Assistant Professor Sociology, Morgan State University, @morganstatesoc. Intellectual, sociologist, political economist. From US, UK, Austria, China, India.
Workers such as secretaries, registered nurses, police officers, and firefighters have become more likely to hold college degrees.
That’s in part due to a strange legal regime which privileges college degree requirements in hiring. But a new DOJ opinion could change that.
"...This “is not about employing fewer people,” she said. “It’s about all of the people who are here being able to do their best human work and taking the stuff that can be automated off their plates."
U.S. in the picture it will fortunately be less economically disruptive and militarily dramatic than what we had experienced this year. Given the escalation of geopolitical crises all over the world, this is a rare silver lining.
As the U.S. retreats from the Middle East to lick its wounds, the Israelis that have become quite unpopular globally will have to learn how to coexist with the Iranian regime. More realistically, the war in the Middle East will continue as a low-burning fire, but without the ...
an underdiscussed aspect of modern capitalism is that most low-wage jobs tightly regulate what you're doing at all times while you're on the clock and most high-wage jobs consist of hours of unstructured time in front of the computer during which you can do whatever
"AI is likely to produce neither a job apocalypse nor productivity utopia, but something harder to measure: a quiet degradation of the quality of the jobs that remain," per Bloomberg
Americans can't find jobs.
The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.
These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.
This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.
Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.
As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.
By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.
Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.
Indians are being paid to train robots to perform human work
They film their daily household tasks — cooking, cleaning, kitchen routines.
The pay is low — around $2–3 per hour — but there is one condition: everything must be recorded in first-person view.
These recordings are used as training data so AI systems can better recognize and replicate human movements.
🎥 DW
🇮🇳 The Indian workers training AI robots to take their jobs
With a smartphone strapped to her head, Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra films herself performing everyday chores to train AI-powered humanoid robots to take on household jobs in the future.
The Caucasus remains a geopolitical flash point, where the pro-Russian and pro-western forces are battling for dominance but where the pro-western ones are holding the better cards for now. https://t.co/VFpuE9sBCw
Really interesting new charts measuring (lack of) progress on material footprint decoupling. The authors argue that green growth isn’t working (at least not globally, and not fast enough). Link in next tweet.