rhelz

chuckle it is oddly reassuring to hear somebody's worries and complaints, Especially when from a country like New Zealand--apparently, New Zealand is so great that even our billionaires want to move to move there.

There are plenty of resources to support retirees, even in the face of declining population. After all, people have been paying into the system their whole lives---what did the government do with all that money? Making New Zealand richer. Over the last 30 years, your GDP has quadrupled, and yet your population grew by less than 2 million people.

If our parents could support our grandparents with 1/4th of the GDP, our kids can certainly afford us in the future, when the GDP will be even higher.

Workers these days are incredibly productive. Trying to get everybody scared is just creating a false problem. True, instead of sending the dollars to defense contractors and billionaires (Its amazing how the U.S. was suddenly able to spend another trillion on the Iran war, eh? Always plenty of money for that.)

I'm still refactoring my theory of mind in the face of the obvious successes of AI.

Depends upon how laze-faire you want your capitalism to be.

Sure, better ethical principles might solve this. But extracting maximum profit is the prime directive of capitalism. This might be shit ethics, but it is brilliant capitalism.

Sure, they are your problems, but to expect capitalism to solve your addiction is just magical thinking.

It's not capitalism gone wrong. It's a great example of a historic success of capitalism.

You can't expect capitalism to solve your addiction problems.

The point that taxation is qualitatively different from having your 401k's value cut in half is well taken. But it sure was a "very heavy brake on compounding", though---even at 8%, it takes 9 years do recover a 50% loss.

But inflation is most definitely a wealth tax, don't you agree? And here is the kicker--if we raise taxes enough to close the deficit (as Clinton did in the 90's) the inflation rate will go down. By enough to recoup a big chuck of the wealth tax in the first place.

Well, I'd wager most of the people who are advocating for the wealth tax have already felt economic disaster. Many economic disasters.

During the dot-com bust, my 401k was cut in half. How is that for a wealth tax?

Cut in half again during the great recession of 2008. How is that for a wealth tax?

Dipped during COVID. Another wealth tax.

Inflation went up when Trump applied the first round of tariffs. Inflation is the ultimate wealth tax.

Went up again when he invaded Iran. Another round of wealth tax.

I saw him in a video saying that he had to sign the "memorandum of understanding" because if he didn't there would be a world-wide depression. So I'm bracing for another round of wealth taxes.

A couple of things happened. One, the Supreme Court handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and not Al Gore.

Bush did not continue the policies of Clinton. He cut taxes, which increased the deficit, which made interest rates rise, which made the subprime market collapse, which resulted in the worst recession since the great depression.

What gave him political cover to do this was 9/11. He took the opportunity to spend Trillions on oil wars, which we fought for the next 20 years, and which accomplished absolutely nothing.

The result was that for the first time in American history, the next generation had it worse than the previous generation. When I graduated from college, my biggest problem was choosing which stock option package to accept. When my son graduated from college, his biggest problem was deciding which meals to skip to afford his insulin.

Thank goodness Obamacare fixed my son's insulin problem. And Obama wasn't able to get rid of the deficit, but he at least put it on a path where it was shrinking relative to the size of the economy.

I can't bear to rehearse what the Trump administration has done. Absolutely incalculable damage to the budget, the deficit, civil discourse, our international goodwill, and to the rule of law.

It's hard to even convince people how bad it is, because nobody under the age 40 even really understands what a functional government and economy looks like.

Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.

There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.

Amen. We can't normalize autonomous AI agents killing us as part of their nominal operation.

This seems obvious.....

// The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power //

There must be a dictatorship of the proletariat, because they obviously don't know what's good for them....

If I could see the future well enough to answer those questions, I'd be a bitcoin billionaire.

A high tech company store.

I'm so old I remember the first oil crisis of the 1970's. That was a "before" and "after" event: the world has never been the same. Double-digit inflation. Dad bought a house and took on a 14% mortgage.

If the straight of Hormuz isn't opened in the next few weeks, stock markets are going to start to crash.

Beautiful! Thank you!

Don't think of it as a government subsidy....think of it as more like a single-payer wage system.

An AI generated course? And of course the fictional professor's name is "Amit Patel".

I really hate this timeline.

Half make *more* than $1000 a month?? Not bad odds for a not bad amount of extra income.

I have done my fair share of misunderestimating before, but I've never been off by that much.

It is a very bad idea. The reason which people who stand in judgement over other people (e.g. judges, teachers, professors, etc) are granted tenure is to make them less tempted to bribery.

One way which professors are bribed these days is to do pay-for-play research papers. A particularly good vehicle for this is "meta-analysis." There are meta-analysis papers which purport to prove that, say, masks don't help stop an airborne-transmitted disease, or that vaccines don't work or are actually harmful....

Garbage in, sprinkle some "meta-analysis math" and...garbage out in sheep's clothing.

In a system which is so cutthrought, and in which brining in research grant money is so prioritized, the temptation to do these sorts of dishonest papers is very high.

Without tenure, there is no end to this kind of pressure. Professors will never feel comfortable pursuing long-term research, or even useful short-term reseaarch.

// I showed that to be incorrect. I followed the evidence, where you followed your gut. //

Even the authors of the original article didn't claim this was evidence of conflict between the species. They only claimed that it was evidence consistent with conflict between the species.

You are extrapolating far, far, beyond what the evidence would support.

There's one bone which is fractured in a way which is *consistent* with its being caused by a homo sapiens-style rock hitting it.

And nobody is claiming that we never got into the pleistocene version of a bar fight. Of course we did. Perhaps the bone mentioned in the article you cited was the result of such a fight. Perhaps not.

We have no evidence whatsoever of war between the species. None. Zero. A bar fight is not a war. And we have absolutely no evidence of any kind of genocidal berzerking. Any attempt to recruit the Assyrians or the rapists of Nanjing is anachronistic. That kind of warfare requires social coordination on the a scale which we wouldn't even invent until the Assyrians.

sigh it is an easy mistake to make---the evidence is consistent with what you want to believe. Therefore, it must support what you believe. :-( You have to resist the temptation. The more you want something to be true, the more suspicious you should be that it isn't true.

Thanks for the reference, and I don't want to overstate my case. I'm certainly not claiming that there was no conflict between varieties of humans, after all, Homo Sapiens has plenty of conflict with itself. Oetzi, for example, died of arrow wounds.

The cited article certainly is evidence of conflict. The Neanderthal's bone lesion was consistent with the kinds of bone lesions on pig carcases from projectile weapons, so perhaps even interspecies conflict. Maybe.

But the original claim, that Homo Sapiens conducted some kind of uncanny valley-fueled genocide of every other variety of human, is not supported by the article. "Injuries consistent with war" are also injuries consistent with with not-war. I mean, if we had a single example of a neanderthal bone with an arrowhead in it....but we don't.

// We also took women as prizes of war and raped them //

There is absolutely no evidence of this. You've got to remember, every single Neanderthal fossil we've ever found could fit on a large dining room table. They lived light on the land, and left hardly a trace.

There probably was only on the order of 10k Neanderthals alive at any one point, and that population was spread over all of Europe and half of Asia. The vast majority of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals would go their whole lives, generations, without even seeing a member of the other species.

We can speculate, but that's all it is, speculation. Theories of the "uncanny valley" and raids by women-raping, spear-throwing humans are fanciful, and say a lot more about what our psychological hang ups are. Cf. with historical speculations about Neanderthals as brutish and stupid. Any theory which gets too far ahead of the evidence has a very short shelf life.

Every part is unsubstantiated. For starters, for the vast majority of H. Sapiens existence on earth--from 300,000 years ago to about 45,000 years ago, we shared the world with 4 or 5 other hominids that we know about. (Neanderthal, Denisoven, H. Luzonensis, H. Floresiensis, and still perhaps a few H. Erectus, and no doubt even more we haven't found yet.)

That's 250,000 years of coexistence. We know that we sheboinked with at least two other species, probably more, because we still carry their genes to this day. So much so that it couldn't have been just a sheboink or two; we sheboinked over extended periods of time, i.e. we formed families with Neanderthals and Denisovens.

We have no evidence of warfare between the species. I.E. We have found no Neanderthal skull with an arrowhead in it, for example. Besides the fact that we are the only ones left, I don't see any substantiation at all.

It is a mystery why they are not still here. But the last 50,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, has been very hard on human species, for some reason. We are the only humans left, what every got them might get us too if we let it.

Smaller salaries can lead to happier lives. Lower standards of living can lead to happier lives. Spending less on food can lead to happier lives. Less education can lead to happier lives.

There's just so much valorization of poverty going on.

Plucking a head of state and his wife out of a military compound and whisking them away to NY, without losing a single vehicle or soldier's life, is the opposite of incompetence.

I am no fan of the current administration, but we just have to stop thinking about them as incompetent. They are incredibly competent, they just don't have any particular interest in helping out 99% of the population.

I don't understand, can you expand/explain?

:-( I really don't want to be negative here, but really, the essay gets off on the wrong foot almost immediately. Propositional knowledge, i.e. knowledge which is described by true/false statements, just cannot be conscious experience.

Jackson's thought experiment sets this up. Mary has lived her life entirely in a black and white room, has never seen any other colors. But she's put the time to good use: she has learned every true proposition about how the brain works, how it processes dolors, even detailed descriptions of the neural processes which give rise to the conscious experienced of color.

After this, somebody at long last brings red rose into the room. Question: has Mary learned anything? Answer, no. By hypothesis, she already knows every true proposition about her present experience of the rose.

But what she does have is a non-propositional conscious experience which she's never had before. This has to be the correct answer, because of the work of another Philosopher, Wilfred Sellars. His (in)famous essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" gives a knock-down argument that conscious experiences of things like color cannot have propositional content. They are not like sentences, they are more like rocks and trees, i.e. real objects, but they cannot be true or false, and therefore they cannot be propositions.

Alas, reading the essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is a journey that many start, but few finish :-( It is very definitely the hardest thing to understand that I ever read. But indeed, it does inescapably prove that proposition just can't be used to make conscious experiences.

Why do these sorts of screeders never remember that China is an explicitly Marxist country? Like, with 5 year plans and everything?

Can't speak for everybody, but maybe it has something do with hundreds of thousands of us being laid off, and we're just too busy trying not to go under.