Right. Except you can't influence the Chinese government. Whereas you can, if you are American, influence the American government (through elections, say). And the American government can, in turn, possibly influence the tech companies. And they do. See: the antitrust enforcement in the Biden administration.

As an American, I can't say I'd be terribly enthused about using a YouTube competitor based in a foreign country. And China is quite foreign to us as far as countries go. And I use YouTube constantly.

Reading Rainbow was on from 1983 to 2006. 21 seasons. I had no idea.

Space exploration enthusiast / youtuber Scott Manley appears in compilation 7.

but you’d have to actually… look it up and leave your house to do any of this.

That's the problem. The sort of person we're talking about isn't going to do this. What's needed is an army of people incessantly knocking on doors offering to help.

There should be a government program to handle situations like this if there aren't. Take an assessment of their current skills and interests and get them into employment and/or training for something that fits. You basically need to intervene when the parents won't and do it in a way that's as least stressful for the person as possible. It would pay off in the end because otherwise this person may end up on government assistance later when they most need it. Politicians who can pull this off may get to claim to have reduced unemployment in their reelection campaign. And it's just a good thing to do. Some people won't take the initiative. You have to do it for them and hold their hand.

Edit: As far as I can tell, the closest thing to this in the US is the one-stop centers. Each state has their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_employment_service

archived myspace music

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things

At some point (maybe we've reached it), I fully expect that many of the top-ranked websites by Google will be AI-generated themselves. There's a cottage industry (and has been a very long time) of websites engineered in such a way to game the algorithm. They target specific queries and load up the pages with ads and links to product pages on amazon which generate a kickback for the website. Google used to turn up pages written by passionate people, using the web of hyperlinks people created out of good will as a proxy for relevancy to a query. But when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Google Search was so good that everyone started to use it for everything and then we got the cottage industry wanting to generate money from people just seeking information. Vague queries like "best dog food" or "how often to water plants" or "tortilla recipe" are not likely to turn up anything except crap and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophesy. A top-ranked website for a popular query will bring so much traffic so as to overwhelm any site except the ones generating some money per page view. A site which doesn't do that goes offline and then is deranked by google. And the sorts of people who stoop to the level of putting ads and trackers on their site and aggressively SEO'ing their way to the top are not likely to care about providing you with the highest quality information. It goes the other way too; a passionate hobbyist does not want their website to be top-ranked as the traffic would bring the server or its costs to its knees. Neither do those old-school web forums who don't want hundreds of noobs coming in and ruining their fun time. I'd consider the possibility that google is ranking pages partly based on whether the site can tolerate and would welcome the load. A metric like that is almost certain to rank up the bad, ad-riddled sites. Google may have no choice in the matter. When a random person wants to know why their refrigerator smells bad, the only other person willing to spend their own resources answering their dumb question will be evil as fuck.

It was poor English literature grads writing those pages only because those were the only people who could write well. Now a computer can do that job. Take a guess where it's going to go. The people running these sites and prompting the AI will be the poorest people in the world with internet access, where the money from the kickbacks goes a lot further than it does in the West. The internet has no borders. You'll be getting information from an AI prompted by Raj in India, claiming to be Dave from NYC.

According to a 2026 Kearney's PERLab analysis, the shortage is expected to last at least until 2030.

Lord, have mercy.

Further reading

I also liked this 1997 radio show episode.

It's something like decision fatigue. You're constantly having to criticize every word because you know it will make stuff up out of whole cloth. Reading something you've verified to have come from a trusted expert or even just a human being is far less stressful.