If our markets weren’t corrupt, everyone in the AI space would be bankrupt by now, and we could all wander down to the OpenAI fire sale and buy nice servers for pennies on the dollar.
I'd take this more seriously if I didn't hear the same thing every other time there was a spike in VC investment. The last 5 times were the next dot com booms too.
The side that thinks vaccines are a hoax, RFK Jr discovered the cause of autism, wants to burn up satellites we’ve already paid for because the carbon numbers are bad, suggested injecting bleach (remember that?), stared at the solar eclipse, constantly makes noise about how women should have fewer rights and maybe the 10 commandments belong in school… are not who you want in charge of science funding. Obviously.
Remember the sharpie path of the hurricane? No need for a supercomputer, we’ve got sharpie.
Team “windmills cause cancer” obviously isn’t better for science, get real.
If we’re using the federal government to shut down comedians, I think we have more in common with China/Russia/N. Korea? Especially when you consider illegally using the military to murder boats full of civilians, and banishment (not deportation) to random places.
Since the left has moved so far left, and Trump is closer to historical center, I believe the West is now closer to what it's been from a historical perspective.
I'd agree that the FCC's threat exceeded their authority. But between Kimmel's factually-stated (and sick) assertion, which opens ABC/Disney to defamation claims, and massive public and affiliate backlash, ABC faced concrete distribution risk, hence placing him on indefinite leave (not fired).
The techno-libertarians I’ve interacted with were always painfully naive, with a simplistic worldview (that they thought was extremely learn’ed - mistaking their technical skill for broad intellect that understood politics to be “simple”).
If they haven’t grown up thus far, I doubt yet another logical inconsistency will puncture their shallow and hermetic understanding.
Or as I read it somewhere, “We’ve created a group of technical people who can solve any technical problem but can’t explain why Nazism is bad.”
The only thing that might pierce that veil is this: they believed they were not workers, but more like a priestly class, “self made” but immune to the travails of “everyone else”. The massive spike in layoffs, the economic slump, our increased taxes (via tariff), the rights erosions - might get them to recognize their mistake in understanding, but only if it strikes them personally (this gets back to the naïveté mentioned above).
As we’ve learned from victims of pig butchering scams, denial of the obvious runs very, very deep. Pride and confidence and lack of self reflection will make it very difficult for Trump voters to change their minds.
We don’t have a moral or civil society anyway; we can’t even prosecute Trumps numerous illegal actions (even when convicted!). Can’t get the Epstein files. Can’t even point out Charlie Kirk was not a great person (while politicians said nothing about the school shooting the same day), and where it’s legal to kill 40,000 of us a year due to poor medical coverage so we can prop up the stock.
I’m not sure, given the moral dystopia we currently inhabit, what positive benefit would accrue from removing online anonymity?
Didn’t the President of the United States say he didn’t care about bringing the people together, and has wished violence upon people who don’t support him politically?
Where do you think this comes from, and, rather than arm ourselves with similarly martial language, we should be expected simply to lie flat?
Such a powerful message Trump sent when the very first thing he did in January after the inauguration was to pardon the people who tried to murder his vice president and did beat cops with an American flag. He pardoned people convicted in a court of law of seditious conspiracy against the United states. That was a permission slip.
So I agree, there's a direct line from the political violence on J6, to the political violence we see today. If there is any lingering doubt, the the message from the President is clear: he literally said he doesn't consider violence from the right to be a problem. Right wing extremists are just people trying to reduce what they see as crime, according to him.
This is an administration that once had a man who, during a meeting about deportations attended by department lawyers, in response to what would be done if the courts rejected their rationale, said "Fuck the courts."
This man is no longer part of the administration. But not because he was fired for this blatant disregard for the judicial branch. It's because he was nominated to be a judge (and the Senate confirmed him).
When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.
We don’t need “the elite” - they don’t actually “create jobs”, and the “engine of the economy” is just a convenient vehicle for the rich (and private equity) to ruin the middle class further - it was never about “efficient markets”.
If anything what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is that we need better systems.
There is some benefit from having a pool of people with enough funds to take investment risks that the rank and file can't. They can outmaneuver any planned economy. The problem in the US is that those people have engineered themselves a disproportionate wealth disparity that doesn't generate a collective benefit.
That used to be “industrial policy” - it doesn’t need to be individuals at all. In fact it shouldn’t be - they’re concerned with returns, not jobs and certainly not with any technology that requires a longer timespan to complete.
The Biden administration had excellent industrial policy. Trump had the government steal a 10% share of Intel.
Watching people realize he’s just a criminal loser has been heartening.
That's a novel take on diversity, but I think your window is too small. The US was full of similar anti-immigrant sentiment a century ago, directed at southern and eastern European new arrivals. Today no one is calling for Poles and Italians to be deported. The "melting pot" can work, if no one is actively trying to kick it over.
Considering our success so far, it’s obvious it’s succeeding. You’d have to ignore your eyes and ears to think a multiracial secular democratic country can succeed.
What’s amazing is that racists seem to be trying to screw it up on purpose, then to claim it doesn’t work. “Starve the beast” but for social cohesion. They’re always surprised when they get bitten by the monster they created.
The rich never had “noblesse oblige” - we used to shoot at the factory owner when they didn’t pay us.
I’m not sure what to do with such a limited understanding of history and such an obvious blind spot as this, but then I remember: you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
The other thing is that different dimensions of the economy and other societal aspect have different lagging effects so you cannot simply assume causation or correlation between things during the same time frame.
There is a big difference between tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (completely legal). Many of the tax shelters and loopholes utilized by the rich when top marginal rates exceeded 50% were completely legit.
Yeah, sure, helicopters is all you need to catch millions of sophisticated tax evaders using semi-legal loopholes developed and implemented by professional accountants and lawyers.
The Laffer Curve is frequently cited by the same people who refuse to see the failure of conservative-style economic policy over the last 40 years, for some reason.
It’s clear all that “don’t tax the rich, they create jobs!” Is just trash. Noise. We have 40 years of data, it doesn’t work.
But still, someone ignores all that to tell me the Laffer Curve, every time. What’s also amazing is that they don’t really understand it themselves. Wild.
So we have 40 years of data that clearly shows that advocating for reasonable tax rates for the wealthy "doesn't work"? I world love to see the detailed analysis that proves that!
Even the most staunch conservative wants the rich to pay their "fair share" of taxes. The only legitimate debate is about what constitutes 'fair'. The flat tax advocates will at least give you a real number (10%, 15%, or even 20%). Progressives will never give you a number. Why?
