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America May Soon Be Facing Largest Labor Shortage in Its History

America "is facing what's projected to become the largest labor shortage in its history," according to experts interviewed by the Washington Post:



Economists warn that the worsening labor problem, due in part to a skills shortage and population shifts, will be vast and reach beyond tech. It "could hobble the American economy for years to come," predicts the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Lightcast, a labor market data company, calls it "the largest labor shortage the country has ever seen." JPMorgan Chase warns of a national security risk from "a pervasive talent deficit that constrains the nation's capacity to build, compete, and protect its interests." There will be shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics — jobs AI generally can't do...

Among the trends that have been leading to this moment: a mismatch between the careers college graduates are pursuing and the jobs employers are struggling to fill. Far fewer students are majoring in health care fields than are needed to meet demand, for instance. "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" when what's really in demand are graduates in other fields, [said Ron Hetrick, Lightcast's principal economist]. "It's like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, 'We really don't need them.' And the factory just keeps pumping them out." But the principal reason for the looming workforce shortages is much more basic. A protracted decline in birth rates is coinciding with a record wave of retirements, data shows.

From 2024 to 2032, when the last baby boomers sign up for Social Security payments, more than 18 million college-educated workers will leave the labor force while fewer than 14 million enter it, according to the Georgetown center. Meanwhile, even as the number of people with associate and bachelor's degrees falls, the number of jobs requiring them will grow, the center forecasts. That will leave a gap of 4.6 million workers. Lightcast puts the deficit at an even higher 6 million... The effect of population shifts on the supply of talent, with or without degrees, has been compounded by a drop in the proportion of high school graduates choosing to go to college, a sharply reduced rate of immigration, and a growing number of Americans leaving the workforce altogether because of such issues as lack of child care, early retirement, incarceration and substance addiction, according to the Chamber of Commerce.


Three interesting statistics from the article:

U.S. college/university enrollment in 2023 was down by nearly 2 million students since its peak in 2010, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Education Department.
America's low birth rate since 2010 "means the number of college-age Americans is forecast to decline by another 13 percent through 2041."
South Dakota has just 41 workers for every 100 open jobs... while California and nine other states have more workers than jobs, the Chamber of Commerce found.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Reportedly Agreed to Intel Chips To Avoid White House Tariffs

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Apple agreed to use Intel's U.S. chipmaking plants after White House officials pressured Tim Cook during tariff-relief talks last summer. MacRumors reports: In August 2025, Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Washington to lobby the Trump administration to drop its proposed 100 percent tariff on semiconductor imports -- a levy that would have raised costs across Apple's product line. Apple reportedly secured an exemption after pledging to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S., although many of those investments were already planned. During the meetings, president Trump and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick are said to have urged Cook to use Intel's fabrication plants to make some of Apple's chips. The link between the tariff talks and the Apple-Intel deal had not been previously reported.

Almost a year later, Trump announced via his Truth Social platform that Apple would begin using Intel-made chips in some products. "We need to design and build our Chips right here in America," the president posted. The news sent Intel shares to record highs. According to a person familiar with the negotiations cited by the WSJ, Apple plans to have Intel make chips for both Mac laptops and iPhones. The report doesn't say which chips or in what volume, and Apple is expected to remain reliant on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, for the majority of its custom silicon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloudflare Precursor Watches Your Mouse and Keyboard To Decide If You Are Human

BrianFagioli writes: Cloudflare has launched Precursor, a new behavioral bot detection system that monitors mouse movement, typing cadence, scrolling, clipboard activity, page visibility, and other signals across an entire browsing session. The system is designed to catch advanced bots that can run JavaScript, use real browsers, and pass traditional CAPTCHA challenges. Cloudflare says Precursor does not record actual keystrokes and instead studies timing and rhythm. The company also says the data is not tied to user identities or persistent profiles. Even so, software that watches how people move and type throughout a visit raises privacy concerns, especially as Cloudflare claims bots now generate roughly 57 percent of all Internet requests.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting On Social Media

A new Incogni survey suggests Americans are pulling back from social media, with more than half saying "maintaining an online presence feels like work" and 55% reporting they post less than they did five years ago. "The full study concludes that there's been a significant shift in public attitudes toward social media," reports PCMag. "Where it was once fun and relaxing, it's now growing dark and angsty..." From the report: As the chart shows, there's also a clear correlation with age. A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer? Those of us in the Boomer category are clearly more relaxed about it, with just 38% saying that maintaining a social presence feels like work. The survey quizzed respondents about how they feel when they don't keep up with checking their socials and, by extension, how they'd feel if they just plain quit. They were given choices, both positive (peace, relaxation, and relief) and negative (anxiety, fear of missing out, and discomfort).

Overall, positive reactions held slightly greater sway, with an average of about 21% compared with 19% for negative reactions. The Gen Y contingent accentuated that split, with 25% positive and 21% negative, while Gen X went even further, with 20% positive and just 13% negative. But the Gen Z group flipped the results, identifying 27% negative and 26% positive reactions to going without social media.

There's another force pushing folks away from the socials: increasing politicization. Of the survey's respondents, 44% agreed that political content is driving people away from social media, and only 20% disagreed. Among Gen Z respondents, the impetus was stronger: 48% agreed, and just 13% disagreed. These negative feelings associated with politics only serve to highlight the positive reactions to deleting your social media.

Are you posting less on social media than you did five years ago, and are you being more selective about who can see what you post? Then you're with the majority. More than half of the respondents answered yes to each of those questions. But would you ever parlay fewer posts into no posts (aka quit posting entirely)? When asked what it would take to finally get them to terminate a social media account, a die-hard group of one in six respondents said there's nothing that could make them quit. But more than half could picture quitting due to security concerns, and almost half accepted the possibility that harassment or hate speech could send them packing. Others cited the amount of time wasted on scrolling through social media and the mental health threats of doomscrolling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Social Media Limits Are Coming For Teens Across Europe

The European Union is considering major new restrictions on children's access to social media, including age limits, phased access, and an outright ban. "This is not about whether children can access social media," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "It is about when social media can access our children." The Verge reports: Social media platforms could also be forced to prove their services are not harmful before young people are allowed to use them. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc's executive arm could propose new legislation within months, after reviewing recommendations from a panel of experts released today.

The panel recommended using a phased approach, including "no screens at all" for children under 3, supervised internet use for those under 13, and some limits for older teens. It also said social media platforms should have to prove their services are safe to younger users, an approach von der Leyen said she supports. Von der Leyen said the Commission will consider the report and return with proposals "after the summer." Any legislation would still need approval from the European Parliament and the EU's 27 member countries before becoming law across the bloc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China, Russia and Others Seek To Inflame Debate Over AI Data Centers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans' physical and financial well-being. A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet -- created with OpenAI's ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said -- circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash. A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. "The country's electrical grid instability may render it useless," the video's narrator says.

All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence -- verging at times on hostility -- about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere. China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into "a domestic fracture point," according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year. These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year's midterm elections.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

StamCafé - Claviculars bezoek aan Israël heeft alles

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Jongens waar hebben we dit aan verdiend. 's Werelds twee marktleiders in discours-creatie (Clav en Eretz Yisrael) vinden elkaar op het snijvlak van geo-mogging en clip-farming. En het heeft gewoon echt alles. De bovenstaande IDF-soldate Shira Braun die zegt een beheerder te zijn van het IDF TikTok-account is, heeft een probleem. Het Israëlische i24News schrijft: "The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said Braun had acted without authorization. "The soldier acted without coordination with her commanders, and her conduct does not meet the standards expected of IDF soldiers," the IDF said in a statement. "The incident is under investigation, and the soldier will face disciplinary action." En daar maakte AL JAZEERA dan weer een video over jongens wat is de wereld toch mooi soms. Inmiddels is gebleken dat ze uit het IDF social media-team gehaald wordt, en herplaatst is als KOK. 

Vervolgens vertelt Clav onderstaand dat hij gedineerd heeft met Netanyahu-adviseurs en dat er besproken werd hoe Netanyahu meer 'gehumaniseerd' kon worden. Waar het antwoord dan op was dat Clav met hem naar de sportschool zou kunnen gaan en dit ge-livestreamed kon worden.

Weer daarna wordt hij stevig aan de tand gevoeld tijdens een Israëlisch tv-interview over die keer dat hij in een club Kanye West's Heil Hitler zong met o.a. Nick Fuentes, de Tate-broers, Sneako en Amrou Fudl, en meer in het algemeen zijn 'relatie' met Nick Fuentes (die vrij miniem is). 

En wéér daarna scheldt de dochter van rabbijn Schmuley, degene die bekend staat om haar kosjere sekswinkel, Clav de huid vol tijdens een etentje, ook wegens het zingen van dat Heil Hitler-lied.

Al met al: reden genoeg voor Clav om zijn reis door Israël voortijd af te breken: "People are so negative to you here. It almost makes you want to say, well then I'm not going to come back. That's why I'm leaving". Gelukkig hebben we de beelden nog, allemaal onderstaand.

Echt een gemiste kans voor Israël hoor, Clav kwam er met de beste intenties en dat land kan elke positieve PR gebruiken. Is ze niet gelukt, zonde. Hier nog beelden dat hij verbaal belaagd wordt bij zijn hotel. Een generational fumble, noemen de jongeren dat.

Diner met Netanyahu's adviseurs

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Voortijdig beëindigd 'vijandig' interview over Heil Hitler-zangfestijn en band met Nick Fuentues

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Niet alle Israeli's fan van Clavs Heil Hitler-zangfestijn met Nick Fuentes & Co

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Israeli's hebben hier echt de bal laten vallen hey

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JAAAA het Al-Jazeera filmpje over de geschorste IDF-soldate

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Clav heeft genoeg gezien van het beloofde land

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PANIEK! We krijgen: 'FEITELIJKE WATERTEKORTEN'

hoe lang nog drinkwater?

Nederland waterland. Dat ligt niet alleen ontzettend lekker in het gehoor, het ís ook nog eens zo. MAAR VOOR HOELANG NOG? Al tijden wordt gewaarschuwd voor grote watertekorten en zelfs De T. zucht, maar nu brengt Nieuwsuur ons een waarschuwing rechtstreeks van de Landelijke Coördinatiecommissie Waterverdeling, die stelt dat we waterwise zo'n beetje teruggaan naar het jaar 1976 (toen Joop den Uyl nog kraanbeheerder was). We zitten pas een paar dagen in fase 1: dreigend watertekort, maar fase 2: feitelijk watertekort ligt al op de loer. Dat raakt in de eerste plaats scheepvaart en boeren, alleen op een gegeven moment komt ook de burger in de zee van ellende terecht, zeker met die eeuwigdurende hittegolf waar we in zitten. En ja, mogen we dan straks nog wel dweilen? Plantjes water geven? De was doen in een teil? Kan er dan nog muntjesloos gedoucht of moeten we de zweetgeur van Jeroen van sales op kantoor gaan gedogen? Dat worden onsmakelijke toestanden in Nederland. Gelukkig kunnen we in plaats van drinkwater nog altijd aan het bier (toch geldt ook hier: hoelang nog?), verder ziet het er allemaal bepaald niet positief uit.

Goed genuanceerd verhaal wel

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VIDEO. Rusland gooit 3.000 kilo zware FAB-3000 brisantbom op Oekraïne

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De hopeloze toestand in het Slavische theater volgt u wellicht in ons onregelmatigheidsklassement van de Weekupdates maar voor deze banger breken we de week graag weer op. Een FAB-3000, een 3.000 kilo zware zweefbom met een explosieve lading van 1.400 kilo die onder een Su-34 jachtbommenwerper geknoopt wordt en dan een kilometer of 40 van het doelwit op deze manier wordt losgelaten om het zelf uit te zoeken. Heel precies zijn ze niet. En dan krijg je dus deze ellende, in Orikhiv, oblast Zaporizhzhia. Op een woonblok, waar weinig mensen meer wonen, dus we zullen het volgens de Code van de Volkskrant wel geen genocide noemen. En er zijn natuurlijk minder Joden bij betrokken!


Made in L.A.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Made in L.A.

Well You're Sleeping in That Southern State

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Well You're Sleeping in That Southern State

Hongaars parlement stemt voor wetswijziging om president uit ‘Orbán-tijdperk’ af te zetten

Al sinds zijn verkiezingswinst in april wilde premier Péter Magyar dat president Tamás Sulyok aftrad. Sulyok, die door Magyar werd bestempeld als een „marionet” van de radicaal-rechtse oud-premier Viktor Orbán, weigerde dat.

Datacenter Microsoft gebruikt 1 procent van alle Nederlandse stroom, Google wil geen inzage geven in verbruik

Microsoft geeft als eerste grote Amerikaanse partij inzicht in het stroomverbruik van zijn datacenters in Nederland. Dat is groot, en groeit de komende jaren bovendien hard. Terwijl andere datacenteruitbaters zwijgen, verhardt de strijd om toekomstige aansluitingen op het stroomnet.


Skiën in Japan, coaching in Valencia, of toch maatschappelijke dienst? Het tussenjaar blijft populair. ‘Ik wil mezelf ontwikkelen, ook mentaal’

Ongeveer een kwart van de geslaagden op havo en vwo kiest voor een tussenjaar. Ze willen reizen, sporten, een taal leren, vrijwilligerswerk doen. En ze zijn op zoek naar persoonlijke groei. „Ik weet nog niet zo goed wat mijn kwaliteiten zijn.”


Waterschap in Brabant legt watergebruik aan banden vanwege droogte: ‘Grenzen bereikt’

Het waterschap Brabantse Delta ziet zich door droogte gedwongen om het watergebruik in de regio aan banden te leggen.

Brussel en Berlijn geven geen krimp: EU blijft importeren uit Israëlische nederzettingen

De economisch kleine, maar politiek omstreden handel tussen Europa en de illegale Israëlische nederzettingen op de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever gaat door. Een grote groep EU-landen wil een verbod, maar Ursula von der Leyen en Berlijn liggen dwars.

Colossal

The best of art, craft, and visual culture since 2010.

Korea’s Coastal Folklore Surfaces in Jeongmin Lee’s Ink Illustrations

Korea’s Coastal Folklore Surfaces in Jeongmin Lee’s Ink Illustrations

Jeongmin Lee is interested in the ways “memory is carried through craft and repetition.” On traditional Korean mulberry paper, or hanji, Lee draws delicate lines in ink and pigments known as bunchae, rendering rippling textures that whirl across the page. Steeped in local folklore and mythology, the Busan-based artist creates surreal scenes that conjure fantastical tales of life by the sea.

“Most of my recent projects begin with reading regional folktales, visiting places connected to those stories, and collecting fragments of history, mythology, and oral traditions,” she says. “I rarely paint a folktale exactly as it’s written; I’m more interested in its symbols, emotions, and the questions it leaves behind.”

a surreal illustration of a nude woman standing atop circular forms

Many of Lee’s compositions focus on women’s knowledge, labor, and resilience and how those qualities emerge through coastal storytelling. Tales of powerful sea gods and the diving traditions of the haenyeo commingle into balanced illustrations that translate the symbols and motifs of the region anew.

While her approach is labor-intensive, Lee enjoys utilizing such a meticulous, meditative technique. “Painting with traditional pigments requires a slow, layered process. The colors are built gradually, allowing the paper and pigments to create subtle textures that wouldn’t be possible with other materials,” she adds. “It gives me space to sit with these stories while I paint them.

Many of the works shown here are part of Daughters of the Sea, an ongoing series recently on view at the SĀBRS Festival in Riga. Lee hopes to expand the project into one that’s participatory and connects similar narratives from across the globe. “I’m exploring ways that folklore can become something people experience and talk about together, rather than something that exists only on a gallery wall,” Lee shares.

She’s also currently working on a graphic novel centering on Busan’s mythology and folklore, which she hopes to complete next year. Keep up with her projects on Instagram.

a surreal illustration of two abstract figures facing each other and then waves on the bottom
a surreal illustration of a snake spliced to reveal a figure's head and flowers
a surreal illustration of a fox with two figures emerging upward
a surreal illustration of a woman surrounded by waves
a surreal illustration of a woman surrounded by waves
a surreal illustration of a nude men playing chicken
a work in progress

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Korea’s Coastal Folklore Surfaces in Jeongmin Lee’s Ink Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.

Weird Pi failure mode

I have a Pi 4 B that, after a power failure, seems unable to talk HDMI in any resolution higher than 1024x768. I have tried both ports, multiple cables, multiple monitors, and a known-good CF card.

# xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 7680 x 7680 HDMI-1 connected primary 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.00* 800x600 60.32 56.25 848x480 60.00 640x480 59.94 HDMI-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

I have also tried various permutations of hdmi_force_hotplug, hdmi_group, hdmi_mode, hdmi_force_mode, hdmi_force_hotplug and hdmi_drive in config.txt, and video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D in cmdline.txt with no change.

Before I toss it in the trash, does anyone know what could have caused this and if it is fixable? Is this a known failure mode of the video hardware scorching itself somehow?

Do not speculate. Do not just google it for me.

Previously, previously.

Tiong Ang @ Lumen Travo

Ik leerde Tiong Ang kennen via Remy Jungerman met wie hij in 2002 een residentie deed in Indonesië. Ik ben zijn werk sindsdien blijven volgen, eerst toen ik meer reisde op afstand en sinds ik [Meer...]

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP

Seemingly unaware of the concept of irony, Satya Nadella is warning AI-using enterprises to take care not to give away their business secrets alongside the massive piles of cash they’re forking over to frontier labs every month. Writing in a long-form post on X over the weekend, the Microsoft CEO and chairman warned of what he called the “reverse information paradox,” a situation in which purchasers of AI essentially pay for the intelligence product they’re getting twice: once with cash, and again “with something even more valuable,” namely the proprietary business knowledge one has to feed an AI model in order to make it worth using in the rare instance an AI investment actually pays off. “Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed,” Nadella noted. “The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.” The irony is thick, given that Microsoft itself pushes AI that slurps up business data, and Redmond helped get this entire messy AI ball rolling by investing billions into early generative AI leader OpenAI. Azure was the former exclusive cloud home for ChatGPT, and Microsoft leadership arguably helped Altman get his job back when OpenAI ousted him in 2023. The pair’s relationship grew strained in the intervening years, and they loosened several exclusivity provisions in early 2026. It also comes after a number of large organizations paused or restricted Microsoft Copilot deployments in 2024 over a related concern: weak data governance and sprawling internal access rights. Enterprise data security outfit Securiti told The Register in 2024 that about half of the more than 20 chief data officers it polled had grounded Copilot deployments, either switching the assistant off or severely restricting what it could access. The problem was particularly acute in organizations with years of accumulated SharePoint and Microsoft 365 permissions, where overly broad access rights risked exposing sensitive information through Copilot. Fast forward a couple of years, and now Nadella is warning that data protection measures aren’t even enough for a business to stay safe in the AI age. “Models learn from ‘exhaust,’ the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make,” Nadella warned. “It's the kind of knowledge a competitor could never buy, and the kind that leaks almost imperceptibly: trace by trace, correction by correction, eval by eval.” Consuming intelligence through AI, Nadella added, creates more organizational intelligence. The Microsoft chief argued that the knowledge generated through those interactions ought to belong to the companies that create it. “Enterprises need a real trust boundary for their human capital and token capital to compound,” Nadella wrote, describing his ideal solution as having “a hard boundary across which nothing crosses, not even the intelligence exhaust, without consent.” In other words, welcome to the post-cloud era when all your AI infrastructure will come home to roost inside your own network. If you think we’re exaggerating, Nadella even mentions that one of the things enterprises need to do to solve the reverse information paradox is to build their own proprietary AI learning environments “within the tenant boundary.” We asked Nadella and Microsoft whether solving the problem goes beyond good data governance, as Nadella suggested in his article, and a spokesperson told us yes, describing the matter as a structural problem with the current generally accepted model of AI business in which companies rely on hosted services. Anyone and everyone using AI for business is at risk, they explained. In addition to isolating learning environments, Nadella’s X note also suggested AI-using businesses should create their own private evaluation systems and retain ownership of organizational AI memory and decouple their orchestration layer from any particular AI model, essentially creating “your own continuous learning loop.” “A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique,” Nadella wrote. The Microsoft spokesperson argued that agent harnesses and memory should be independent of models, and called for enterprises to have the rights to their own usage data and model outputs, echoing Nadella’s comments about the irony of leading AI firms crying foul about model distillation while reserving “the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data.” As for whether this is a generic warning that something in the AI industry’s got to give or a sales pitch with Microsoft positioned as the hero, the spokesperson made that clear, telling us that Copilot and Azure AI Foundry (a hosted solution, it’s worth pointing out) are Redmond’s solution to the problems Nadella outlined in his weekend post. Both separate context, memory, and agent harnesses from AI models themselves, giving businesses an additional layer of assurance that their data is safe, the company told us. It's debatable whether or not Microsoft is actually the AI data protection hero enterprises are looking for. But the bigger point is true: Frontier labs are rolling in valuable proprietary data, and that could come back to bite the businesses that forked it over for free. ®