He's gotten a handful of interviews (maybe a dozen, which over that time period doesn't seem like very many to me but I don't have enough job hunting experience to say). Ive generally asked him about them the day of, he's usually thought they've gone well (the places that have actually interviewed him have usually been fast food type places, and have usually asked him more about availability than much else from what he's told me), and often they've told him some variation of "we should give you a call with our decision within a week", after which all but one has never actually done so. I've not tried giving him a mock interview (I've been lucky enough to get hired by the first place to interview me both times I've been job hunting myself, so I have very little notion of what exactly to ask to simulate such a thing), most of my assistance to him has either been trying to find places he hasn't applied yet, helping him make his resume, and relaying advice from an aunt of mine with a lot more general life experience. I've also tried recommending him to my workplace's HR a couple times when they've had entry level positions open but he's never heard anything from applications there either. As far as seasonal work goes, I don't know if he's applied to any tourist stuff or not, I've not seen very many such jobs listed when I've looked around job postings but I might not be looking in the right place. He has tried applying for temporary landscaping positions a few times without any luck though.

The problem I have with that, is that to know how long someone is looking at me, I need to both see when they start looking at me and when they stop doing so, and that inherently implies that I'm looking at them for longer than they look at me, unless I intentionally look away when they start looking back to balance the time out, but then I feel like that looks suspicious, like I've been staring and don't want them to know.

It also requires realizing I've been looking at someone, which can be a problem if I stare off in some direction while distracted thinking about something, not really paying much attention to the visual stimulus I'm getting, only to realize a bit later that there's a person in whatever direction I've had my eyes and now I look like I've been staring at them for however long.

ah, well, designing a different system is a whole different problem to gaining the influence and political will to implement it once designed. And probably a harder one, seeing as it requires finding a way to convince a lot of other people to use what levers of power they have to push your idea, and changing peoples minds requires more than just thinking through an idea of what could be. (edit: I mean the latter as the harder one, Im realizing that I didnt exactly write it in a way that implies what I intended to mean)

It isnt actually liberalism I dont think, because to implement what I just mentioned, you would at the very least need to seize a lot of what it currently considered to be private property (that stock and business ownership), and distribute it in a way that the person possessing it does not have the ability to freely buy and sell it (else people would just sell it off for one reason or another and ownership would quickly consolidate again). Liberalism, as I understand it, has an emphasis on personal property rights that would find such a policy and later restriction on business ownership objectionable.

I have never personally worked in a worker co-op or employee owned corporation to give an anecdote about how they feel day to day, but I do know that they exist.

It's a matter of scale I think, I don't think I would consider a blacksmith having a handful of apprentices to be capitalism, especially considering the implication of an apprenticeship meaning that those guys will eventually become blacksmiths themselves. Maybe if he owned a whole bunch of blacksmiths shops and the associated tools and just paid the actual smiths a certain amount to use them, but if a small shop like that is capitalism, then every economic system from the dawn of trade to now is capitalism, and that isn't how I generally see people use the term.

When did bidets become politicized, that's a new one for me

There's a difference between capitalism and just having markets and money, to be fair.

Honestly I don't think you actually can have socialism that isn't a functioning democracy. Ownership implies power over something, and a government by its nature must have power over the things within it's borders. If society at large, ie the people, don't control the government, then regardless of who owns things on paper, whatever smaller group of people actually control the government effectively own whatever is in that country, and therefore their effect is fundamentally similar to the effect that a wealthy capitalist class has in a capitalist society. Anything where the people aren't actually in charge that calls itself socialist, is just using the terminology and aesthetics to gain support without actually setting up the socialized ownership structure that the name implies.

While I don't think this scenario likely, something that I can't help but thinking when this sort of statement comes up is, well, how do we know what it's doing isn't thinking? Like, I get that it's ultimately just using a bunch of statistics to predict the next word or token or whatever, but my understanding was that we have fairly limited knowledge of how our own consciousness and thinking works, and so I keep getting the nagging feeling of "what if what our brains are doing is similar somehow, using a physical system with statistical effects to predict stuff about the world, and that's what thinking ultimately is?"

While I expect that it probably isn't and that creating proper agi will require something fundamentally more complicated than what we've been doing with these language models and such, the fact that I can't prove that to my own satisfaction makes me very uneasy about them, considering what the ethical ramifications of being wrong about it might be.

Is this particular image recent? I feel like I remember something like this around covid lockdown, as a "park the wifi bus in a lower income area so that students without home internet can connect to online classes" thing.

It's possible for platforms under the influence of the Chinese government and right wing American billionaires to both have harmful censorship.