You might want to look at laser printers. If you’re just doing black and white documents, whatever the latest Brother printer is will do a good job, do it fast, and not screech at you about your cyan running out.

It’s a few hundred bucks up front, but the toner cartridges print a ton of pages and don’t dry out if you don’t use them. I can’t recommend it enough if you have even a passing desire to make hard copies of documents.

Let me start by saying first and foremost the paychecks and severance packages are beyond ridiculous. Like fucking unconscionable.

Now, that being said yes, when the CEO rightly or wrongly (typically rightly) becomes the fall guy their career is over. If they manage to get another job it probably won’t be in a leadership position, and if it is it would be with a much smaller organization that simply won’t be able to pay them the big bucks. The best a CEO can hope for after a public downfall is to be put out to pasture.

I don’t feel sad for them. While their golden parachute might represent literally the last money they will ever make it’s more than enough to live off of for the rest of their lives.

There’s an even bigger picture, though. Their personal reputation is ruined, but so is their family name. With the amount of money and prestige they were building up they may have had aspirations of positioning their kids as the elites of the future. Family money and connections could have ended up with their children some day becoming Senators and Congressmen. If they end up taking the fall, their public failure will sully their name for a couple of generations.

The kind of people that become CEOs of high-profile companies are a special breed of psycho. They’re willing to accept huge piles of money to roll the dice on their own career and the reputation of themselves, their children, and their grandchildren on the off chance they manage to avoid the chopping block until retirement.

Is it really “taking” responsibility if it’s getting pinned on you?

There’s an important thing that the CEO provides that no AI can: the acceptance of risk.

On a day-to-day basis the CEO makes decisions, ignores expert advice, knocks off early for tee time, etc. For this work they are wildly overpaid and could easily be replaced by having their responsibilities divvied up amongst a small group of people in leadership roles.

To see the true purpose of the CEO we need to look at a bigger scale - the quarter-to-quarter scale. What could be bigger than that in the world of the MBA?

Every quarter the CEO must have the company meet the financial performance expectations of the board/owner(s)/shareholders. Failure is likely to result in them losing their job and getting a reputation as an underperformer, thus ruining their career. If the company does poorly or those expectations are unreasonably high then the CEO must cut corners in the operation. This of course hampers their ability to meet expectations later, but they’ll make it through this quarter.

When (inevitably) too many corners have been cut something catastrophic will happen. Either the company’s reputation will go to shit with customers slowly, or a high-profile scandal will blow up in the company’s face.

This is the moment when the CEO provides their most valuable service: to fall (or be pushed) onto their sword. The CEO is fired, ousted, or resigns. This allows the board/owner/shareholders to get a new face in and demand that they fix the most egregious issues, or at least the most glaring ones that don’t cost too much to fix.

This service cannot be provided by an AI. Why? Because the AI is a creation of the company. If it is used as a scapegoat it solves nothing. The company is pointing at their own creation and saying “see, that’s the problem”. It’s much more effective to point at a human they didn’t make and scream that that person made a mistake.

I seem to recall a saying about pots and kettles…

Sanest Lemmy user.

And that’s an overwhelmingly good thing. The nut jobs and extremists are looking for an excuse to start shit but (as you correctly stated) lack the resolve to finish shit. They want to do a little political violence to feel enfranchised and like they have some control, but they’re not ready to give up everything for a cause. This makes them particularly dangerous.

The real bulwark against government fuckery is the people you don’t hear about: normal folks who happen to have guns. It would take actual, serious grievances against large swathes of the population to make them do something. Because that much larger (and more ideologically diverse) cohort isn’t champing at the but for a fight they haven’t lied to themselves about being able to maintain a normal life and therefore wouldn’t start one lightly. That’s pretty boring, so you only hear about the weirdos.

No, only in elementary schools.

What they’re getting confused about is that a lot of architecture firms that design prisons also design high schools because - shockingly - both of those institutions are designed around moving large numbers of people to different areas throughout the day.

My high school was designed by one of those firms and it wasn’t weird. You could see it in the little details, though. There were exactly two places in any of the hallways where you couldn’t see a clock, so nobody could say they ran late because they didn’t know what time it was. The architects just decided where they would place cameras in a prison and swapped them out for digital clocks.

Hot on the heels of this one, I’d imagine.

Patents expire. In the long run your inventions would be used for evil.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Wait until you hear about media contagion!

This shit is par for the course.

Best we can do is Elon Musk spam.

You. I like you.

This one happened to be made of lead.

Besides semi-autonomous (as the other commenter mentioned) wired control is an option for most law enforcement uses.

It’s even simpler than that. The author sets the rules of the world. If those rules change, are ignored, or characters behave in a way that disagrees with the rules the reader’s trust is betrayed.

That’s why people get a stick up their ass about plot holes. They were told things work a certain way, but characters miss an obvious opportunity or break an already established rule. Lack of effort on the author’s part makes the reader feel like their time hasn’t been respected.

My favorite turkey recipe is really easy:

A gallon of menstrual blood;

10 long fingernails and a handful of human hair;

Super spicy soba noodles;

A little bottle of gasoline;

A trader’s pack of heroin.

First, you eat all soba because you’d need energy to run fast. Then you enter your neighbors house where you put fingernails and hair on fire using gasoline and watch it slowly burn making the place smell like a crematory. I don’t know where to put menstrual blood here so just make sure to spray it onto everything white like bed linen, curtains, ceiling. And don’t forget to put heroin somewhere stupid cops gonna find it. After everything is ready and consumed, run for your life, kid.

Because Californians love writing laws as a knee jerk reaction to the crime de jour.

Some pearl-clutching local will go to their state legislature and demand that WiFi jamming be banned despite the fact that the FCC is all over that shit. They keep passing redundant gun control laws in the same way for the same reasons.

I’m guessing it’s the department of redundancy department, is my guess.