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An elephant in the room in the movement to steer America away from universal college is this: We're bringing back an underclass of not only uneducated. They also lack the socioeconomic markers of having the four-year "college experience." Those include free-form playing with ideas, delayed adulthood of long vacations, freedom to travel and ease of developing close friendships.  When almost-everyone-went-to-college those without who didn't have been doomed to be outliers. Also, they usually gave themselves away through communications patterns, everything from voicing an opinion without evidence to back it up to errors in grammars/limited vocabulary.  More to the point, before almost-everyone-went-to-college most of society consisted of an underclass. Only the elite, that is the offspring of the then-middle class and better, had access to the college experience. Then, of course, the GI bill changed that.  For multiple reasons higher education has already experienced a 1...

  Back in 2022, Google fired engineer Blake Lemoine. That was because of this: Lemoine went public with his hunch that LaMDA, the tech corporation's AI chatbot generator, was "sentient," that is, self-aware. Now, Lemoine types would be on specialized teams at, yes, Google, as well as Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and more. They are  investigating AI consciousness.   "Consciousness" is often defined as a form of subjectivity, the capacity for awareness of experience such as perception, reflection about that and then connecting the dots about a response. Bots' social network Moltbook displays the ability to organize, form religions and other intentional behavior. For centuries artists have focused on that phenomenon. Victorian novelist Virginia Woolf made her life's work exploring that realm. An example is "Mrs. Dalloway." Of course, this is a significant issue for ethics experts and humanitarians. It involves the "welfare" of AI agents. Ho...

  Dow Jones Industrial Average Index Index: DJI Compare 52,178.54 USD ▲ +302.43 (+0.58%) today

The auto industry created the middle class in America. Not only did ordinary factory workers get to buy their own homes in the urban Midwest. Many purchased getaway cottages "up north."  That dates back to Henry Ford. His Model-T, which rolled out in 1908, did two things, at least. It created a large number of production jobs. And since the pay was $5 daily for eight hours, the labor force went beyond survival to being the new consumer class. Now, like other sectors such as much of professional services and tech, the auto industry is slated to shrink. CNBC  details how by 2040 auto sales could decline by 2 million units. What's driving that, found Bain and Company, includes:  "Falling birth rates, behavioral changes, high car prices and a growing array of alternatives ..." Of course, already we're seeing signs of that.  Actually since the dawn of the digital age, fewer kids were getting their driving licenses or putting that off for years. They preferred vi...

  Timing is almost everything. And, as a former communications pro, I assess that law firm Paul, Weiss has decided the timing is right to again be telling its story.  After the perfect storm of multiple controversies, Paul, Weiss went low profile. That's a fundamental of crisis communications management.  Then came the James Sprayregen development. A mega star in bankruptcy at Kirkland & Ellis - a major Paul, Weiss competitor - he retired in 2024 and went on to Hilco Global.  The media story was positioned and packaged to have legs. First was the announcement that Paul, Weiss and the dazzling twinkler were talking. Then, yesyesyes, the deal was done.  Immediately that's been leveraged. Financial Times publishes an interview with Sprayregen. Re-opening is the law-firm's willingness to be a story. This move resonates in Big Law. Way back in 2021, celebrity lawyer at Paul, Wess Brad Karp told Bloomberg Law  that the sector operates on star power.  Ma...

  For Boomers and Gens X,Y the "it's always something" more and more is about housing. About a third of us are "housing cost burdened," that is, we're paying out more than one-third of our income for shelter.  No one really gets off the hook, at least not for long.  Thought it was smart to hold on to your low-mortgage house? Yeah, now it's time to put on a new roof and cough up the increasing insurance. Figured you were mighty clever to relocate from HCOL (high cost of living) area to a LCOL (low cost of living) one. I did that and the corporate owners kept raising the rent plenty at lease-renewal times. Low cost was no longer low cost. Maybe as a public service The New York Times  has published a very long-form article on home-sharing. Essentially that means renting space, sometimes also adding services such as lawn mowing, in someone else's house. An industry is sprouting up providing a matching service. But even the enthusiastic coverage of this ...