Confirmed. As someone who has led customer operations at large companies, the scale of chatbots to address a userbase is absurd. Companies are more than willing to take the hit to their reputation and customer goodwill in exchange for not needing to hire as much staff, train them, manage their schedules or deal with benefits and performance reviews. Cutting all that cost is an instaboner to execs and a nightmare to support managers who actually care about quality.

The amount of $700 judgements that Air Canada would need to be hit with to make replacing humans with chatbots a losing proposition is too high. It’ll never happen.

Sadly, in my decade of experience, I’ve yet to see any bots able to reliably handle much beyond ‘where’s my order?’.

If you come in with the baseline that none of them tell the truth, it’s a lot easier to figure out who is lying.

If only there was one person in government that could direct the rest of government to affect positive change in our blighted hellscape of a telecom industry…

Yes.

One crisis at a time PLEASE. Affordable EVs first, THEN flying cars.

I saw used 2013 Honda Fits going for 17k in BC last week. Is that mirage still available??

Fewer electronics to replace doesn’t matter if we have no right to third party repairs. many EVs are locked down, so they have you over a barrel on replacement part pricing.

We’re in the market for our first car and I feel this. First manufacturer to make a car without all this touchscreen bullshit and actual button based controls will make bank.

I just want a car, not an HP printer on fucking wheels.

“Wasted precious staff time?” If only ABC had a plan on how they expect to solve a housing crisis without checks notes having city staff work on the problem…

We can’t even get ICEs under 10k these days, it’s wildly unthinkable to expect we’d manage it with EVs.

As for everything costing more, this is capitalism, every business out there is trying to extract every dollar they can from consumers. Until and unless a paradigm shift happens (ex: we stop trusting the private sector to solve issues, like housing for instance) we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting.

Cory Doctorow, is that you?

Yeah in 2015…aged like milk.

I’d generally agree, but unfortunately, we work in very specialized fields. The options in Canada for this work are Toronto or Vancouver. Otherwise its the USA and visas are a pain. We did that for a few years and while cheaper, that’s a big fucking nope now.

If not for landlords who would you rent from?

I wouldn’t be renting. Landlords solely exist to make profit, not to serve anyone.

The average house price in the 80s was 3x the typical family’s annual income. Yes, 21% was high but had much smaller principals comapred to the 5%+ we have now when homes are at least 7x the typical family income.

Even worse in CCOL (Crazy Cost of Living) areas like Toronto or Vancouver. Vancouver needs a family income of over 225k to qualify for a mortgage on the average house price. This average house is not a dream home, you’re lucky if it’s 1200 SQ feet and in a safe neighborhood. Or within a 75 minute drive to work. Don’t even get me started on trying to buy a car today either.

I think what we need to do is not compare how fucked it was then, I don’t disagree that it was.

However it’s clearly fucked now and nobody’s doing anything to unfuck it.

An asteroid in the outer solar system. If we vote hard enough to have it win in our broken FPTP system. it’ll alter course and end this horrible timeline.

New to fediverse, so bear with me if this is dumb to the rest of y’all.

How does this work? I’m seeing this post all across my feed using (Sync) because it’s been created across many instances. Is this a feature of the federated model or is this someone making a feature request and spamming it across instances for views. Any way to identify and dedupe posts across instances?

I’m in the 35-59 year old bracket and desperately want home prices to drop. I’ve done everything our parent’s generation said to do to succeed and the goalposts move faster than I can make money.

When two adults making low six figures can’t qualify for an average home, something is deeply deeply broken in this country.

The shitty part is there’s no one in government who gives half a shit about it to actually do something.

New Vancouverite here, previously from Montreal. The answer is that it’s fucked. 1bdrm hitting 3k a month and 2bdrm is about 3800. I can’t imagine how service works are surviving. Min wage is 16.75/hr but living wages are mathed out to about 25/hr and even that would be hard.

Salaries seem to be generally lower since it’s beautiful and has mild winters. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay if things don’t get better soon. Sadly local politics are NIMBY friendly and not doing anything useful. In fact they just reduced the vacant home tax…because people weren’t reporting it on their taxes voluntarily.

It’s too bad because we found dream jobs in specialized fields here, the only other real option is Toronto (ugh, no) or the US (hard no).

No they won’t. They’ll just pay for delivery and carry on.