I’d read Madison’s reply. Everyone knows Jefferson talked a lot of shit. The other founders were used to him. This is him getting emotional in Paris during the French Revolution. He thought the proto-Cult of Reason people were a bunch of crackpots and was worried the same thing was going to happen here.
Phasing out oil and coal production would be great, but that's a task for politics. It is still a collective action problem though since any such agenda needs to gain popular support in a democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
As individuals we can both take some actions to reduce climate impact in our daily lives and also support movements and campaigns for actions on the political level. No contradiction there.
I dunno, haven’t most populations sometimes gone through boom-bust cycles on the order of a few years/decades? It feels a little absurd to consider only a single ecological factor.
I think that most people would like to avoid the population of humans going through a bust. Personally I have no worries about human-induced rapid climate change eliminating life on Earth. I am, however, concerned about it affecting humankind.
I mean the alternate vision isn’t compelling. “AI safety” has a nice ring to it, but the idea seemed to be “everyone just… hang out until we’re satisfied.” Plus it was becoming a bit of a memetic neoreligous movement which ironically defined the apocalypse to be original thought. Not very attractive to innovative people.
I understand where you're coming from, but I suspect the same would have been true of the scientists working for the Manhattan Project. Technology may well be inevitable, but we shouldn't forget that how much care we spend in bringing it to fruition can have absolutely staggering consequences. I'm also more inclined to believe, in this case, that money was the primary issue rather than a sense of challenge. There are after all much more free, open-source AI projects out there for the purely challenge-minded.
You can build a monetary system atop Bitcoin using convertibility. I don’t see what’s so crazy about that. I mean, right now I get paid in fiat controlled by septuagenarians that’s guaranteed to lose value unless I use it to buy assets they own. Plus they tax half. It’s a pretty bad deal for most people.
Bitcoin is extremely deflationary. Imagine (or read a history book) a society in which almost all wealth/income is derived from land (a "deflationary" asset the value of which only increases as population grows and 95%+ of it is inherited).
Bitcoin is that just much worse because unlike in the case of land you don't need labor and significant capital investment to make any money from it you can just hoard it get richer without doing anything, which means:
- no economic growth (why invest in anything economically productive but risky when you can just get richer by doing nothing)
- eventually 90%+ of all wealth will become inherited and people who were born poor/disadvantage will remember these times as a lost utopia.
> It’s a pretty bad deal for most people.
Yes and even if bitcoin is a "better deal" for you it will be a significantly worse deal long term for the people who follow you..
Only if you have a static or economic in permanent recession then yes.
If you have a growing economy (of course not a concern it bitcoin would replace Fiat currencies) it's extremely deflationary. The supply of money has to grow at least at the same pace as the demand for it, otherwise bad things happen...
Eh I guess it’s supposed to be water cooler talk for startup founders. The vibe would be different if people stuck only to what they know. We all know we’re ignorant, but it’s more fun to be interestingly wrong than boringly correct.
I’m not sure if you read their education proposals, but their platform basically boils down to spend less money on public education and instead support charter schools, private schools and home schooling, etc., teach the bible in class, get rid of national educational standards, support abstinence instead of sex Ed, get rid of student counselling for contraception/abortions, get rid of government funded student mental health support, reinterpret Title IX to apply only to women/girls, and privatize the federal student loan program.
None these proposals are very education-forward at all, and are mostly just hot button issues to rile up the base. Each of these policies just decreases educational support and funding. How will any of these policies have any beneficial effect on the quality of education American’s receive?
Don’t even get me started with their stated tax policy. The Republicans’ entire platform on tax reform is to repeal the Johnson amendment, a ban on non-profit political campaign activity that prohibits non-profits (which includes churches) from participating in, or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for political office; and to make the tax code “so simple and easy to understand that the IRS becomes obsolete and can be abolished.”[0] This is a literal quote from the 2016 Republican Platform that you linked. Yeah, let’s just abolish the IRS. That’s a super realistic policy.
Yep, I honestly don’t get how people can seriously read this platform and claim in good faith that these are valid policy positions. The “evidence” they linked to support their claim ended up instead just supporting your original point that they were trying to refute. Agreed. Just completely mad.
My understanding is that flattening the curve was an argument in favor of social distancing and movement restrictions. It predates mask mandates. A properly trained LLM would miss your masking reasoning. See
The bigger problem is an LLM doesn’t have access to things that aren’t written down. Although it may see a bunch of publications popping up declaring “pain is the fifth vital sign” and a bunch of new pain management CME courses, it cannot see the pharmaceutical reps showing up at doctors’ offices to sell Oxycontin.
“Community masking is not aimed to prevent everyone from ever getting infected, the aim is to reduce transmission and ‘flatten the curve’, reducing peak healthcare demand, or to work in combination with other measures like social distancing to contain transmission in the short-term.”
A politician is an elected official or somebody who is active in party politics. The WHO director is elected, and the current CDC director who founded Doctors for Obama is active in party politics.
