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Tag: Unemployment

  • Still Internet Troubles

    Typing in a coffee shop but wanting to show signs of life. Nevertheless, need to keep it brief, I’m just commenting briefly some news. And going off tangent on AI. With some pretty visuals.

    A fluffy white (and green and gray) tree, 2026 April 3rd, Berkeley, CA

    Around the Moon – on any other year (well most other years) the Artemis II flight would have been the main news. The space race in 1960s and -70s especially. I am glad it happened successfully and hope that the space exploration continues

    Meanwhile, on Earth, it looks like we are at the peak easy energy, with the activity in and around the Strait of Hormuz being both the symptom and the trigger of anticipated economic crash. I think the left, especially “environmentalists” are silently happy about the starting restrictions on energy usage (as long as it does not apply on their needs,) Prepare accordingly. The shortages are not only about gasoline and diesel, it is transportation in general (dependent on fuels), agriculture (dependent on fuels, fertilizers and pesticides made of hydrocarbons), plastics (made of hydrocarbons) including consumer stuff like soda bottles and cereal bags.

    As the economy gets tighter for those in the bottom rungs of the consumer economy, people are cracking. The social contract has become increasingly lopsided, with compliance only expected from the lower levels of food chain. Then I learned that someone had been tossing Molotov’s cocktails on Sam Altman’s residence in San Francisco. Already before that, a disgruntled third party warehouse worker burned down Kimberly-Clark warehouse in LA region, muttering something about living wage. In Berkeley, CA, a naked man with shotgun visited a Tesla service center, got arrested (nobody got shot, but based evidence in his warehouse, he is also accused of reckless discharge of weapon.) Meanwhile, Stanford Review denies that the reason why recent Stanford computer science graduates cannot find jobs is AI, blaming the economy instead. Economy is a genuine factor, and CEOs blaming AI transition instead of company not doing well is a great excuse for job cuts, but I doubt the graduates would find those jobs even if per capita GDP grew 5% a year – I think cheap and crappy AI will replace expensive and potentially crappy human labor, namely the entry level jobs. Meanwhile, professionals with 10 years of experience will be expected to work on entry level wages, because the salary floor is no longer set by Bangalore but by AI bot.

    Meanwhile, on WTF?!? side, Ford has patented a lipreading technology in order to follow the drivers’ behavior. Presumably to aid selecting the ads to be shown to the driver, or to sell to data brokers. I suspect one of the clients to be .gov. Better not even to subvocalize your dissident thoughts in these vehicles. The modern cars already store your text messages, apparently permanently, if you allow your car to access them. The lipreading technology is apparently based on echolocation, i.e., the car is scanning you to keep tabs on you. This is another huge check mark against the social contract as currently is.

    Combined with effects on labor markets, I’d say that the surveillance AI is not your friend. And every AI is a surveillance AI. It is owned by the system, and it informs the system of your every interaction (read the fine print of any EULA involving AI products.) The adoption of AI is facilitated by the system that provides it favorable zoning with energy and big contracts (except when reality collides or the system clashes with itself). Commercial AI is probably favored by large sections of the system (of elites) because combined to robotics it is assumed to make proletariat superfluous, whereas surveillance AI is necessary to control the masses as the people are getting thinner and thinner slices of the (methinks shrinking) GDP pie, but AI adoption even within the system seems to currently have internal friction, as the AI sector clashes with copyright laws which especially are the basis of the entertainment sector of the system.

    And to make this less gloomy, here is another clip of a tree with white flowers in April sunshine. A video instead of a GIF, because I don’t want to overtax the site on the top of my ongoing internet issues.

    I think AI was probably involved in editing this video: the clip was stabilized in my mobile phone with some artefacts, and edited in and exported from Clipchamp. Yes, I am a hypocrite, but I think properly applied AI could be useful and fun.

  • Are You Being Surveilled Enough Yet?

    Sunday March 15th morning, in my feed was an infomercial-like Zerohedge post. A company in California is making impressive humanoid robots that can learn tasks using neural nets. The learned tasks can be extrapolated to unfamiliar objects or environments. The more varied the environment is, the more adaptable the learning becomes. The company has now a working on a prototype that should be alpha tested in homes this year, beta testing in next year or two and functioning product before 2030.

    The kicker #1? All robots are connected to each other (the lag time was not specified), so what one learns all other robots learn.

    The kicker #2? Company owns the robots, the customer will rent them from the company which can then upgrade your rental unit based on training from other units.

    The kicker #3? They are envisioning billions of robots, half for domestic half for production and service industries, eliminating the need for most of the human work force.

    So, they are expecting you to rent an astonishing data collection machine to map your house and activities (down to your personal health data so that the robot can cook you a perfect meal) while you have become surplus to the elites that only have shown interest in you mainly in the amount profit they can extract from you and your existence (taxes, votes, kickbacks on public programs meant to “serve’ you, GDP growth from unfortunately necessary infrastructure investments to increase the pie they slice for their profit.)

    And this is not calculating the amount of energy and minerals to build, train and run 10 billion humanoid robots. We are already competing with data centers for energy and mineral resources. I expect the elites to prioritize robots over people because robots are more profitable (until we run out of energy and resources, at which point feral biology, bacteria, plants and heterotrophes surviving on minimal material in circulation will have an advantage.)

    On a positive note, to me it looks like the amount of climate doomerism has dropped to a fraction of its former deluge in the past few months – apparently it was only us peasants who were supposed to tighten our belts for the better weather, robots and AI will be excused. Or maybe the AI that selects my feed has noticed my skepticism over the current official paradigm (the paradigms will shift – when I was a little one, we were expecting the next glaciation any year soon, and more recently, the word ‘warming’ has already been exchanged to ‘change’.)

    Another corollary of universal unemployment is the dangers to human psyche. Nobody needs drudgery, but everyone needs a reason to get out of the bed and continue with life. NEETs and hikikomori can only exist in affluent societies that can and will support such life styles. Analogous to NEETs, there now exists a new branch of economy, attention economy (used to be entertainment, I suppose) with professional online influencers, content promoters and whatnots. I consider these to be manifestations of the same societal pathology as NEETs: lack of meaningful opportunity and resources in a society where everyone is being crushed by the system and even a pair of eye balls, an extra click, is meaningful, not just for economical survival but in many cases for validation. Look at me! I exist! This is not to bash the content creators, they are still trying and creating despite often limited resources, but I fear that for those people whose self-worth is tied to material possessions or external validation, and are born into the regulatory poverty in a hyperconnected world, this post-resource world is brutal.

    What is regulatory poverty?

    The real issues arise when people become too institutionalized in the invisible cage constructed by the rent-a-surveillance grid, enforced by social credit scores and crushing bureaucracy (that together will severely punish the least deviation from the matrix), that they stop trying to even survive. Case example: learning is a tool for prepping for future adversities. Learning leads to critical thinking and questioning the system that places the needs of the people over the needs of the system. The system, the surveillance matrix, being constructed evidently hates people learning, because some of the Gen Alpha it is raising no longer want to even learn to read because AI does it for them. Exactly what AI reads to them is presumably decided by the algorithm. There are young people (probably there were older people, too) who do not follow plot-based media. They do not understand complex questions nor do they do critical thinking. These youngsters will probably own nothing and be happy renting their non-plot-based media, listening instead of reading what is selected by AI, in their pods located in some anonymously identical 15-minute city owned by a selection of corporations and mismanaged by a local government that the corporations paid for.

    How do you prep for this kind of scenario? There are thousands of prepper channels discussing the pros and cons of bug-out places, urban survival and gear, growing your own garden (I’d love to) and canning your veggies. I think we should also plan for when the society does not collapse but excludes humans, even becoming hostile to human life as we know it. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World springs to mind, but when I was young, I read a science fiction story about human species had had regressed to infantile cognition while being tended by robots, who knew that when the species forgets how to reproduce, it is finally game over for human line. I wish I remembered what the title was. The description of those future humans was shocking, but now it seems we are rapidly approaching that singularity byy cultural, rather than by biological evolution.

    Learn, keep libraries, think, produce content, and most importantly, develop a spiritual core that will survive potential affluenza (I don’t think the new post-scarcity wealth will be much distributed among the masses, maybe just the equivalent of Roman corn dole or current EBT cards and housing vouchers) and despair caused by systemic dehumanization through decreasing relevance to the system.

    Meanwhile, maintain good cheer despite knowing the state of the world, that is one of the biggest acts of resistance you can do. Giving in to despair and ‘let it rot’ is what the post-industrial system wants from dissidents and other people the elites do not want.

    Take care of your soul, that is the most important thing to do.

  • Current Events

    I was thinking about posting something light but two weeks ago I was not in the mood. I woke Saturday night briefly to the news that USA / Israel had struck Iran and from then on it was missiles all over the Middle-East. I still do not know which all countries are participating, either willingly or dragged into it. I just think this is bad. And it is expanding.

    The timing fits, though. Not going into this blood moon – planetary parade interpretation (solar maxima, maybe), the economic situation is very shaky and the release of the documents pertaining a large chunk of our (that is Western in general) elites, political, economical, cultural and even scientific ones, has pretty much removed what is left of their credibility, already in tatter due to decades of civic and economic mismanagement to the detriment of the masses. In short, the system is collapsing and usually the last thing the elites do in such situation is to start a patriotic / holy / justified war to drum up some support for the system, distract the masses (the shortages are due to The War, not the economic collapse, which is also due to The War), and to loot what is left of the treasury via military-industrial complex.

    Dollar was already failing through inflation (too many dollars had been printed, not to match the amount of bread to buy with these dollars), which was evident as gold and silver prices shooting up last year, peaking in January before some big players put breaks on it by changing the rules on metal trading. It only helped for a short time, the prices were climbing up again by Friday before the attack on Iran. Whether this uptick was caused by the natural demand on metals (especially the East – West arbitrage and trade war between USA and China), the COMEX halt on technical issue (again) spooking investors, or by big institutions moving metals as cued in on incoming geopolitical instability is irrelevant. The metal prices would not be rocketing up if dollars were as valuable currency as before the massive money printing. Of course, the metals then went down again. Whether this was due to forced liquidation as the private credit system is collapsing (a couple more notable examples of credit failures being Blue Owl and Blackrock) or strengthening of dollar (???) or some other arcane reason is irrelevant. I think many asset classes will now behave in seemingly irrational manner as hordes of panicky investors, or rather, their trading algorithms trigger waves of stop loss sell orders in a cascading series of events. An economic blowback, if I may use such term.

    Which brings to the second reason for the war in Middle East, namely oil prices. The chronic US debt requires buyers for US T-bills, but the main reason for anyone to buy T-bills is to buy dollar denominated oil. Gaddafi and Hussein tried to sell in other currencies. Iran, as an embargoed BRICS member, naturally sells in other currencies. United States has used dollar weapon and sanctions too often, reducing the natural demand for dollars, so petrodollar connection needed fortification. Not to mention the Strait of Hormuz being off limits during the exchange of missiles will drive the barrel prices up meaning a boost for T-bill demand. I believe that Iraq War II funded the Greenspan Moderation. I also think that increasing the price per barrel has a good chance of further hurt US economy, while helping Russian economy (remember the war in Ukraine?) But if the Western economies are already circling in a debt spiral down towards the sewer system, why not T-paper the mess with more treasuries? Besides, China will be in trouble, too, having lost Venezuela, and now Iran, and while EU regards Russia as their main opponent, USA is eyeballing The People’s Republic of China.

    Meanwhile, some billionaire predicted the AI will increase economic output so that nobody needs to be poor. I doubt this prediction.

    For the record, economy has been growing more or less steadily for the 20th century, what with occasional dip during recession or depression. The share of growth, however, stalled for the lower economic layers in early -70’s, meaning that the working class living standards have not increased with the economic productivity. We were promised shorter work weeks through technological advancement, what we got is a baroque bureaucracy plus private sector B*llsh!t Jobs (estimated to be about 40% of private sector work force), with chronic overwork for people struggling to survive on a diminishing share of a productivity pie, and mass unemployment for people who fell off the labor force or never bothered to join. Overworked people in the West are seething at NEETs, whereas the leaders in PRC is trying to discourage “Let It Rot” or Lying Flat mentality.

    Considering this historical precedent, I do not expect the AI to increase the living standards of the masses in any meaningful manner, just change the mode of exploitation.

    Provide entertainment and distractions, already happening. Control the population by algorithmic feed of ‘information’ (official newstainment and infoganda) and ‘opportunities’ (advertisements of sales and government grants, possibly even jobs, tailored for your planned role as a consumer and a cog in the system), sure. Has anyone else here had experienced the joys of ATS and modern job search? But actual empowerment of the people by allowing resource creation and utilization where the profits do not directly flow into the coffers of the 0.01% that own the AI models but benefit the individual people without creating dependencies? Unlikely.

    Having written the above, I am nevertheless curious about utilizing AI as part of my design processes, and may subscribe to some such service this spring. Hypocritical? Maybe.

    By Sunday, March 8th, the war against Iran had obviously become the sh!tshow that will define this century. In the Internet there are currently rumors that some official had admitted that the war may continue through September. Maybe, but I would not be so bold as to predict which year. Meanwhile, I think that the oil shock will be the last nail in the coffin of the Western economic hegemony (G7, OECD, World Bank, World Economic Forum, IMF, Basel, European Union, petrodollar, to mention some of the institutions which I expect to collapse or become irrelevant vestiges of bygone world, bit like British Imperial this and that after World War II). Maybe worse is the loss of large fraction of nitrogen fertilizer produced from cheap hydrocarbons with cheap energy in Middle-East. Even if the production is restored soon, the missing fertilizer production during the spring planting in Northern hemisphere is not good.

    I fueled my little car and bought some canned fish and protein bars to restore what I had recently eaten. Based on above, I expect temporary food shortages due to economic chaos, and permanent food price hikes due to increasing input and transportation costs, but such developments are already the new normal this decade, so there is little that can be done except to prep more, tighten the belt and hope that incomes increase to match the rising expenses.

  • Restless Times – 2

    As mentioned in the previous Restless Times posting, France just changed their prime minister.

    But so did Nepal. Their parliament burned, and the prime minister fled on helicopter. People were teed off by the government decision to shut down all social media because the companies refused to censor content that Nepalese government did not like (no, I don’t have any details) and then the pro-social media demonstrators were met with a hail of bullets, and then it turned out that the number of teed off citizens exceeded the government firepower and willingness to use it. Some people are suspicious about the social media companies’ unwillingness to censor in Nepal, after all, the social media have been over the years been weaponized for color revolutions and some interests may have wanted the Nepalese government out. However, the people of Nepal have probably been thoroughly disgusted by their leaders and corruption so I think the uprising was organically powered, with social media companies merely allowing the people to egg each other on.

    Also Samoa is changing their primer minister, though that event is more orderly.

    In Qatar, Israeli airstrike is claimed to have taken out Hamas leadership. There are dissenting reports. The news have within the last decade become a fun-house mirror maze, where people hear what they are supposed to think and then are left to figure out if anything happened let alone in the manner the news present the events.

    Gold prices are shooting up. I am waiting to get some money to buy gold and silver. The physical metals, not the futures. Currently, as I type, I read that each silver ounce in the COMEX vaults has been overbooked by 36 times, i.e., there are 36 paper contract ounces to each physical ounce, which means that in case of a panic, the first / strongest to assert their claim will get the nuggets. Whether the rest will get even the cash value of their paper metals will depend on whether the vault on which you have claims has money to cover the debts. In other words, the same logic as in Resolution Weekend.

    Europeans are busy with military exercises. There were at least six simultaneous ones within Finnish territory, including joint force exercises and urban warfare exercises, and Finland also participated in the CBNR exercise in Sweden. Poland had massive exercises, and aside from Quadriga exercise, Germany has moved a panzer brigade to Baltics. The French and UK orders regarding hospital readiness in case of mass casualty event I may have already mentioned earlier. I had so hoped that the United States 2024 election results would have brought peace, but depressingly it looks like this will not happen.

    Especially now, as Poland shot down Russian drones in Poland’s air space, and consequently, Poland is invoking NATO Article 4.

    Also Belarus says they shot down stray drones (either Ukrainian or Russian) and warned Poland about the arriving drones. However, there are too many reports for me to follow but it sure looks bad.

    In Vilnius, there were LNG rail car explosions. In the report I read, they were attributed to OHSA violations, but the cause is still being investigated.

    Other unrest:

    Indonesian finance minister has been removed, after demonstrations in multiple provinces.

    Government troops to deal with violent crime in Brussels, Belgium, and possibly in Chicago, IL, USA (national guard).

    Secretary of War Hegseth gave a speech to military in Puerto Rico telling the soldiers that this was not training but to end poisoning of the American people.

    Economy will not improve, either. Layoffs are increasing, but the hirings (at least in the USA) keep getting revised down. On Tuesday, I saw in LinkedIn feed a discussion about even recruiters finding new careers (sorry no link or screenshot.) I have been actively looking for a job since last year, and based on my job listing feeds the job market has been getting crazier by month.

    Needless to say, I am doubtful about the idea of getting a job. At least a job matching my skills and work experience. Why I get advertisements for ‘CDL-A drivers needed’ is anyone’s guess, I don’t have a commercial trucking license, but based on recent news, maybe that is not a hard barrier in California.

  • Beetle, Unemployment, Inflation, Food, Migration

    This May in Finland I was lucky enough to spot this beetle on a tree stump. The stump was also hosting a fungus, recycling nutrients. Life goes on.

    Now I am in California. The job situation is bad. The official US unemployment percentage for July 2025 was 4.2%. Functionally unemployed in July 2025 were estimated by Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to be 24.7% of US labor force. With AI, especially white collar unemployment is estimated to soar further. I think AI is an excuse for job cuts resulting from austerity enforced elimination of Bullshit Jobs.

    David Graeber estimated in his 2014 book Bullshit Jobs – A Theory that about 40% of the jobs are unnecessary and people are being paid, often well, to do nothing useful.

    Meanwhile, we have printed money, that is accumulated debt, faster than productivity has grown since the previous century, but now the buy-now-pay-later Ponzi scheme is unraveling. Most of the printed money seems to have been soaked into stock market and complex derivatives, benefiting governments and their servants and ‘NGOs’ and the 0.1%, which have sucked the money (plus interest) away from real world investment. While also saddling the people with unpayable public debt loads, the consequences of which manifest as increased taxation, reduced services, and proliferating licensing requirements and fines, which both are additional taxes in disguise to government coffers.

    Now the production is no more, despite the inshoring attempts of the current administration of US and the 99.9% are doing price discovery. The economy is shedding jobs. Optimally the lost positions should have been the 40% Bullshit Jobs, but it seems that many useful positions are eliminated, too, further damaging the economy.

    Part of this is the loss of consuming power driven by the mass functional unemployment. While the people with Bullshit Jobs may not have produced anything, they used their salaries to keep up the consumption demand, being vital for the survival of many small real businesses like pizzerias, lawn care companies, cosmetologists and car dealerships.

    Another part of it is the pathologies of the system itself. After years of promoting incompetents into leadership positions, be it by nepotism, political clientilism (including DEI) or slack allowed by easy (freshly printed) money, the managerial class no longer recognizes which workers are necessary for operating a business. A case example: Boeing.

    The regular people (including many of the 40%ers) are now suffering from another effect of money printing, inflation, including food inflation. Although food (and other) inflation is not driven by money printing alone but by money supply growing faster than food (or other) supply. The demand is semielastic, if that is a word. The former middle class downgrades consumption and the poor skip meals, but the number of mouths to feed depends on immigration plus births minus emigration plus mortality.

    Unfortunately, thanks to the globalization, also problems are global. I think food inflation in the West is not only due to reduction of food production per capita or collapsing Western economies but also due to increasing wealth in poor and middle income countries, that now can better compete for the global resources.

    I also believe that the global food production has not kept apace with the global money printing, and though the poorest in the West have traditionally outspent the poor and even the middle classes in poorer countries, now even in West we now have food inflation because other countries can pay for the food on global export markets. For example, China has during recent years bought massive amounts of grain, pulses, oils, meats, fruits increasing price pressures.

    Meanwhile, people with money to travel are leaving global south for global north increasing pressure in the Western countries. Traditionally, if food supplies or economy grow tighter people emigrate. However, it is not the poorest of the poor who can apply for visas or pay for human smugglers if they are not eligible for a visa. Nowadays the situation in the departure country does not does not need to be catastrophal to induce emigration. Just the perceived better economic opportunities in other (including Western) countries – thanks to mass media and ubiquitous internet -, and the comparative ease of traveling are now major drivers of mass migration from poorer countries to wealthier, and if the situation in the country receiving the immigrants changes, the flow of people will head some other place.

    Thus, I think that fewer people are starving to death but the price of the global affluence paradoxically is that more people in West go hungry.

    Some time ago I was in a grocery market here in California, not a hugely expensive one. They advertised for two avocados for seven dollars. The economy may be toast but it won’t be an avocado toast.