Yeah the agesism is serving the hiring companies that would rather sacrifice quality than cash flow. The issue with retirement goes deeper than the layoffs for the same reason but also is exacerbated by the high cost of living. At the end of the day it's not supply and demand that drives pos-capitalist economies, but pushing in margins to optimize profits while running companies on the brink of collapse. Logan's Run does start to look more like speculative fiction these days...

By paycheck my company's CEO is worth 95 senior engineers and that's before stock options. With stock options he's worth 265 senior engineers! (Or 240 and 670 junior developers respectively)

He's so skilled he splits atoms with his mind. He probably should be president, except he's nowhere near the highest paid executive in the US. Probably not in the top 500.

This is longer than I've worked with copilot, but the manual fix versus prompt time feels pretty right on to me. I think that there's a sweet spot where continuing to prompt will take longer to get to the expected result than coding by hand from that point.

Being able to gauge when to dump the autopilot and take the stick is probably the development skill we all need to learn with LLMs.

The gallery scene is still a thing, but even it suffers from capitalist enshitification as Art has shifted from the signifier of taste to a place to keep your money where it can't be taxed. Making the art world more of a stock market than a laboratory.

On thing I find interesting in all of this is the nearly complete avoidance of the viewer's role in Art. That removing taste, deadening the palate of the viewer through political alienation of the educated class where taste is fostered has largely allowed this to happen. Art made for artists is Art made for viewers with taste. Why can't everyone be taught to understand Art. Media literacy is how our culture can grow, but it has been defunded for decades.

Don't forget that to start a company the more common goal is to make money, not to produce a good or service that others want or need including employment. Meaning this is just a lesser concern. Generally business owners are just as likely to shed quality as to shed employees as long as the profits go up. What helps to sustain this is the gradual lowering of the bar on quality that leads to consumers settling for garbage products and sending a positive signal to the business to continue. This is exacerbated by monopolistic trends in the world where only one company is providing a good or service and buying out the competition when it raises to control choice. What we end up with is similar from the consumer's viewpoint to late Communism in regards to choice and quality. In the end Capitalism didn't win. It just lost last.