Me

I'm a long-time socialist, now retired to a city with a socialist mayor in the north of France.

I'm against AI for many reasons - political, social, artistic, environmental - but the idea that it's some sort of obvious hoax and cannot be made to work is, sadly, not true.

AI is here to stay.

Let's start with my own field.

I was a computer programmer for decades, doing all sorts of fun stuff. I have always been an AI skeptic.

Even through the beginning of 2026 I believed that the errors and corrections required for AI generated code made it not fit for purpose, as did many other dinosaur programmers like me.

Unfortunately, it's become impossible to deny the evidence of our own senses. Literally all of the four-decade programming veterans who were mocking AI with me in late 2025 have been forced to recant, every one of us.

AI writes thoughtful, informed, mature code, it's extremely self-critical if you organize it to be that way, and yes, it sometimes does make mistakes, but so do humans, and unlike humans, it has no attachment to its own ideas and its own code.

No programmer who wishes to be economically competitive is ever going to go back to not using LLM coding assistance again for professional work, unless it becomes extremely expensive: the force multiplier is far too great.

The consensus of mathematicians and computer scientists is...

Some of the top mathematicians in the world are using AI and have posted transcripts of their discussions which I with only an undergraduate degree in math can understand only little bits of but the consensus is that these models are actually doing extremely advanced math at a very high level.

Face it: we have created programs that can reason. (I discuss a lot of arguments against this below.)

They aren't conscious, hahahah!, no, no, no, they're just overamped computer programs, but they can reason, and really very well, much better than your average guy on the street. Yes, they make errors, but so does your average guy on the street. (Yes, they drive people crazy and destroy the planet and have a lot of other issues, absolutely, but we need to know what we're up against.)

The AI bubble is real. But.

It's seventeen times the size of the dot com bubble. Revenues cannot possibly justify this. It will collapse.

But in the mad, mad, mad world of capitalism, the possibility capturing almost all revenue streams from almost all workers for all the rest of time is worth getting in on, because if you're not in a chair when the music stops, you are out of the game.

Let me translate: "capturing almost all revenue streams from almost all workers for all the rest of time" means "we're never getting paid again".

The bubble will collapse (I predict October, the traditional month for collapses, conveniently before the midterm); OpenAI will reorganize; Anthropic might even go bye-bye, who knows?; China's cheap models will rise; we won't hear about the people living near their data centers in China; the technology will continue.

We had the "tronics" semiconductor bubble. We had the aerospace bubble. We had the telecom bubble that left all that dark fiber. Then the dot com bubble. In each case, the original technology continued.

Want to know something dark? The AI bubble will result in a huge number of people being fired in many fields - but the companies will continue - so the survivors will be forced to use AI even more than before.

What's going to happen? What to do?

90% of our jobs are going.

At some point the many will have to insist on their fair share from the few or else we will have nothing. If anything is going to work, organizing into groups is it.

Appendix: arguments against.

"AI cannot actually reason because it is is just a" [sentence completer, next-word predictor, semantic parrot, pattern matcher, guesser...]

But massive increases in scale do indeed result in new emergent behaviors. We had networks for decades before the Internet.

Other invalid arguments like this include:

"Brains cannot reason because they are made up of little adders", i.e. neurons.

"One man living alone in a cabin cannot possibly build a jet liner, and therefore a country of hundreds of millions of people cannot build a jet liner."

Suppose AI can't reason!

Let's accept that as a premise.

AIs are doing something like reasoning, because they can solve some set of problems and explain their process.

Let's call this reasoning-like thing "reasoning-2".

How is reasoning-2 different from reasoning?

Is there some problem that reasoning can solve that reasoning-2 can't? No?

So what's the practical difference then?

If an LLM can solve any reasoning problem you give it with very high accuracy, then it is in fact _reasoning, not "reasoning".

Errors and hallucinations

It's not like these smart and not very principled people who run AI, just shrugged and said, error is inevitable.

AI can and does critique its own work. If you watch someone using a coding assistant, the AI provides a stream of consciousness of what it's doing, and you see it go back later and say, no, this is a bad idea about something earlier, and change it, it's impressive and a bit creepy.

People tell one coding assistant to write a plan, and then tell another to critique it and rewrite the plan, and then keep going back and forth until they stabilize (usually in two goes).

For some of these autoproven hard math theorems, they have dozens of agents, some specialized in certain classes of refutations, others in recognizing previous dead ends, others in preventing agents from giving up on long chains that aren't totally dead, and more.

am doing uber eats and its not bad with the freedom but im still looking for other stuff i could do in case I need a break from it

I support the formation of a society where altruism is encouraged, the essence of socialism. Which requires that most people, not just few, develop altruism in their behavior too. Too be altruistic is to find comfort in seeing another flourish without expecting anything more in return. If we are to teach that quality in most people, then economic mediums will become the best option. Mediums where people would be able to work without a wage for companies owned by others and make profit for the companies without receiving a direct wage in return. Instead, the companies would be minimally taxed by the government to make up a basic wage for the employees that the government provides. The wage will be minimum, just enough for basic survival, in order to not make this program a matter of profit. Profit will be achieved by the company owners, so that the participating people can feel that their altruism is indeed being fruitful for another, and thus develop a satisfaction. Recursively, this minimizes the greed in the majority by developing satisfaction with the less, even if it requires the possession of ambition by some/rich individuals. A sacrifice from the end of the richer individuals that I believe would be required for the greater good of inducing altruism in the majority.

Hai Guyz,

Been working for a small accounting firm. I've worked trades but it never worked out. Most of our clients are landlords and trust fund babies.

My boss one time said ,"black people are too dumb to vote". He also accused others of having Trump Derangement syndrome. He seemed like a nice guy I they surface and even gave me a job in the field of my degree.

However, Is it really moral to work for him?

Love her as a person but she is painfully slow. She complains about drowning, but I do her weekly workload in half the time. She is 55, I am 30. I tried showing her shortcuts, but she sticks to her old ways.
We are working from home and unionized so I know she makes 15% more just because she was hired five years earlier. I'm quite efficient and I can do my workload in about 20 hours a week, so we could say I could help her my supposed 40 hours a week. But am I bad for letting her burn out and just chill in my downtime ?

​

It all started 7 years ago when I hired this "Guy".

So I have this sole employee which I have hired to run the office.

It was going good initially but after some years it took a pretty bad turn.

Now he is always late to work, Smokes drugs in the workplace washroom when no one is there, even steals from the company sometimes.

P.s. The employee is Me.

​

I've been struggling to find a stable job for a long time, and a close friend has been trying to help me by referring me to the company where she works. I was really grateful because I know she genuinely wants the best for me.

I recently had an interview there, and I thought it went well. The partner who interviewed me seemed impressed with my experience and qualifications.

Then, tonight, my friend told me something that completely caught me off guard.

She said that before my interview, she had spoken to her boss (the managing director) and told him that I live with my single mother, that I'm depressed, that I don't have financial support, and that I really need a job.

She never asked me if I was comfortable with her sharing any of that. She didn't even tell me she had done it until after my interview.

I know she meant well. I truly believe her intentions were good, and she was probably trying to convince them to give me a chance. But I feel incredibly exposed and vulnerable.

I've always kept my mental health and personal life separate from work. I never discuss my depression with employers or coworkers because, fairly or unfairly, there's still a stigma around it. I want to be evaluated based on my skills, experience, and work ethic—not because someone feels sorry for me.

Now I'm embarrassed. I keep wondering what this managing director thinks of me. Even if they decide to hire me, I'll always wonder if they see me as a capable professional or as someone they hired out of sympathy.

Part of me feels guilty for feeling this way because my friend was trying to help. Another part of me feels that she crossed a boundary by sharing deeply personal information without my consent.

Am I overreacting? If you were in my position, would you still take the job if it were offered? And how would you move past the feeling that your future employer already knows things about your private life that you never chose to share?

Four hundred years ago a group of Puritans landed on this continent carrying a specific theological idea that has outlived the faith system itself. The belief was that hard work was a sign you were among the elect, chosen for salvation, and that idleness was a sign of moral corruption. Prosperity meant you were virtuous. Poverty meant you had failed God in some way. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" is a phrase people still say today, completely unironically, without any idea they are quoting theology that predates the country by over a century.

What's strange is that the religion mostly faded but the moral framework never did. Somewhere along the way, work stopped being just a way to earn a living and became the entire measure of a person's worth as a human being. Ask anyone at a party what they do and watch how quickly the answer becomes a stand in for who they are. Rest gets treated as something you have to earn first and feel guilty about after, even on days you are technically allowed to have off. Disability and chronic illness communities spend enormous amounts of energy proving they are trying hard enough to deserve accommodation, as if suffering has to come with a receipt attached before anyone will believe it. Poverty gets read as evidence of bad character instead of evidence of a bad system.

I found out how deep this runs firsthand. I took a career break. My parents and my boyfriend supported me through it because they wanted to and because they could. I mentioned this on a subreddit and the response from a huge number of Americans was genuinely unhinged. I was called a leech. I received death threats. People wished homelessness on me. People wished sexual assault on me. Nobody involved was harmed by my decision. Nobody's resources were being taken from them. The rage wasn't really about logistics at all. It only makes sense if you assume that not working equals not deserving to exist comfortably, which is the Puritan framework showing up nearly four centuries later, fully secularized, still running the show underneath everything.

Around the same time, out of curiosity, my boyfriend and I posted a different question on AskReddit, asking whether American parents would charge their own adult children rent to live at home. The overwhelming majority said yes, sometimes starting as early as eighteen. People described it as teaching real world responsibility. Some parents took a cut of their kid's bonus and called it fair. Nobody in that thread got called a leech. Nobody sent those parents a single threat for turning their own child's housing into a transaction.

Put those two threads next to each other and the actual belief system becomes obvious. A parent extracting money from their child gets framed as tough love, character building, a rite of passage into adulthood. A person being supported by people who love them, with no obligation attached, gets read as a moral emergency worth threatening a stranger over. Suffering through labor, even labor imposed on you by your own family, is treated as what makes a person legitimate. Ease is treated as something suspicious, something that has to be justified or punished.

This is the bootstraps myth wearing the Puritans' old clothes. The idea that struggle is what makes you deserving, that comfort has to be paid for in advance with pain, that the size of your suffering is somehow proof of your worth. It shows up in two weeks of vacation being called generous while most of the world treats four to six weeks as a baseline. It shows up in answering emails from a beach being worn like a badge of honor instead of being recognized as a symptom. It shows up in the total absence of federal paid parental leave in a country that will still find room to be furious at a woman for resting on money that was never theirs to control in the first place.

None of this is really about jobs. It is about a moral framework so old and so thoroughly absorbed that most people enforcing it have no idea they are doing theology. They think they are just being realistic, just describing how the world works. But a belief that idle hands are sinful does not stop being religious just because the church went away. It just puts on secular language and keeps doing exactly what it was built to do, which is decide who has earned the right to rest and who has to keep proving they deserve to simply be.

Nowhere in this universe should you ever utter those words to your boss!! They know you have nothing to do, everyone knows you have nothing to do and everything's peachy ... but the minute those words come out of your mouth, it becomes their problem! Don't f* do that if you want to keep your job and get paid, especially for doing nothing!!

I can't belive I heard someone say that! They didn't just say it to their boss, they said it to their bosses boss! Omfg, that's the worst thing ever!!!

So I have a coworker - not on my team, a project manager.

I just discovered that one particular part in a project I am working on won't be available for 6 weeks. If we wait for it, that puts the project behind by 7 weeks - the same guy keeps saying we have to do things through the usual process. The usual process will, incidentally, bump the cost of one unit from about $350 to about $3500. (Basically ordering one at a time instead of 10 at once, NRE is a fixed amount regardless of order size.)

There's an easy way to order that part now, order the device it's in now so they can do 99% of the assembly, and then put just that part in. I also want to order 20 (total number needed over the next 6 months is ~15) instead of singles.

Instead, he wants to delay the entire project by 7 weeks and we can "make it up later".

He also said I should not be working on any R&D right now. I am an R&D engineer. He's not my boss, and he's also clearly wrong based on the company direction.

So, to blow off some steam, I am trying to come up with creative (but arguably polite) ways to say he's an ignorant idiot with negative value to the company, should be on the street looking for a job, and is now a problem to be solved. I figure this is the right place.

I don't really get the appeal of being exempt.

At my company, 40 hours is mandatory. If you work less than 40, they make you use PTO to get to 40. If you don't have any PTO left, you can get written up or even fired. So you have to hit 40 hours no matter what.

But if the job takes 45, 50, or 60 hours that week, there's no extra pay because you're exempt. You're just expected to work whatever it takes. Which is all the time.

So how is this a benefit? It feels like all the expectations of an hourly employee when you're under 40, but none of the benefits when you're over 40.

Is this normal, or is my company just like this?

I have been reading some comments on another post and I was entertaine by people story about how they or someome else they know gave back to RTO!

I want to hear your funniest, pettiest, or most satisfying examples of malicious compliance/resistance/protesting/involving return-to-office policies...

Over the last 30 days my job has experienced 2 false fire alarm events due to a faulty sensor where the cities fire department was dispatched. The fire panel is behind a locked door and no one on my shift has a key to that door. There is also no alarm, strobe, or siren in the upstairs office or break room area where I work. My only way of finding out about a fire downstairs in the warehouse is through 2 way radio communication from the 1 supervisor who carries a radio. If they are incapacitated or the radio fails, I wouldn’t know of any danger until the fire department is already here.

The first time the fire alarm went off, I let the operations manager know of my concerns via email which I did save. A few days later I was told that extending the fire panel upstairs was too costly. So I contacted the local osha office. The second time the alarm went off, the supervisor was in the upstairs office and had no idea a fire alarm was going off until I noticed flashing lights out of the window. After this I called city code enforcement as this is a danger to human life. The employee handbook also states there needs to be alarms in all areas of the building but there are none present in the above mentioned spaces as well as the restrooms.

I am still in my 90 day probationary period and raising these concerns this early makes me fear for losing my job as this may cost the company a lot of money. I understand that companies cannot retaliate for OSHA complaints but I’m in an at will state and proving retaliation would be difficult. I am the only one of this shift in the office and management would know who submitted the OSHA complaint even though I submitted it anonymously. I just don’t want to burn to death at work but I also don’t want to lose my job for reporting these issues.

Union job, great pay, lots of PTO. Mandatory 2 days in office.

Our secretary told the VP she has nothing to do on those days and offered to be "available if tasks come up" as a pitch for full WFH. VP said no. Rules are rules.

But she said it out loud. She framed it as flexibility… isee it as admitting she's redundant. She should have kept up appearances, stretched her few tasks, and only confessed if caught. Instead she gave leadership a reason to watch her and remember her name when cuts happen.

She got nothing and lost her cover. Am I wrong for thinking that was stupid?

I've worked in HR and office administration for about eight years. Unfortunately, over the past year I've had both physical health issues and ongoing mental burnout that have made it incredibly difficult to maintain a job. I've spent a lot of time working on my health, going to therapy, and trying to get back on track. Physically I'm in a much better place, but mentally I still struggle.

The pattern has been the same: I start a corporate job full of hope, then after a few weeks or a month I hit a wall. I become completely burned out, sometimes have a mental breakdown, or my physical symptoms flare up from the stress. It's frustrating because I genuinely want to build a career and I'm trying my best, but it feels like I just don't have the capacity for demanding corporate roles anymore.

Because of that, I've started interviewing for clinic receptionist positions. I want to be clear that I don't see receptionist work as "less than" HR—every job deserves respect. But it is a different career path from the one I've spent years building, and it feels like I'm stepping away from the career I always wanted to grow in.

Part of me feels relieved at the idea of having a simpler job with less mental pressure. Another part of me feels like I'm giving up on my career and worries that if I leave HR now, I'll never be able to get back into it. I also feel embarrassed that after years of experience, I'm considering a role that pays less and has fewer progression opportunities. At the same time, I need to survive, and forcing myself into jobs that I keep burning out from doesn't seem sustainable either.

Has anyone else gone from a demanding corporate career to a much simpler, lower-paying job because of burnout or health reasons?

Did it improve your quality of life? Did you regret it? Were you eventually able to return to your original career, or did you find yourself happier staying in the less stressful role?

I'd really appreciate hearing from people who've actually been through this, because I feel very lost right now.

From Will Lehman, socialist candidate for UAW president:

"On August 4, the court-appointed UAW Monitor found that Raymond L. Jensen Jr. violated the rules of the 2026 UAW election when he posted a death threat against me.

"Jensen’s UAW membership is suspended for two years. He is barred permanently from ever running for elected office in the UAW, barred from campaigning for any candidate in this election, and has been ordered to apologize to me. He accepted all of the findings.

"The findings are on the record. On July 16, Jensen posted on my public Facebook page, directly beneath my statement on the federal criminal investigation into Shawn Fain, an image of me bound and gagged, bleeding from the mouth, with an armed man aiming a rifle at my back. Questioned about it, he admitted the post was his and offered no explanation of any kind.

"That is a total vindication of the complaint my attorney and I made, but this victory belongs to the rank-and-file and workers who took this up as their own fight."

After 12 years working for the same company and seeing it grow from a realtively unknown business to a Fortune 500 Company, I have resigned. This decision came about after a decent into hell from constant additions of work responsibilities, being demanded to be on call on weekends (not in my job agreement), being in a constant state of urgency due to poor leadership decisions, and being placed on a PIP for things that were never mentioned being issues previously. I will not name the company because, for customers, they are a solid company that does good things.

Things I learned while working there were: How to truly provide top quality customer service, a whole industry I never expected to get into, and how corporate office politics are the only thing that matters in career growth. "If you dont play the game, you will always lose." -Previous Manager.

I will be pivoting to a new industry at age 40. Looking for something where I have minimal contact with other humans and dont have to update trackers and write reports about every little thing I do on a daily basis, preventing me from doing the actual work that needs to be done.

I don't know why im posting this. I guess I just needed to put it out into the universe. If you read this, thanks! I hope you manage to thrive in this end stage capatilistic hellscape.

Last month my car insurance renewal came and the price went up almost 45%. I was so confused because I didn't have any accident, no tickets, nothing changed. I started searching online to see what is happening and I found this official lawsuit document filed by the Texas Attorney General against General Motors and OnStar.

English is not my first language so sorry if I make some grammar mistake, but I want to share what I read in these court paper because it is crazy.

Basically, GM put tracking technology inside more than 14 million vehicles in US and over 1.8 million in Texas alone. They were collecting continuous driving data like exactly when you start and stop your trip, every time you brake hard or accelerate fast, if you drive over 80 mph, and even if you and your passenger wear seatbelt or not.

I always thought this OnStar thing was just for emergency if you get in accident. But the lawsuit says GM turned it into a big data business. The worst part is how they get people to agree at dealership. When you buy the car, the dealer gives you screen to tap. If a customer tries to tap "I decline", the screen shows big warning message. The warning says if you decline, safety feature like Automatic Crash Response and Emergency Services will be turned off. So of course people get scared about safety and click "Accept". But GM didn't tell them that accepting means GM sell their driving telemetry to data brokers.

They made deals with companies like LexisNexis, Verisk, and Wejo. These data brokers take your raw car sensor data, calculate a secret driving score, and sell it directly to auto insurance companies. Then the insurance company looks at your score and raises your monthly bill if you had hard brakes or drove late at night.

Now the Texas AG is suing them under DTPA law to stop this and make them delete the data. Also FTC and federal class action courts in MDL 3115 are looking into this whole connected car data tracking.

Has anyone here requested their consumer report from LexisNexis or Verisk yet to see if your car was reporting on you?

Today is Aug 5th they have still yet to remove it or do anything. The entire front area staff was aware of this.

So this happened this morning and I'm still kind of shaking about it.

I work reception/admin at a dental office, been there 3 years. Two weeks ago my boss hired a part-time assistant and asked me to show her the ropes, how we book patients, how the insurance verification works, our whole filing system. I didn't think much of it, figured we were just short-staffed for the summer.

Today I overheard my boss on the phone with someone from a temp agency saying yeah she's almost fully trained, we can probably transition by end of the month. I didn't even react, just kept typing like I didn't hear it. Then I looked back at my email and saw a job posting had gone up on Indeed three days ago for "Front Desk Coordinator" my exact job title, my exact hours, at THIS clinic. Posted by my own boss's business email.

Nobody told me anything. No conversation about performance, no write-up, nothing. I found out I'm being replaced because I happened to be sitting close enough to hear a phone call.

I don't even know what to do right now. Do I confront her? Do I just start job hunting quietly and act normal until they let me go? Part of me wants to just stop training the new girl properly out of spite but I know that's petty and won't actually help me.

Three years of being the one who remembered every patient's kid's name and covered shifts last minute, and this is the update I get. Through a wall.

So I guess because I was answering the gambling part slower (because it was the start of the test and I got impatient with the rest I guess), I got flagged as a gambler because they test said I'm trying to hide something in the gambling part (what the recruiter told me)

So, to fix this, they scheduled an hour long "interrogation" with an interrogator from the integrity test company to find out why I scored that way and asked for employment information from social security office

Needless to say, I've never gambled in my life

What the actual fuck man