane shit), and then proceeded to take me to his garage where he showed me how he assembles untraceable ghost guns by ordering parts without serial numbers separately snd then doing some light machine tooling to construct them.

… I am very much enjoying my having ghosted all of these fucking nutters, but quite seriously, when I tell therapists things like this, they often suspect I am delusional, exaggerating, lying, etc, to the point of trying to diagnose me with some kind of disorder involving persistent hallucinations.

either way the only reason I responded was to say sorry i disturbed you. not really sure i mean that any more, that was kind of a dick reply but whatever

you’re in ‘therapist’ mode, thats why you sense hostility from me.

you presume you have a better … at least potential, understanding of myself, of any topic you feel you are well versed in, than I do or potentially may, and you speak and ask rhetorical questions with arrogance and authority, presuming you will be able to prove yourself as correct.

then on a dime you will flip to acting offended or outraged, as if you have not been being rude the entire time, by not actually reading or understanding what I say, and by throwing in your own assumptions first, then coming to conclusions, then getting emotional over those conclusions… when you could have just asked for clarification in good faith.

I have already expressed to you mutliple times that I require a therapist who understands how to communicate with and to a high functioning autist… and you continue to exemplify why this is the case; you have no idea how to connect with an autist, as evidenced by the fact that you do not understand why I do not appreciate the things you have been saying to me, the way in which you have been saying them.

In less words: you could stand to be more humble, less conceited.

I mean, I explained why I don’t really need a basic therapist beyond just going over the basics of CBT, which I’ve already done now… but sure, ok, thanks?

For what its worth, I’m not the single downvote your comment here has.

Fair point.

But we’re on .world here, ie Reddit 2.0, ie, almost everyone is much closer to a normie who is way more uninformed than they think they are and way more confident than they should be.

But also, again… fair point.

It is entirely disingenuous to just pretend that LLMs are not being widely promoted, marketed, and discussed as AGI, as a superintelligence that people are familiar with from SciFi shows/movies, that is vastly more capable and knowledgeable than basically any single human.

Yes, people who actually understand tech understand that LLMs are not AGI, that your metaphor of wrong tool wrong job is apt.

… But seemingly about +90% of humanity, including the people who own and profit from LLMs, including all the other business owners/managers who just want to lower their employee headcount … do not understand this, that an LLM is actually basically an extremely advanced text autocorrect system, that frequently and confidently lies, spits out nonsense, hallucinates, etc.

If you think it isn’t reasonable to continuously point out that LLMs are not superintelligences, then you likely live in a bubble of tech nerds who probably still think their jobs or retirement are secure.

They’re not.

If corpos keep smashing “”“AI”“” into basically every industry to replace as many workers as possible… the economy will collapse, as capitalism doesn’t work without consumers who have jobs, and an avalanche of errors will cascade and snowball through every system that replaces humans with them…

…and even if those two things were not broadly true…

…the amount of literal power/energy, clean water and financial capital that is required to run the whole economy on these services is wildly unsustainable, both short term economically, and medium term ecologically.

We investigated ourselves and everything looks peachy actually!

Yep, no need for any independent audit mr. auditor regulator man person!

=D

therapy does not have to be expensive.

But it is though.

Your medicaid patients?

Poor. By definition.

Sure they might not pay a copay, but they pay for it in gas money to get to that visit, their barely running car now breaking down from visiting you, time off work they can’t really afford, time filling out reams and reams of fucking paperwork to be able to qualify for anything, likely when they’re already in a mentally comprimised condition to some extent… its all very stressful.

Which is very bad for mental health.

we have no reason to believe it would be any better than a paper journal and a CBT worksheet.

And the part you don’t want to admit (at least here) is that … that’s actually quite helpful in and of itself for a lot of people.

Have a few sessions with a live, in person therapist, to teach you CBT, give you the paperwork, walk you through it.

Not all, but many people can take it by themselves from there, and not need to keep wasting time and energy on continually requalifying for medicaid, getting to and from psych appointments, dealing with scheduling delays and unavailability, etc.

Yep, a lot of people are also helped by basically just having someone to be able to talk to and feel heard.

But… that’s often doable by just making either a friend or even casual acquaintance with someone who is capable of, and has the capacity for reflexive empathy.

Much less stress and paperwork involved there.

And also yes, some people with much more serious issues need much more serious help.

Unfortunately, the entire medical system in the US is utterly broken, and the only real solution is having a system that … isn’t broken, so that comprehensive screening and diagnosis is easily available without huge delays and costs… and more broadly, those people need to have the first two levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs taken care of.

But currently our society basically just takes those people and throws them into the streets, evicts them, forecloses on them, incarcerates them.

There simply is no systemic way to help those people without major systemic changes… and those ain’t happening, they’re moving in the opposite direction.

…

The problem with LLMs as therapy is that they are wildly overconfident, agreeable to the point of encouraging delusions and dangerous behavior, they hallucinate facts that aren’t real… and they are not actually capable of legitimate critical thinking or reasoning.

They also will not introduce you to concepts you have never heard of before which you do not know are or could be very useful, unless you directly ask them to do that, and even then… they obviously are not experts themselves and may suggest dubious ideas.

But also, at the same time… people often do form what they will describe as meaningful relationships with an LLM. So… its not that ‘it doesn’t happen’, its that its a psuedorelationship, a fascimile of a relationship, lacks in person interaction, a real human modulating their intonation, having micro expressions, body language, etc etc.

Yeah, memes, common jokes, can be employed for unhelpful purposes, in unhelpful ways.

You are basically saying ‘its just a joke bro!’ when its clear that a lot of people, in general, and here in this thread, are tired of this joke, as it is dismissive and reductive.

You entirely derailed the topic by being dismissive of about 350 million people and just saying you don’t give a fuck about them.

Thats not relevant or productive to attempting to seriously discuss broad social dynamics, at all, whatsoever.

And now you’re just openly insulting me directly and personally, and you’re now acting as if you are an authority figure who can direct the flow of this conversation.

You seem to have a bit of an anti-American/anti-homeless chip on your shoulder, and I don’t much care for the sociopath vibes you’re giving me, so I’ll be blocking you now.

Uh, I am not intentionally trolling anyone.

To the best of my understanding… CBT has the largest amount of empirical data showing it actually helps a broad variety of people.

Yes, of course there are other forms of therapy that are more targetted and helpful for people with specific, identified conditions or diagnoses, or specific kinds of past trauma, etc.

This is why I phrased the sentence the way I did, with ‘basically’ as a qualifier, said ‘most’ people. I suppose I could have been a bit more clear and concise with that, my apologies.

There’s no need to catastrophize and read a boat load of ill intent into what I said; we can have a good faith conversation here if you want to.

What are other broadly empirically verified to be helpful therapy methods that help a broad range of people?

I would genuinely like to know, so I could look into them.

I’ve heard DBT is showing promise, but I’ve not heard it is as widely empirically evidenced and verified, yet.

I also freely admit that I could have some details and specifics wrong here… I am after all recovering from 2 years of homelessness, multiple concussions, contusions, etc.

This is like, how conversations work, right?

If someone says something you know is false… you don’t immediately assume they are an intentional badfaith disinfo agent, you instead say hey, you said this, I think that’s incorrect, and let me tell you why.

Though I do have to point out the irony of me saying that I often encounter many psych field people who needlessly read hostile intent into what I say… and then you are here literally exemplifying that, by having a very emotionally charged reaction, while identifying yourself as being in the psych field.

Now flip that around and anytime you see or a hear a woman saying her man isn’t emotionally available, just tell her he isn’t your therapist.

… Do you see how this kind of framing is wildly unproductive, when either side engages in it?

You are the one that made this all about what does and doesn’t apply to a specific area or country, into being a pro or anti whatever specific nationality discussion.

Like I don’t disagree that we should fix our own country, it is our responsibility… but you could have just said ‘Damn, is it really that bad in the States?’ or something like that, without being dismissive and hostile for… basically the only reason is you’re tired of hearing about America I guess?

???

Sorry I exist?