An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.
And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
An unnecessarily cynical take. What this is implying is that, in the absence of any morals, evil provides a selective advantage.
And yet, pro-social behavior has evolved many times independently through natural selection.
We aren’t a nation of nerds, I doubt we ever were, but nerds really ought to create a support system for each other. I understand why people care so much about which school district they are in. It’s as much about a culture of curiosity as test scores.
Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.
For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.
Others could probably come up with additional examples.
2)
a) PE is owned mostly by pension firms that the public has a huge stake in. Billionaires have stake mostly in their own companies rather than in PE firms.
b) AI investment for job displacement is necessary for overall prosperity and efficiency.
Clearly, it's a good thing that literally every US tax law passed in the last half-century has reduced taxes on the wealthy then.
I don't think anyone's asking to return to the pre-Reagan era where the top tax bracket was 90%, but rolling back some of the absurd tax cuts in the Bush and Trump eras only make sense, given how much they ratcheted up deficits while doing absolutely nothing to improve the economy.
I believe Betteridge's law of headlines [1] applies here:
No.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Diplomatically, embassies count as the soil of the country they represent and thus subject to the jurisdiction of said country. As a result, a child born to a foreign diplomat present in the US would not be granted citizenship. Similarly, a US ambassador (to Germany, for example) is treated as still subject to US jurisdiction, and by extension, any children of theirs would automatically become US citizens.
A person who entered the US illegally is still subject to US jurisdiction (or else they couldn't be violating US immigration law), so any children they have are citizens. The proper ways to address that are to a) prevent them from entering illegally in the first place, b) fix immigration law so they don't have to enter illegally, and/or c) add a constitutional amendment modifying the 14th amendment to explicitly deny citizenship to children born to parents who are here illegally.
Tell that to anyone who was hoping to upgrade their RAM or build a new system in the near future.
Tell that to anyone who's seen a noticeable spike in electricity prices.
Tell that to anyone who's seen their company employ layoffs and/or hiring freezes because management is convinced AI can replace a significant portion of their staff.
AI, like any new technology, is going to cost resources and growing pains during its adoption. The important question which we'll only really know years or decades from now is whether it is a net positive.
I didn't check your math here, but if that's true, AI datacenter spending is a few orders of magnitude larger than I assumed. "massive" doesn't even begin to describe it
nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3].
While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one.
1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181
2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ
3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...
How's that? Beyond some level of care I suspect demand drops of a cliff. No one goes to the doctor for the fun of it.
When giving the option of parting ways with some more money or dying, virtually no one is going to choose the latter.
Unfortunately, the US healthcare system is set up to extract maximum capital from people who interact with it. Worse: it's not alone. For example, the reason food in the US has so much sugar, salt, and fat in it is that the food industry has carefully engineered processed foods to be more addictive so people will buy more of it.
We live in one of the most exploitative societies in the world, and it's only getting worse over time.
You say: "One achieved it, but the other person in similar circumstances didn't achieve it"
Well how do their circumstances differ? Don't you think it's important how they differ? Actually, couldn't how they differ be the key?
Why, then, do you draw the line at an incomplete analysis? Maybe because it is convenient? Maybe because we'd rather not destroy our illusions of ourselves? Maybe its convenient not to understand others?
What is real in regards to ones self and others? There shouldn't be a loss of pride with understanding.
Let's take a person who made it rich betting big on bitcoin early on. Were they a savvy investor who made their own fortune, did they merely think it sounded cool and thought why not while bitcoin prices were so low that snatching them up was super cheap, did they rely on a tip or tips from friends/family, or was it some other reason?
If you come back and ask them years later after they've become worth 10^7 or better, how likely is the person who merely got lucky to admit it was dumb luck in an environment that lionizes the wealthy as self-made superhumans?
Congress is expected to make laws. End of story. Chevron Deference allows them to reduce their own liability and burden by rubberstamping opinion into law. That is a tremendous problem. Congress' core directive is to protect our rights. Not restrict them. Industry plants have a much easier time infesting regulatory bodies through revolving door policies, regulatory bodies change with every administration, and regulatory bodies are not held to a standard of rigor that approaches 1/10th of the worst quality scientific journal. That is a major problem. The first thing any true tactical politician will do is move his or her favorite industry plants into regulatory bodies. Then, they can give "opinion" that aligns with the view of that person, which is then rubberstamped into law.
If we cannot expect congress to do their job our government has failed it's absolute simplest purpose. There are then much greater problems than whether turtles are choking on can holders.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sen-jim-inhofe-climate-change-i...