Dig1t

I have met many people in the US who have this opinion, absolutely. Even on this site you can find them easily. Heck some of my own family hold this opinion!

I don’t really care about abortion as an issue, I am simply making the point that the people who wrote this article would probably make two contradictory arguments: “My body my choice” and also “my body but NOT my choice because this choice is icky and it looks too much like a free market”.

My point is not about risk, my point is about giving up something which you cannot get back. Most surrogacy pregnancies don’t need C-sections and are normal uncomplicated births. The surrogate receives money + other benefits and can continue to live a normal healthy life with no change to her wellbeing after she gives birth.

If you are talking about risk, many transactions in life carry some risk. Your Uber Eats driver risks his life getting in the car or motorbike to bring you your Chipotle burrito. An oil rig worker daily risks heavy machinery injury in exchange for money. We accept that consenting adults are capable of accepting some risk.

Additionally: agencies do everything they can to mitigate medical risks as well. Intended parents are required to purchase good medical insurance for the surrogate if they don’t have any.

There’s an obvious difference between the two: having a baby is not the same as giving away an organ.

Humans have a finite number of organs which they need to live. You are selling a finite resource and doing so has concrete drawbacks for the seller.

Having a baby does not give up anything. It is a win-win. Surrogates in the US are asked if they are done personally having children. The agency won’t let someone be a surrogate (usually) unless they affirm they are done having children of their own.

As an aside: a highly regulated market for organs would probably be a net positive for society. It would increase the total supply of organs and decrease demand for black market organ harvesting. It would almost certainly save many lives every year.

What happened to “my body my choice”?

These same people would have no problem with women having an abortion up to the day of birth, but if a woman wants to voluntarily have someone else’s baby, it’s unethical?

The motivation here seems mostly like a vague disgust at the concept rather than any concrete criticism of the system’s implementation.

>I’m not sure the U.S. model is the right one, but what it needs is some regulation. It looks too much like a free market. It looks like livestock trading.

Surrogates are treated incredibly well throughout the entire process. Not only do they make a large amount of money, but they are often showered with gifts throughout the process. Insurance is purchased for them if they don’t already have it.

The entire process takes up to a year of bureaucracy, medical screenings, and planning.

There’s nothing exploitative about the implementation of surrogacy in the United States. I say this as someone who is intimately familiar with the process.

His competitors already have economies of scale, they are incumbent carmakers that build tens of millions of cars every year.

Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?

If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.

This seems dumb to me, but if it will help prevent regulatory capture by providing a counterargument to the fear-mongering, I’m all for it.

Assuming you are talking about climate change: isn’t Tesla doing more than anyone to electrify everything and help fix the problem?

The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.

The USA has gone from 90% white -> 50% in one generation. Social trust is rapidly declining as a result. Just like South Africa, which is the global epicenter of low-trust crimes like copper theft, we are seeing a rise in these types of crimes.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...

The poorest Americans do actually have free healthcare (medicaid). It currently covers 40% of all children in the US and generally covers the bottom 25% of Americans. In places like California and New York the state level benefits are even better and apply regardless of immigration status (illegals get free healthcare).

Free addiction care: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/free

Most Americans live in a state that has excellent free addiction care, especially in the major population centers like California and New York.

Housing via emergency housing and subsidized section 8 housing:

https://www.usa.gov/emergency-housing

https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/housing-choice-voucher...

Heck they even get free/cheap subsidized cell phones and internet service: https://www.lifelinesupport.org/

I am responding directly to your comment about their mission statement.

I am saying that most Americans would agree that these types of grants go directly against their mission statement.

>to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare, and to secure the national defense

Equity and diversity initiatives are almost always blatantly racist and discriminatory by definition. They are also rife with ethnic favoritism and ingroup collusion.

Giving taxpayer money to people to "foster gender equity" by definition means you are giving money to try and advantage one group of people based on immutable characteristics (gender).

I find it telling that many of the people who lampoon these cuts make a point to never actually talk about the specific grants themselves, but like to keep the discussion at a higher level and discuss how "scientists" are going to leave in droves to go study in Europe instead of the USA.

>Examining Undergraduate Research Experiences of Latinx STEM Students in Research Intensive HSIs and Emerging-HSIs

>[this project] will undertake a comparative study of undergraduate research experiences for Latinx students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) using an asset-based framework and Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology and the "platicas methodology"

If you went on CNN and discussed how funding is being cut for "comparitive studies using feminist epistemolgy", the majority of Americans would be fine with it. In fact a huge portion of Americans would likely say that cutting these types of grants actually advances the NSF's mission statement by cutting out racist and divisive programs that center on specific ethnic groups.

Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research".

"fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.

Go check out the grants which were cancelled:

https://grantwitness.org/nsf

Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)

>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools

>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.

>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers

>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.

>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty

>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers

Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.

What font is used in the technical drawing part? It's very cool.

I thought these cameras were only used to read license plates. What happened to that discussion?

I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

It's like we've had this ancient knowledge passed down for generations but people constantly just ignore it.

Absolutely, there’s a reason as well why the VC’s funding these defense tech startups are so pro H1B. It guarantees them a compliant workforce who can’t easily quit, ask for higher wages, or complain about things like genocide.

Well we're talking about new types of capabilities here, Sarin is a chemical which can be manufactured with a basic understanding of chemistry and searching with google.com. AI will not allow bad actors to do anything they couldn't have done already with google's 10 blue links.

Again the same logic applies though, it takes significant effort and money to create sarin, it requires a lot of rigor. That is the limiting factor, not the knowledge of how to make it.

If we are worried about people making sarin in their garage we can do many things to control the supply of chemicals needed to make it. We don't need to try to restrict knowledge of chemistry.

"regulation of current models" basically implies that open source models will be heavily restricted if not banned outright and guarantees that intelligence will be owned and gatekept by a duopoly.

Thank goodness someone wrote this, I was also thinking about writing an article like this.

This is such a massively overblown worry that AI companies who are seeking regulatory capture love to roll out whenever they are trying to gin up some FUD.

Creating viruses at home is extremely difficult, even if you have a perfect instruction manual and someone sitting behind you telling you what to do. It's full of trial and error and validating each step requires rigor.

It's also a process which requires fairly expensive and specific supplies, which can be easily gatekept. Instead of trying to gate-keep knowledge of biology, we can do things like KYC around specific types of lab supplies (like we already do with fertilizer which can make bombs, or specific types of supplies needed to make nukes). Heck the Biden admin already added a KYC requirement for plasmids and plasmid companies already have implemented screening for sequences which could be dangerous.

This is not crazy at all for anyone from the Bay Area. A rundown house in a not so great part of the bay is seven figures minimum. 75k is a typical bonus at a company like Facebook or Google. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of tech workers that are at this level of wealth.

ctrl-f search for "Israel"

Yeah there's a strong theme in this letter.

These robots are 2 feet tall and don’t come equipped with weapons.

Genuinely curious how you are saying they are dangerous? Are they more or less dangerous than a human with a gun?

In what way are they not safe?

Unless you strap a gun to one (which they are not doing afaik) how could they actually cause harm to a human?

Hopefully Mount McKinley will stay. It was named that in 1896 and held that name until Obama decided to make a political statement.

Do we the people get to elect the people in this new branch of government? What recourse do we have if they stop serving our interests?

This is still a useful first step. Once “flock” becomes eponymous and a toxic political football, it can be applied to all future companies who do the same thing.

The word “Flock” is quickly becoming toxic, in the future we’ll be able to use it as a shorthand for all companies of this type. e.g. if I call something a cleanex everyone knows what I’m talking about regardless of whether Cleanex the company actually made the item being referred to. Similarly we’ll be able to just say “flock camera” and everyone will know what it is regardless of who makes the camera.

Notice how CNN frames this in a pretty favorable way towards Flock. They claim the cameras are only for license plates even though they can and are used for other things. They don’t mention at all the fact that the general public does not like being spied on, or trading away privacy.

They frame it as just needing some tweaks like changing the data retention policy.

At the end of the day I think these media orgs are biased somewhat in favor of mass surveillance.

It will definitely get a lot more biased when the Warner Bros Discovery merger goes through.

>I was concerned that they would fail to modernise into a world that is quite different now than 13 years ago

What do you mean by this? In what way has the world changed that you thought they might fail to capture?

Most right wingers are fine with that. As the recent GTA 6 leak shows, companies that embrace offshoring too eagerly learn the hard way that not all jobs can be sent to the other side of the planet.

It's an obvious thing that anyone can understand, any group of people on the planet would behave the same way. It is natural to oppose becoming a minority, minorities are treated poorly and marginalized, by dint of human nature. The data showing it's happening are undeniable, the only way to defeat the argument is to shut it down by labeling the people who make it as hateful.