hcurtiss

Yes, and imagine if we doubled the USAID funding! Or even quintupled it! Why, if we borrowed a(nother) trillion dollars, imagine how many lives we'd save!

My point is that it's all fake math. If we're killing people by not funding aid programs, then we're killing even more by not funding more. How much are you personally sending to Africa? How much more could you be sending? Imagine if you borrowed to do it? You can't do the math that way. While tragic, those people have no demand on our treasury any more than Vladimir Putin does. We may be less benevolent than we once were. We are also much further in debt than we once were -- to the point of threatening the Republic's viability. The US didn't kill a half million children any more than France, or Spain, or Great Britian, or China did by not sending the same money. It's all fake math.

You are, of course, right. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at that.

I don’t think the AfD is “literally fascists.” They certainly don’t claim to be.

Those numbers always crack me up. If you do the math that way (US funding cuts kill people), imagine how many people we’ve killed by not confiscating all the wealth of our nation and shipping it to Africa!

But there have been way higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels historically, and those have largely coincided with plant and animal life climaxing. See the Jurassic.

I'd like to use it for legal work too. Microsoft makes great hay about its ability to sandbox CoPilot's work and not train on or share company resources ("Look for the green checkmark."). It's largely for that reason that we've rolled out Copilot to most of the white collar positions in the company. Do you happen to know whether xAI has similar functionality?

Nah, dollars buy war machines. And for the first time in human history, we are on the precipice of projecting substantial ground force without the need for humans.

I can think of no capitalist society in the last thousand years that has produced feudalism.

I'm not so sure that global population growth tells the right story vis-à-vis declining birth rates in western countries.

I don't recall what arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. And one could hardly call that system "capitalism," which is the subject of this thread. I maintain that the relevant objective should be the best outcome for the most. There is abundant objective evidence that capitalism is the economic system best suited to that objective, even if it produces varying degrees -- and sometimes large amounts -- of income inequality.

But, again, the gap between the poor and the wealthy is irrelevant. Income inequality doesn't describe what's best for the most. If more income inequality produces a better outcome for the majority, it becomes very difficult to argue income inequality is, itself, bad. While the GINI index has certainly increased over the last fifty years in the US, real median household income and real personal consumption expenditures have too, all while poverty rates have substantially declined. It is exceedingly difficult to argue by any objective metric that rising income inequality has handicapped median standard of living.

We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.

Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.

So also does the US. Trump had prominent cases against Google and Meta. Biden against Apple and Amazon. Prominent efforts on airlines and grocery stores. Honestly, I'm pretty sure the US and Chinese antitrust laws are pretty similar (theirs largely crafted after ours).

It's not, but if the existence of billionaires correlates strongly with an increase in the median standard of living, I'm all for it. My politics are not driven by envy -- only what consistently produces the best outcome for the most.

Regarding the idea that we can design a system where "no one should be left wanting," that sounds nice. So does big rock candy mountain. There is no such system.

And almost for the entirety of that period, humans lived in abject poverty. The rise of capitalism perfectly correlates with the most spectacular increase in human flourishing and prosperity in the history of our species. Even in the last fifty years, liberalizing economies, private ownership, and contract law have lifted tens of millions out of poverty, mostly in SE Asia.

There absolutely are monopolies. There are, in fact, many state run enterprises. Where do you get these ideas?

You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?

You are doing the left-wing, pretending not to understand meme. Those are the principal objections in the linked article. Data centers are not an environmental catastrophe. And AI isn’t coming to take all of our jobs. There will be change, for certain, but if we don’t embrace it, the West is doomed. That is not hyperbole. History bears this out repeatedly.

Is that your experience with AI? It’s made my work vastly more efficient and valuable. And have you been to modern Chinese cities? Prosperity is awesome. Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. There’s a way to have all that AND civil rights. But if we continue to outlaw development and energy intensive industries, then yes, the West will be Chinese slaves.

Remember Delaware? Where he not only won on appeal but provoked an exodus of companies out of Delaware?

Tesla is falling to pieces?

https://stocks.apple.com/symbol/TSLA

While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.

Princeton is a strange place. What on earth could be the objection to proctoring? I'd much rather have a proctor than have to narc on a classmate. And even then, the proctor just reports the matter to a student-run body? Wild.

They didn't do a 180 at all. Tusk basically shares Orban's entire platform, particularly vis-à-vis the EU. Orban just got caught in corruption scandals.

I agree. And I am seeing it in a lot of venues, especially political discourse. Commenting is increasingly AI driven I fear the whole thing is going to collapse and nobody will be able to rely on online commentary to make decisions. At least not without a lot of independent research, maybe that’s for the best, but it’s definitely going to change the Internet.

Is it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?

The allegation at the time was that he turned off Starlink. That was not true. He did not turn it on at Ukraine’s request because US law prohibited it.

Why not? Has Musk shut off Starlink? The reporting out of Ukraine was almost entirely wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...

Literally nobody believes he won the last election. Biden said this repeatedly.

Who is “they”? Maduro is not the elected leader of Venezuela.

Yeah, the difference is the Powerboost hybrid electric motor is only like 50 hp. I want 350 hp of electric motor that can be powered by either the battery or an onboard ICE.