There are a shocking number of people who still think Facebook is a good way for Grandma to see back-to-school photos, and either are unaware or don’t care that ceased to be central to the platform while Obama was in office. Inertia is a bitch. And so is Zuck.

Unemployment for college graduates averaged 5.3% in Q2 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Underemployment held steady at a whopping 41%.

There’s no missing decimal point there. Hope the First National Bank of Mom has generous lending terms.

Meh, all you really need is a tacky “live laugh love” font on distressed wood. From TJ Maxx.

Demand tends to drop off when people are getting paid wages that don’t allow them to afford housing, let alone niceties. The corporations did this to themselves, and now we have import taxes atop that. There’s no way out of an extremely painful recession, but I don’t see the way out of it.

I swear sometimes that at this point all we produce as a country is ads. People in marketing mock their customers (source: was in marketing to make better wages than journalism for less than a year) and think they’re doing the lord’s work because of their salaries.

Use magnets like a decent human.

The committee wants to know why these platforms aren’t radicalizing people enough.

I’ve used ChatGPT for work, just asking it to paraphrase original sources so I’m blinded from the original wording ahead of doing my rewrite. One paragraph at a time, it works great (I check against the source); feed it a full story at once, and holy shit, do you not have anything reliable – my favourite has to be that the Manhattan Project was created for Three Mile Island. At that point, you’re spending more time checking and verifying than you saved by using it in the first place.

But I’ve never seen it generate so much as half a page before it writes something that requires editing.

Most human writers require editing well before five column inches. Not trying to give a pass to LLMs, but humans don’t produce perfect output, either.

And there’s an old saw: “Everyone needs an editor … especially editors.” That’s why creative work is collaborative.

Not to be flippant, but as a copy editor and page designer for most of my career, we already went through this a decade ago without AI because we were deemed “doesn’t generate content.”

And frankly, I hate the term “content.” We were committing journalism, not posting to OnlyFans (at least, none of the people I worked with).

But my point is, I got all the “it can’t be that bad” and “bootstraps” bullshit that now other creatives are getting hit with. Accuracy was deemed too expensive more than 10 years ago. And trust me, editing is an art. You won’t get the same final copy and heds and layouts from two different copyeds at the same pub. It’s as much intuition as knowing the rules.

We were mocked (not necessarily by those finding themselves in the crosshairs now, but there’s a Venn diagram there that isn’t separate circles) for thinking we brought value to the table alongside the institutional gravitas.

Well, let’s see how trust in the media has gone over the past decade. Look, I’m not saying the desk disappearing is the sole cause of declining trust, as that would be absurd, but it sure as fuck didn’t help.

So, welcome to the club of “why pay you if we don’t have to?” It’s a fun ride. I was a graphic artist before things completely fell apart in print journalism and we became rectangle wranglers, a pair of hands implementing someone else’s decisions.

Y’all got an extra decade, having seen the decimation of print design and were like, “Well, that won’t happen to me.” And here we are, shocked Pikachu face and all.

First they came for …

Great. Here’s something no one asked for, presented as a breathless positive.

“I wish my video experience included concurrent ads right next to it.” – No One Ever

I fell for an email scam about 15 years ago. I was job searching and got a message about a contract editing position looking for a native English speaker, which, given that I had my resume up for just such a role, didn’t make me bat an eye. So I responded expressing interest. Long story short, it was one of those “we FedEx you excessive checks and then you keep your portion and Western Union the rest to this other person” affairs.

Of course the first check bounced, my bank account was flagged for fraud, with a balance of -$999,999, and it took weeks to be made whole (thankfully I was) while I navigated the byzantine process of “look, I got fucked; it’s as simple as that.”

It took going through that experience to be able to look for clear tells (important, as once you’ve fallen for one scam, you’re flagged as an easy mark, so more come down the pike), and I agree that most people shouldn’t be expected to be able to spot that unless they’ve gone through it.

My point is, if you actively work in security, the bar is far higher. This writer basically gave someone his PIN because his phone didn’t provide full headers, and instead of verifying on desktop, just assumed it was legit, which is an amateur-level error for an authentication professional.

Honestly, the email record eventually shared screams scam. It’s not quite fluent English, has urgency and requests the information not be shared with anyone else. That’s a pretty damning trifecta and should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.

Not sure why the jump to piracy here, but it’s consistent with your thoughts on the rest of the thread. “Won’t somebody think about the music labels that screw artists? It’s piracy ruining everything!”

Tell me you don’t know how Qbittorrent works without doing so. It’s not a streaming service. If you’re redownloading on BT each time you want to listen, my god, are you wasting disk space.

“If you don’t pay for it then you are pirating” is not a discussion, it’s an erroneous blanket statement.

My 1,700 tracks, most at 320kpbs, take up 20GB. Albums add another 4GB. My four-year-old phone has 256GB of storage. I’m not sure where this “fortune” comes from. Especially when you’re paying extra for data monthly just to stream. You’re still spending the money, just pretending it’s unrelated to music.

Being subscribed is not the same as listening. In fact, I use a Firefox add-on to specifically exclude what I’ve categorized as music. It is vanishingly rare that I turn that setting off.

I strongly associate any given track with the mood I was in when I first heard it, and I’ve not been in anywhere near a good mood since the election, so listening to new stuff at this point would give it negative connotations that would forever follow that track around in my mind.

So I stick with “college road trip” or “I just met my (ex-)wife” sorts of stuff. I don’t exercise or anything, and my earbuds are lost somewhere in my van. I rarely listen to music, period, because it reminds me of not being homeless.

Wait … people still listen to the radio?

“Here’s a shitload of ads and someone in Cincinnati choosing what hundreds of stations play.”

Almost all of my collection was pirated in college (it didn’t help that someone stole my 96 CD binder from my car). Once I was making OK money and paid downloads became a thing, I slowly rectified that. It was hard to find electronic music any other way in the '90s.