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I care about consequences, not about feeling smarter than other people. I care about policies, not candidates. In particular I believe that policies like “Defund the NSF” are bad, actually.

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That's a great example. NSF funding (as of 2023) is < $10 billion. So the money spent shipping weapons to Ukraine could have funded it for decades. The money spent on Iraq or Afghanistan could have funded it for centuries. But in modern politics we simply accept that politicians will endlessly blow money like this, and we then content ourselves with fighting over the table scraps that are left over for whatever our pet interests happen to be, while framing those scraps as representing the most important existential crises to have ever existed.

Don't you see how comically dysfunctional this is? If you took the amount of money we spend and actually optimized it for outcomes, the possibilities are unimaginable. But we simply are incapable of electing the sort of people who could do this, because succeeding in politics is mostly just legal corruption (and illegal, but hey that's what pardons are meant for!) on a massive scale where everybody wants their bellies buttered to the point that suddenly government receipts of $5+ trillion dollars, $14k+ for every single man/woman/child, is literally not enough to maintain the basic operation of government. All the while our 'public servants' somehow get filthy rich in office. It's just lol.

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