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Archaeologists believe that the Whale Bone Alley of Yttygran Island, Siberia was built as a shrine and sacred meeting place by the Inuit in the 14th century. At the time, there was a temporary Ice Age that resulted in a prolonged winter, and food shortages that could have led to conflicts between Inuit tribes. Whale Bone Alley may have been the neutral place where they could come together to discuss their problems, take part in sacrificial offerings, and store their meat in the square pits that once existed between the bone walls. 

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

#Everyone has massively cut their support staff everwhere.#supposedly automation makes up for this gap except that it literally doesn't at all#You can fire 90% of your office staff and replace them with a phone tree#And all that happens is everyone hates it and it sucks and it makes your service completely unnavigable#But like. Who is going to stop you?

#Everyone has done this in every industry and field. There is no alternative you can turn to preferentially because they actually staff thei#phones. No one does!!#Let alone any means of communication outside of phone calling. Which remains the absolute bottom line of getting any info out of anywhere#You can cut your office hours because everything is on the website! Which you haven't updated in 5 years and the plugin broke and

#Basically the same principle we're seeing now in the rollout of AI has already been the status quo. The idea that you can just get rid of#all human support services. Replace them with some automated function.

#On the corporate side the logic is clear: once you have a monopoly (and who doesnt) the only way to increase profits is to cut costs#which means fire people. And if the quality of service tanks who cares because everyone's stuck with you anyway.

#on the government services side it's a bit more opaque.... I guess it probably mostly comes back to cost-cutting again.#Budget pressure. Reforms designed to strangle services.#Plus the longtime practice of throttling government support by making the logistical burden too onerous to handle#By way of wretched clauses about eligibility and the proving therof and etc

#And there's a very real and brutal class component also.#Everyone making these firing calls is totally insulated from the effects of their decisions because they have personal assistants.#Meanwhile the people dealing with the most of this shit are anyone trying to access social services of any sort#or even just do or get things cheaply.

via @screambirdscreaming

(reformatted into paragraphs for easier reading) these tags get to the root of the problem in a way I'd like to see more people acknowledging, honestly.

I saw a post the other day that was pointing out how people selling AI frame AI as some genius worksaving innovation or as a tool based on whether they want to cater to the ego of middle management types whose entire job is answering emails, because obviously the people whose jobs are most able to be replaced by AI are middle management email answering jobs.