Does your show use sets?...special effects?...costumes?...writers? Those cost money and shows without an audience get canceled. I can name dozens of AMAZING shows no one has heard of that were GREAT, but got canceled because the network did a shit job of promoting it. One famous example was Family Guy...found a massive audience on reruns and was renewed...same with Arrested Development, but there were shows on FX & HBO that I loved a lot more, but never found their audience...and thus had an early demise.

Get over the lame 90s-punk anti-capitalism bullshit attitude. People who make content can only do so if their bills are getting paid. I'm not a hipster, so if you like my favorite show, I am delighted. I want as many people as possible to see it and enjoy it like I did. Marketing ensures people can enjoy it and those who make it can get paid and get renewed to make more content...why does anyone have to explain this to you?

Sorry...that's bullshit. If the ship is unsafe, people can die and LOTS do. They need the right to communicate with the outside world to report deadly conditions. They could get killed by a storm as well, which could be no one's fault and may be unavoidable...I don't think most phones would be recovered and if they did, I doubt they work...I think given the high fatality rate and length of time at sea, we can make exceptions for them that we wouldn't make for an accountant or someone working at WalMart.

A lot of these men are young. They need release and after 10 months, the imagination can only take you so far. A lonely man with a well drained nutsack is much less likely to lose his temper...even if it's not porn...maybe he misses his kids or dog...a connection with his home, family, or even just porn can really reduce hostility and antisocial tendencies.

The last thing I want to do is work with sexually frustrated heterosexual men on a cramped vessel for 10 months at a time.

A migrant fisherman can't afford his own Starlink terminal...if you can even do that. He needs WiFi to work with a basic phone. In the USA, you're 25x more likely to die on the job as a deep sea fisher than all other jobs, which includes cop, miner, truck driver, etc. If a job is that deadly, especially since it is often due to employer negligence, you need the right to communicate to the outside world.

An e-mail terminal would get monitored by corporate...as soon as the word "union" or "organize" gets typed, expect a sudden loss of internet. Corporate overlords who abuse migrants can't be trusted to not abuse their rights. Open and un-monitored Wi-Fi is the only reasonable solution. If these corporations are afraid of that, it makes you wonder what they're hiding. It's a fishing vessel, not a nuclear launch site. The only motivation for secrecy is to hide illegal labor abuses.

Deep sea fishing is has 114 deaths per 100k FTE employees vs 4 for general US employment. I am sure it's not much better in Asia. If you're 25x more likely to get killed on the job, I think unrestricted communication with the outside world should be mandated by law. These subcontractors and vessel owners are notorious for ignoring safety warnings to shave a few bucks of their margin.

Just because it exists, doesn't mean it's popular. I can buy a lollipop with a dead scorpion in it,...but I think it's safe to say, dead scorpion is not a popular flavor. You don't find whiskey flavor at your local Target or grocery store. While technically, I said "no one"...I think you knew I mean "nearly no one" it is colloquially said.

The point is most don't like booze. I honestly like whiskey, but like most...when I had my first sip as a kid, my reaction was "owww" and "why do you drink this?" I would be surprised if you didn't have the same reaction because ever person I've met or heard from had a similar reaction. They had to be trained to appreciate hard liquor and even most of the sugary stuff. Virtually no one takes their first sip of beer or wine and says "yum!"

For most, drinking is not natural or pleasant, or for those like me, not worth the consequences. For others, it's a means to an end...to relax or cope...of which we have more pharmaceutical options or legalized marijuana in most states....so it's not a surprise to me that it's usage is declining. If you think about it, the bigger surprise if how prevalent it has been for so long.

"IT" is a broad term for services bought by businesses. IT is a symptom. If they're doing too much business, take it up with the those writing their checks. You don't skin a patient to cure their herpes, you treat the virus. You don't crack down on chefs to treat obesity. You tell those ordering the food to make better decisions.

Most in IT aren't paid "too much"...only a few elite software engineers are wealthy. Beyond that, most tech riches go to business owners. Most working in IT are earning modest wages and even most with good titles are earning middle-class wages. Their salaries seem high, but if you're working where the jobs are, you're not living in a mansion. I could afford a VERY nice place in South Dakota, but I can barely afford a middle class home where I live.

if you think spending is wasteful, which there is a case for, it's due to clueless decision makers, almost none of which are technologists, who are funding stupid ideas. IT is agnostic to politics and business...just like a plumber or electrician. Most tradesmen do their job and care little about who it's for. I doubt many electricians in DC care if they're upgrading a circuit breaker panel for AOC or Matt Gaetz. If either hires them for a stupid wasteful solar retrofit, would you take it out on the electricians?

You did a poor job of explaining your thoughts and your opinions and came off as clueless to the entire industry or how business works in general. You probably have some insight and a decent point buried in your vague writing, however, I will assume your beef is with the MBA herd...not the people who take their money to realize their ideas. Few of us in the industry have the luxury of scrutinizing where our paycheck comes from. We have families to feed. Go after the disease...not the symptoms. If they're not wasting money on IT projects, they'll find something equally stupid to justify their executive paychecks on.

The biggest benefit of learning how to code is creating useful software. We'll have to agree to disagree. It's not a mental exercise, but a multi-trillion dollar industry. AI hasn't made developers useless. First of all...it does a shit job. Secondly, it's VERY easy to write code. It's very hard to maintain it.

OK, ChatGPT shit out a Python program that's 5x bigger than a skilled professional would make it and is obtuse...OK, now you need to secure it. Someone broke into your website and defaced it because it concatenated SQL Strings....and it doesn't know how to fix it...you're going to have to hire a professional.

Finally, AI can only replicate known patterns. No one pays me to replicate known patterns. They pay me to write new software....which AI will automatically be at a disadvantage at. At my employer's request, I work with AI-generated code daily...for simple tasks that AI should be able to do...and the code it writes only compiles about 50% of the time. Sometimes it saves me time, but I spend a lot of time fixing their mistakes...some suboptimal coding, many fatal bugs that don't compile, some the dreaded insidious bugs that look like they work, but don't or have a security flaw.

AI is interesting, but it hasn't replaced coders...at best, it's the new StackOverflow. I google a bit less now, but man does Claude shit out some uncompilable garbage...and ChatGPT and CoPilot are even worse. Coding definitely engages the brain, but more importantly, it's a job I take very seriously.

For the last 40 years, the wealthy have been parasitically lobbying to remove all tax burden so that as Warren Buffet famously said, he pays a LOT less taxes than his secretary(by percentage). Give 100 billion dollars to Elon Musk, nothing changes. He owns everything he wants and needs....give that money to the bottom 10% of America and every sent will be spent in their local community, quite efficiently.

Sooner or later, UBI or some scheme will be needed. We need people to have a functioning market economy. All technology is created with the goal of reducing the need for people. Eventually we'll have an economy with more people than demand for their labor. With each technological advancement, wealth is creating from things....owned by the wealthy....factory robots ensure the owner can pay extra money to avoid paying a human being....AI is designed the same way...with the goal of firing a person that costs money...so that those with money can replace as many human beings as they can afford to do so....and their wealth snowballs into a massive, unfathomable sum. What happens when Amazon achieves it's goals and can lay off 90% of their workers? Who will buy their stuff?

Historically, advances in technology killed one type of job and created many more, but there is a limit to this...just like Moore's law with chips, eventually, we run out of ways to keep this going. No one knows when that'll happen, but what happens if they actually achieve their bullshit promises with AI and every accountant, lawyer, writer, and software engineer is replaced with software? What happens when a semi-truck can run autonomously? What happens when Amazon can operate a warehouse with robots alone? That day will come...not sure when, but we need to be prepared.

Our entire written history depends on there being more work than people....thus you contribute in order to survive. Someday, we'll need a system that doesn't rely on you finding value in order to live.

Also, you misunderstand the nature of money. Supply and demand is only simple when there's a fixed supply. If 10 people want to buy a house, the price does go up, as you indicate...inflation happens. However, if the good is manufactured, that doesn't apply. If 10 people want to buy a Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo just produces more of them. The greater the demand, the more that are produced and often companies can leverage economies of scale. By your logic, the top selling car in the USA would be the most expensive, since it's the most popular, but the Toyota RAV4 is quite affordable...because Toyota can make nearly as many as they want and make them more efficiently than many of their other vehicles.

You're only correct in the sense that it's reckless tax breaks that are choices laws that got us here. Prices only go up for finite supply goods. If more people have money, Sony just makes more PS5s. They don't raise prices on PS5s. If anything, it allows them to lower production costs, which allows them to lower prices, make more profit, or run promotions with discounts. For property?...sure, that's true, but the record property prices have a lot more to do with corporations and wealthy speculators buying all the property they can as investments...so yeah "choices we make and the laws we enact" apply here, but not on the individual, but on the gov for not taxing the fuck out of speculators who leave housing unoccupied. It's well documented that many foreign nationals invest in American property because they don't trust assets in their country (think China/Russia) or for various nefarious purposes, like money laundering.

Our property issues have a lot more to do with the ultra-wealthy thinking property is a safer and more lucrative investment than the stock market and reducing the supply drastically.

So goods and services in finite supply?...they will raise in prices with increased demand. However, the majority of things we buy are not limited by our ability to produce them. Apple can make a LOT more iPhones. Nintendo can make a LOT more switch 2s.

UBI only ensures that some of the wealth that goes to the 1% goes to the lower half...which stimulates the economy...thus just adding more money right back to the wealthy. Jeff Bezos pays more taxes...and people can afford to buy more from Amazon, put simply.

We know that UBI doesn't significantly reduce laborforce participation....no one wants to live off UBI alone. It does allow some to invest in education or raising a family or other short term absences leading to greater productivity down the road.

FWIW, I have a good job, UBI won't help me directly...but if more people can afford to buy my employer's goods and services, then it will help me indirectly and ensure less homeless, less addiction, less poverty in my community....thus less crime, less tax money spend on law enforcement and incarceration, etc.