atmavatar

Under Obama's deal with them, Iran was quite content to not have nukes. Had the deal not been torn up, they'd likely never acquire nuclear capability in our lifetimes.

Trump's unprovoked attacks on them were not only extremely costly due to the Strait of Hormuz closing, but it underscored why Iran absolutely needs nukes to protect themselves. It's virtually guaranteed they'll attain nuclear weapons inside the next decade now.

That's what happens when you elect a narcissistic fraudster to run your country and its foreign policy.

It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families.

However, I'll concede its juxtaposition with overall whiteness and Spanish language fluency as additional metrics of population-level success are highly suspect, even if we grant that being a white, English-first speaker may contribute significantly to an individual's success (for reasons which include the unsavory).

1. beef for $6.97/lb

You'll want to specify what type of beef. The price per pound varies immensely based upon what cut you're getting.

$6.97/lb is a price I can only assume refers to ground beef. Once you start talking about steaks, though, the price climbs rather quickly. Near me, sirloin regularly clocks between $14-16/lb, and NY strip/ribeye at the best of times may go on sale for close to $20/lb, but they also regularly exceed $30/lb.

Of course, we largely only need to worry about the security vulnerabilities because manufacturers increasingly hook our hardware up to the internet so they can exfiltrate data about us.

Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice

That's by design.

The billionaires who own the media conglomerates have spent decades airing propaganda to that effect, as well as perpetuating the myth that anyone can become wealthy if they just work hard enough, with the implicit contra-positive being that the poor are poor because they are lazy, thus deserving their poverty.

While I would like to see us return to having federal senators elected by the state legislatures

I certainly wouldn't. There are multiple states with legislatures having D/R party ratios in excess of 20 points different than both their registered party ratios and what their state-wide votes for things like governor and president end up being due to how badly gerrymandered they are.

    I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
    - Mark Twain

I limited the first point to specifically deal with learning the subject matter, but I added the second point to account for any negative externalities which may fall outside that.

A small (contrived) example: a child uses an AI tutor because they're falling behind in mathematics. The tutor does an excellent job at getting the child back up to speed and improving his/her grades in math, but the child then starts becoming dependent on AI tutors for all subjects because they've either lost interest or capability for self-learning.

We've already seen a study or two indicate extended use of AI coding agents causes some people to lose their own coding ability over time, making them dependent upon the agents. It doesn't seem far-fetched that children could become dependent upon AI tutors in a similar fashion.

That's not to mention that AI tutors require children to have computer access, which would ultimately cement in place school laptop programs I was under the impression were neutral to net negative in and of themselves.

So yes, in short, I think AI tutors have the potential to be worse than nothing. I'm not asserting they are, but I'd like to see some studies done on the topic before rolling them out for children en masse.

For the state itself? None.

For state employees (i.e. representatives, judges, etc.)? Some get kickbacks.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

See: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dhs-contractors-told-wh...

Alas, the "kids for cash" scandal was such a big news event that it dominates the results for any search you'd do on the subject of private prison corruption, but it's hardly the only example.

I have nothing good to say about the USDA or FDA.

At least in the context of the article, the requirements for labeling ice cream as such forces some brands to change to "frozen dessert" when they skimp too much on ingredients. It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.

Your reaction is based on 3 unproven assertions:

* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.

* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.

* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.

I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.

We're also not even attempting to be smart about our water usage, particularly when it comes to agriculture. Growing crops in a desert that require significant amounts of water to grow is already pretty bad, then exporting the bulk of those crops overseas adds insult to injury.

Of course, all that is made possible by our pants-on-head stupid water rights laws.

(copyright, that expire)

For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.

Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.

Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.

E.g. prototypes, internal tools, low scale CRUD apps, personal projects, etc.

My experience has been that small-ish projects like these are the most likely to contain code with bond-villain level of complexity (and success).

More than once have I been stuck going on Da Vinci Code-esque adventures to uncover bugs in prototypes years after the fact because the business pivoted away from what it was trying to do and later decided to pivot back, only to discover that despite the prototype and systems/libraries it worked with not changing, somehow it mysteriously doesn't work at all or it fails in convoluted ways despite being perfectly functional when it was originally shelved.

With consumer brands (e.g., Crucial) being shuttered in the wake of AI companies buying up all available RAM production capacity, it's difficult to imagine consumer RAM production even returning to normal anytime soon.

It seems all but assured that it will require the AI bubble to burst plus several years to return to normalcy, particularly as RAM manufacturers have also been repeatedly caught price fixing.

In a large enough organization with many layers to it, it very well may be that executives were neither involved nor aware of criminal wrongdoing, and even when they are, you'll never find sufficient evidence to charge them. That's largely the point behind performing criminal acts as a business and why there's so much white-collar crime.

At least if you set fines to a level that such crimes are rarely if ever profitable, you can both remove the incentive for the organization to commit them as well as introduce a passive internal mechanism to prevent them in the first place.

To start with, the war on drugs was initiated by Nixon as a way to target political enemies (hippies and non-whites).

Those cities encompass both urban and suburban areas, and they represent something like 80% of the country's population.

While I'm sympathetic to the notion rural areas should not go unrepresented, I find an electoral system where you only have to secure electoral votes for states representing ~25% of the population to win, only a handful of which you need to campaign at all due to the winner-take-all nature of virtually every state's electors to be strictly and starkly inferior to one in which a candidate needs to campaign for no less than 40-45% to secure a plurality.

It seems a relatively simple first step should be to declare that algorithmic feeds which cater content to individuals render the platform a publisher and thus no longer subject to section 230 protections.

It is guaranteed we'll quickly find ourselves back here or worse if we do anything short of imprisoning virtually all involved in the current administration, voting out most members of the House and Senate, impeaching and replacing most of the Supreme Court justices, and enacting a number of constitutional amendments to fix the cracks in the system, not to mention (and to your point) breaking up the media empires consolidated under a small handful of billionaires expressly to kowtow to the current President.

None are likely to occur.

Anyone without the appetite for such a clean-up process is OK with it starting all over again, and unfortunately, you're probably right that the majority of people will ultimately fall under this category.

It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities.

As opposed to campaigning exclusively in the half-dozen swing states that matter?

When talking about the health impacts of smoking, most people (the article included) focus on the lung cancer aspect but gloss over the general heart and lung impacts.

Upon banning smoking in public areas, my city and the surrounding municipalities encountered an immediate and statistically significant (~10%) reduction in heart attacks.

I'm not opposed to making voting mandatory, but making election day a national holiday should come first.

While I'm aware many (most? all?) polling locations allow for early voting, the reality is that many people wait for election day, and the combined hassle of having to work that day and deal with sometimes multi-hour waits (due to Republicans repeatedly closing and limiting polling locations) inevitably leads to some not voting.

Of course that also ignores many of the other issues with our electoral system that convince many they shouldn't bother voting (e.g., the electoral collect and heavy gerrymandering disenfranchising large swaths of people), but those are a larger and more complicated set of issues to address.

The problem you're describing isn't so much that private companies are allowed to choose who they do business with, but rather that the US has allowed far too much consolidation of markets to occur.

Regarding your example: I fully agree that Visa and Mastercard have way too much control over payment infrastructure. Before doing anything else, I'd break up their de facto duopoly. I'd focus on Visa in particular, as they control nearly 2/3 the market by themselves.

There's a very important distinction to be made.

Nazi rhetoric earning bans on private platforms happens because a large number of people organize in protest against such rhetoric. Advertisers see this and don't want to be associated with it, so the ad-driven platforms make the obvious choice to remove the Nazis. This is an example of people exercising their free speech and their often overlooked freedom of/from association.

Nothing stops the Nazis from creating their own platform or buying out an existing one, which is why we have Gab, Truth Social, and X. They're also free to organize themselves and try convincing people to leave the platforms which banned them and/or convince advertisers to apply pressure to let them stay.

You have to appreciate the absurdity of getting airtime on nearly every right wing media platform to complain about being silenced, though.

Arguing private platforms should be forced to keep Nazi rhetoric around isn't meaningfully different from arguing I shouldn't be able to kick a guest out of my house when they start spouting intolerable bullshit.

I would expect such a grant to be handled by local/city government, which should have the local knowledge you speak of.

If they're right:

* Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.

* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.

* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.

The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).

I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.

This article reads like a rather flippant dismissal of the original concern that "earning" a billion dollars cannot be done without some moral compromise.

Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.

However, his only response for how you should achieve exponential growth is this hand-wavy "make something you yourself want". His only acknowledgement of the concern that maintaining exponential growth may require cheating is a casual dismissal, and his only acknowledgement of the concern that the growth rate will drop off over time is "you'll still get there eventually".

So, while the original concern was that you cannot earn a billion dollars without some wrongdoing, PG's response can be boiled down to "nuh uh".

Disney?

Gaza residents voted Hamas into power, despite Hamas’s vile charter pledging erasure of Israel and Jews and so on.

Reminder:

* The last parlimentary election held in Palestine was 2006 [1].

* The median age in Palestine as of 2023 was 19.8 [2].

* The voting age in Palestine is 21 [1].

In other words, the majority of the population today were born after the last major election, and they aren't voting age now, let alone at the time of the last election. When you account for people who were voting age in the last elections, the number of people still around today is a rather small minority. It shrinks even further when you consider that Hamas only got 44% of the votes for Parliament (alas, due to how district votes are handled, that gave Hamas 74 of 132 seats).

Given that, I'm a little less sure about holding the current population of Palestine responsible for Hamas. You could argue they should be doing more to displace Hamas, but perhaps that can wait until after they're done worrying about starving to death or being shot by IDF snipers while accepting food from aid workers.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Palestine

2. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/population-demography/pal...

See also: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/01/majority-palestinians...