If the point is that cost/calorie has risen too much, it's substantially worse in the cost/calorie sense to eat prepared food out of the home versus cook at home.
As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe (Mark Bittmans):
===
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus some for greasing the pan
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
½ cup grated dried unsweetened coconut
===
Step 1
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan.
Step 2
Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.
Step 3
Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out fairly clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.
It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers.
Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell.
Get used to it, we have a lot more people that will be coming in and they all need to be taken care of. Unsustainable lifestyles are going to have to give way. We can’t all eat beef and have air conditioning and travel in retirement if we’re going to share this planet.
That disabled non-producers go to the ER less if given an apartment is true doesn't make it empathetic or correct to build enormous unproductive spending networks under the label of homelessness, either.
$50,000 a year per homeless with minimal, if any, result - if it's empathy, it's suicidal empathy to emit those kinds of funds without results year after year into systems that have sprung up to capture them and ask for more.
Looking at cohorts of workers, automation tools like AutoCad reduce the expertise needed and commodify the job, which reduces leverage and thus per capita wages.
Consider the taxi or unskilled worker examples here:
All to say, as an individual, individuals rationally try to maximize leverage in a negotiation to capture the increased output. But what happens to classes of workers in different jobs varies. My take is that capital appears to be gaining leverage over wages back from many classes of workers, even if some limited classes of expertise are stable or gaining.
Automation isn't foreign to the topic. There's some discussion here that refrains from estimating too hard, but I think it's closer to outsourcing's effect:
Outsourcing and automation both reduce worker leverage, which reduces wages, which could explain reduced labor share. I'm not sure how one would weight it all.
I do see the criticism, but those critics appear made unwilling to accept that material support to other bad actors snares one in their web. No people were punished for mere possession, you or I could possess those zines and even email the prosecution about it.
This shouldn’t be such a leap, but rationalizing is what it is.
The hefty punishments are principally from the punishment enhancements meted out for the alleged terrorist label, firearms, wounded police, etc that overflow from the chief perpetrators onto those caught in the web through membership and their support.
Perhaps hiding evidence should be merely hiding evidence, not hiding evidence in the burying of a highly political prosecution where someone is catching life plus cancer, yet here we are.
The majority also wants their stuff to work - the program that solves a problem or the hardware they bought, and all that surface area to support it is how Windows is Windows.
> What else are you supposed to do?
Customize. You can strip out entire features, often called “debloat” but it’s hyper specific. It couldn’t be a general purpose pc after, and a debloated gaming config might lack the support to run other kinds of apps, or vice versa.
They even have a lightly modified version called LTSC although it retains so much feature surface area so as to remain “Windows” it’s not like the article’s idea, but it exists.
Rolling out the updates to a fleet is the easy administration he’s talking about, which is neither optional nor a trivial task.
Printer administration and Windows printer UX are different too, although the endless-printer-list-oh-god-its-not-even-alphabetical situation is more of an admin oversight to a clunky and low priority situation than anything. Small comfort, no doubt.
Prosecutors were successful in using them as evidence of connection between the members, and as a result of building that connection partly through the zines, held them jointly accountable for the groups overall actions.
I only have the .gov version, but 20-30 rounds were fired, Song was convicted as the attacker apparently and Baumann and Morris were evidently armed as well (the woods gunmen). It wasn’t the whole group but doesn’t appear to be just one individual.
They were successfully tied together by the prosecution as conspirators to the satisfaction of juries by their shared mission, chats, organization, papers, safe houses, and prior meetings among other things.
The actual members of the jury convicted the defendants though, accepting the .gov's evidence and witnesses that these individually innocuous elements together established their links to each other, collectively murdering an officer in the course of an attack.
"The government showed that there were items in the box that were the same items found in the Soto’s residence, tying Sanchez and Rueda to the Sotos, and similar items found amongst the other defendants. It also showed materials in the box contained handwritten notes on them, specifically the name “Ines,” and “Ines in bc” [Ines in book club].
This further drew the connection between Sanchez, Rueda, and the Sotos. This connection was important for purposes of Pinkerton liability and showing they all shared the same motive, intent, knowledge, and foreseeability."
No lawyer, today is the day I learned about Pinkerton Liability, but apparently under it you can be held liable for the actions of your co-conspirators.
Zines related to a shootout and murder by an armed group after retrieving them from the home of one of the parties involved, discussing it on a jail call, and placing them in a third person's apartment.
Rueda was in the jail following arrest in an armed group after a firefight at the detention center where 20-30 rifle rounds had been fired, with a police officer killed as a result.
In jail, Rueda called her mother to contact Sanchez because he would know what was going on. Rueda later directly called Sanchez and said, 'whatever you need to do, move whatever you need at the house'. Sanchez indicated to Rueda he had already been to her house.
Sanchez was then observed leaving his house with zines and was observed moving the zines to an apartment of someone else's. The zines were the same TTPs for anti-gov, anti-LE civil unrest topics as seen before and thus considered likely to be connected.
All in all, moving evidence from an investigation involving armed groups engaging in firefights with ICE isn't a stretch once we don't omit the facts known.
As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe (Mark Bittmans):
===
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus some for greasing the pan
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
½ cup grated dried unsweetened coconut
===
Step 1
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan.
Step 2
Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.
Step 3
Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out fairly clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.