WitCanStain

Risking American lives? How many Americans have died in the war as a result of US aid?

The reason why terms like nazi, racist, sexist etc did not affect Trump's chances is because his voting base _does not care_ that he is those things. The right wing in America, magnitudes more than the left, does not care about the personal qualities of their chosen candidate, only about whether he advances their agenda. Why do so many nominal Christians vote for Trump despite him being a cheater, hoarder, and a person who otherwise embodies so many of the qualities the Bible cautions against? It is, again, because they will cook up any number of excuses and denials to justify their support as long as he hurts those they consider the enemy. The only way to make the application of those terms hurt Trump would have been to make the population care about them in the first place (beyond the thinnest veneer of superficial handwringing) which would have required a much stronger education system than America has.

Not actively malicious perhaps, but prioritising profits over lives is evil. Either you take care to make sure the systems you sell lead to the best possible outcomes, or you get out of the sector.

Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management staff. So if I am reading this correctly, they have far more administrators than actual academics, which is rather incredible. Incidentally, according to the same link the median percentage of salaries paid to instructional staff is 30% for similar doctoral universities.

[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...

Is the US responsible for any crime committed by members of ships that fly the star-spangled banner?

What is the difference between propaganda and someone expressing their view?

I think turning a fledgling democracy into a kleptocratic dictatorship and starting an unjust war that has caused 500k casualties is at least on par with the worst the US has done in recent history like Iraq.

Capitalism is a system that inevitably destroys its own guardrails.

Arguably it is far more authoritarian to enforce private ownership over social ownership.

Tinfoil? That is where we are headed. To handwave away concerns about where the current trajectory is going is very dismissive.

Why comment when you have no way of knowing, when the OP is themselves available to answer?

why don't we have more prestigious universities?

Legacy families need prestigious universities to be rare and exclusive so that them having gone there increases in value. They already know that their kids will get in so making top universities more exclusive only has benefits for them.

What could we do with more accurate atomic clocks that we cannot do with current ones?

US will still have plenty of reason to defend Taiwan, if only because it is a crucial part of America's containment strategy - China would have a much easier time operating in the Pacific if it controls Taiwan, and the US won't allow that. Further, if Taiwan falls a lot of countries will lose faith in America's ability to protect them from China which would thrust the entirety of South-East Asia into China's hands, also something the US can't afford. Though, with recent claims that China can build 1000 cruise missiles a day[0] it might not matter whether US defends them or not.

[0] https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/america-has-no-ukraine-plan-b-...

It's not everyone's cup of tea but Kit Kat is an experience you won't find in many other places.

I've been using only Linux (Manjaro) for the last six years, and although there's been marked improvement it's still in many ways buggier and clunkier for everyday use than even Windows.

Perhaps in a near-post-scarcity world, resurrecting dead people is seen as one of the great humanitarian projects of civilization.

Source?

If only you'll have the money to get high after you no longer have a job.

Or just covertly tell Apple to hand over its documentation / to knowingly leave gaps in the defenses for NSA to exploit.

Businesses exist to make money for their owners, full stop. Any needs they fulfill are largely incidental.

While I broadly agree that that's a wise move, at the same time if I have to spend 8 hours a day working just to stay alive I can hardly be expected to also kill all non-work aspects of my personality for that time as well.

And these are the people who have great say over AI safety. Jesus. Whoever thought that egomaniacs and profiteers would guide us to a bright AI future?

It is used that way in Finland and a fair few other countries and works perfectly well.

Thermonuclear weapons are great for excavating large amounts of landmass in quick order. However I would propose that we nonetheless do not make them available to everyone.

This is a strange argument. There is a vast difference between a world where you can buy semi-automatic weapons off a store shelf and one where you have to 3d-print one yourself or get a CNC mill to produce it. The point of regulation is to mitigate damage that comes from unfettered access, no regulation can ever prevent it completely. Of course, the comparison between computer programs and physical weapons is not strong in the first place.

If you execute all the staff at every power plant in the world and then keep executing the subsequent replacement cohorts, every power plant would have to shut down and we would dramatically reduce global CO2 production. Similarly, if you position machine guns at major roads and keep shooting every car that comes through, you will eventually reduce the environmental toll of driving cars.

Why do you believe this?

The same could be said for traditional monogamy.

No, because it isn't.