gph

Then you'd just be optimizing even more for sociopathic politicians. It's not like caring more about your children than power is some universal behavior in humans.

There is undoubtedly some hardliners that want the nuclear program to continue so they can develop nuclear weapons in order to provide a reliable deterrent against Israeli aggression.

It's more like the middle class is bifurcating between upperish middle class and lower-middle class. In-demand tech workers, doctors, high-level admins/managers, etc. are getting higher and higher wages while other professions that used to be middle class as starting to stagnate and fall behind such as low-level office workers, journalists, teachers, mid-to-low level managers, etc. I wouldn't consider either group to really be upper class, but I guess there's always going to be differences in how people are sorted into those categories.

I think the issue is that the article is inflammatory click-bait because it makes it seems like rich people are getting a break while poor people are getting shafted. It's not until you've read through most the entire article that they finally get to the point, which is that 'rich' people are buying houses in the suburbs/exurbs now that they can work remotely. Unsurprisingly this means prices are spiking in those areas while rent for high-end apartments are shrinking as demand dries up. So rich people aren't really catching a break so much as exiting the rental market in major cities and redirecting their spending to the suburban housing market.

But it also has property taxes and maintenance costs, which will likely be higher than inflation. So it's not a great passive investment unless you expect the value minus costs to gain faster than inflation. Otherwise you gotta live in it or rent it to make back your money, and that's no longer passive.

Yea but the OP was making the claim that no US government official would dare stand up to Bezos for fear of him outspending them out of office. Entrenched incumbents in non-battleground states/districts really don't have that fear at all.

(he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution)

That's a HUGE over exaggeration. Yes money matters, but only so much and it very much matters where that funding comes from. That's why McConnell still has a job despite his opponent spending three times as much. People knew that money was coming from outsiders trying to unseat him. Bezos or some other billionaire trying to pour an ungodly amount of money into a political campaign is more likely to backfire than help.

The 33 vs 66 is in reference to the percentage chance that a prediction is correct. But if you have no way to tell if a given prediction is correct or not without doing the tests that you were trying to avoid in the first place then it's not really worthwhile except for perhaps some exploratory research.

I'm not really sure what your point is.

If it got answer right 1 time in 100, that would be amazing and you'd be foolish not to use it!

Except you have no way of knowing if the answer it gives you is one of the 66 right predictions vs one of the 33 wrong predictions. You could say it's likely correct, but not to a high enough degree of confidence that you could really trust it without verifying using the old established techniques.

So who said America holds free and open trade as an absolute value that we'd uphold even when faced with partners not willing to uphold that value?

You just decided to add extra constraints to my argument for no reason.

If you support your "values" only on a reciprocal basis, essentially you renounce them. And you certainly lose the moral high ground when you try to get others to adopt these values.

I can't agree with that at all. I hold non-violence as a value, but I'm also going to defend myself if attacked and I don't think that means I renounce my values or lose any moral high ground.

There are plenty of situations where supporting a high-minded value requires reciprocation.

*Omniscient

Though I guess it might be hard to deceive an entity that is literally everywhere.

But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value through merging are typically competitors that are able to generate more value together instead of fighting for the same profits.

The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.

You say that with such conviction when you don't have any better info on what the future holds than anyone else.

The unemployment benefits (which for many of the unemployed will actually be higher than their regular pay) last for the next four months. If the quarantine lifts by the end of May and businesses reopen then it will be enough. Obviously that's a big if, but for you to come out here and act like you know something with 100% certainty is absurd.

No you're right. A lot of people are going to make more on unemployment than they would employed. I'm a junior software engineer and I wouldn't be making that much less on unemployment than I do right now.

No one that wasn't already starving should be starving at this point. Except perhaps gig workers.

Not technically the US, but the Confederacy did experience hyperinflation during the war. They ran the printing presses at full-tilt without anything tangible to back them up. And obviously once the tide of the war shifted things got real bad.

"In a national survey, 60 percent of homeless women and 41 percent of homeless men had at least one minor child, but only 39 percent of women and 3 percent of men lived with any children (Burt et al., 1999)" [1]

Most homeless people have had children, they just get taken away from them.

[1]https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/homeless-children-update-researc...

I've seen OTPs described as being a replacement for e2e encryption before, but I just don't see it as actually usable outside of large established organizations (NSA, cartel, etc.) to use for passing short text messages. And even then the usability seems cumbersome enough that they'd only use it when strictly necessary.

Am I missing something?

I have to imagine the heat/humidity is just as bad in places like LA/Atlanta that have previously hosted the summer olympics. Did they just not care about heatstroke back then?

Was that really a coverup or willful neglect due to a cultural atmosphere that was massively homophobic? From what I understand the Reagan administration was reluctant to put resources into something that was considered a "gay mans disease", really wouldn't have played well with the majority of the electorate at the time.

Tech — the web in particular — is supposed to be an equalizing force

Don't take the Google PR so seriously, the tech industry wants to make money like every other industry.

I don't think it's dumb for most small to mid-size enterprise companies to migrate to the cloud. Being able to outsource IT/infrastructure is quite beneficial when your needs aren't so big that it makes sense to set up your own datacenter. And it's far more flexible, if you suddenly start getting a lot more or less traffic you can quickly upgrade/downgrade to what you need.

Also somewhat ironic that the author mentions the internet was created/funded by the military as part of a program to keep up with the Russians technologically during the Cold War, then goes on to complain about Stuxnet and nation states using the internet for cyber warfare like they were never even involved in the first place.

I mean if the space industry/tourism takes off in the next couple decades like it's poised to, kids in this generation will have a better chance of getting to space as a private citizen than by becoming an astronaut.

The title of astronaut will likely start to change in meaning as well. Perhaps in the future it will just be a catch-all term for those who work directly in outer space as opposed to tourists or onboard staff.

It isn’t the geographic center of Appalachia either. Pittsburgh, 90mi north, is as much a part of Appalachia as Atlanta, almost 600 mi south.

I don't know about that, that's weird logic to me. Atlanta is barely Appalachia, at best it's at the very terminus in the south. Pittsburgh is much more a part of Appalachia to me, though honestly I'd say both those cities have their own unique culture that's perhaps related or influenced by Appalachia (yinzers are kinda Appalachia). I guess somewhere around Roanoke would probably be the true geographic middle, but eh. Close enough.

Maybe the author meant more in a geographic sense. Like I've definitely heard people say Austin is in the heart of Texas, but they're mostly saying it's centrally-located in the state not that the city itself is a canonical representation of Texas culture at large.

Edit: And while Morgantown is only 9 miles into WV, really the entire state of WV is the heart of Appalachia. No matter what part of the state you leave from you're still going to be in Appalachia, just in a neighboring state.

What if you do not want to trust anyone?

Nope. Sorry. No easy to use options for you out there.

Sure but to an extent that's true about almost everything in modern society. If you don't want to have to trust those supplying you with food or water, there's really no easy options to completely supply yourself with either of those. And even with all the oversight and regulation there's still often good reasons not to fully trust (we all know about Flint at this point even if it was a bit overblown by the media)

It's hard to imagine a situation where someone would supply you with something without you needing to trust them on some level.

And virtually none of the comments will be from people who have studied in psychiatry, are seriously engaged (pro- or con-) with pharma, or have ever run a trade show.

I mean that's how internet comments work on virtually any largish web site ever. I don't think submissions should be based on the commentary they might attract.

...hence people against UBI responding positively to this. OP never said this was UBI.

No it doesn't, that's the whole point of this bill.

AI based teledildonics will be the next multi-tril institutions in less than a decade.