datsci_est_2015

Sure, personally I think Krugman is a bit abrasive and political when he could be a bit more refined in his delivery. But, then again he probably wouldn’t get the clicks and the traction he’s gotten over his career.

But most people I know who don’t like Krugman are generally against monetary policy, as he’s one of the biggest mainstream proponents.

Why do you think the IRS is structured the way it is? Zuck and his cohort regularly contribute to defang the IRS. Or did you miss the part where he donated to the president and then the IRS became significantly less capable of going after the largest tax avoiders?

> This is not about Zuck it's about the IRS and probable political interference.

This is not about Zuck, it's just about the probable political interference that Zuck funded.

Important context to add is that those who benefit from such tax breaks turn around and fund with their disproportionate, ill-gotten gains the very candidates who you say we should really be upset with. They also fund the media companies, both social and traditional, that are the propaganda for the status quo. They don't benefit from these laws that create loopholes in a vacuum - they're the very reason the laws continue to have loopholes in the first place!

As they say, "No war except class war", I think we are perfectly justified in being upset with the names in the headlines.

I didn't interpret his explanations that inflation wasn't bad, but that it wasn't linked to more structural economic issues. It was due to the shock of Covid, and then the macroeconomic policies that tried (and very much succeeded, if you take other countries as counterexamples) to limit the medium- and long-term damage.

To compare and contrast, much of the current wave of inflation can be traced to tariffs and conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, which is mostly self-inflicted and based on strongman politics. I would maybe argue even those aren't necessarily structural issues, as they could be relatively solved overnight, theoretically.

True structural economic issues are scenarios like the 2008 GFC.

tl;dr you've provided a poor reason to not be listening to Krugman, and you probably have more reasons than what you're letting on.

I don't know. I don't have anything intelligent to say about this. I was actually hoping someone else did. The most I can muster is that we're deep into "Great Man" territory and it's deeply annoying. Hegseth comes from the media world so perception is of paramount importance to him, so it's right to be skeptical about a big announcement like this that creates a big splash - does it really have merit, or is it all about optics?

Interesting lack of conversation on this topic. Former Uber executive was tapped as well.

Meh, I’d agree with the OP. American culture has rotted significantly, especially over the past 10 years. The micro cultures within the US are great, though, for the most part. Many cities, states, and regions with a lot to be proud of. But what “America” represents right now, culturally, is deeply antisocial and can’t be sustainable: it’s self-destructive.

Idk I’m getting pretty tired of pretending things are fine because line goes up. Feel like the first thing I’m going to do when we jump the proverbial shark (e.g. a military coup) is come onto this forum and say a big, fat told you so to the technocratic optimists siding with the fascists. Unfortunately the slide into a failed state (like Russia) is slow and depressing, rather than sudden and exciting.

Isn’t technology defined by how things can be used by humans, I.e. tools? Horses can’t use smartphones, and a “smartphone” designed for a horse would look significantly different. Seems a like a nonsensical argument based on the definition of words. Technology is what humans can use to achieve tasks.

The paradox of tolerance fits in here somehow, assuming the commenter you replied to means that the left sometimes excludes people. That’s by design.

That’s not what I said but okay. In Illinois, for example, vehicle registration is handled by ILSOS, not the DMV. Vehicle registration is just one of the many things that ILSOS handles. The entirety of the digital modernization budget for 2026 for ILSOS is (based on cursory searches) $35M. Illinois is one of the larger of the jurisdictions. And one of the higher quality web experiences, probably, as I’ve never had an issue.

Non-interactive websites (that don’t even accept payments) are undoubtedly run on a shoestring budget unless there is a specific case of grifting or corruption. In which case we’re not talking about websites anymore but American grifting culture.

The ACA website is one of the nicest government websites I ever had to use. I assumed the commenter was referencing something like a local Secretary of State website used to update their vehicle registration, which probably goes to the lowest bidder and costs maybe $100k to $1m over its 25+ year lifetime.

We’ll probably never know the true “cost” of America.gov because even if Google is doing it “for free” then they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s a regulatory angle that they’re trying to play or a market they’re trying to corner.

Reminds me of the aesthetics of technological progress inherent to fascist governments of the 20th century. The purpose, or even the material benefit, of any given industrial initiative was not as important as how it affected the perception of the government’s power.

The aesthetics of “America.gov” are off the charts. You can see the fawning in this thread. The practicality is modest in comparison.

Well, seeing as this one probably cost 4 to 5 (10?) orders of magnitude more than any gov website you may be thinking of…

> There are also plenty of people who don't do anything and siphon off value

True, I forgot the whole category of rent-seekers. And grifters as well. Liars. Cheats. Snake-oil salesmen.

Boy this is fun.

To clarify, when I asked

> Why are you taking it so personally?

I was talking about the part of your comment where you literally say:

> It's my fault they did it I bet?

The whole point of my comment is an observation that for some reason conservatives, including yourself (despite your voting record?) have a visceral negative reaction to being informed about how the society they participate in has demons that they are - by virtue of being part of that society - partially responsible for. It doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty about things I do not have an inordinate amount of personal responsibility for, but I do feel guilty whenever I know that there’s something I could do but don’t - usually out of laziness or convenience. But I chalk that up to having a conscience.

What’s a typical concrete outcome from this workflow? Is it saving you time, or money? Because if you buy the $2500 flight when a $2000 flight is available and you just have to scroll down the page, that’s not $500 that you’ve saved…

Reminds of the “girl math” meme that’s trending amongst millennials and younger: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boy-math-girl-math

> It's my fault they did it I bet?

Why are you taking it so personally? It’s funny you say you’re leftwing, but this comment screams that you’re deep into the rabbit hole being pushed by the right that there should be no personal accountability for societal failures. The same rabbit hole that is pushing “uncomfy” topics out of schools so white kids don’t feel guilty about slavery.

Which, is honestly a great strategy. It’s an echo of the libertarian right that has fizzled out under Trump. Erase all of the wrongdoings of political conservativism because conservatives shouldn’t have to demonstrate self-reflection or empathy. That would get in the way of being conservative.

> What is also missing here is that even if there is not criminal activity occurring, there is a general influx of highly anti-social behavior occurring that feeds in to the perception that higher rates of criminal activity occurring.

This counts for white collar crime too. And unethical behavior that’s technically legal because the scales of justice haven’t tipped yet, like predatory payday loans.

The social contract isn’t only being broken by petty criminals that do things like steal hardware tools, but also those who come in to your firm that you’ve worked for for 8 years and fired you without cause because they’re some Jack Welch acolyte.

Tools cost a few hundred bucks at most. Jack Welch bastards siphon millions or even billions in aggregate from the working class, one dismissal at a time.

Nope, but alcohol consumption was a lot higher, as well as domestic violence. And race-based violence. And opiate production hadn’t industrialized yet.

Given the public policy of the 50s, if the Sacklers had been around, I would imagine a much higher death toll and much more damage to the public welfare than the opiate epidemic of the 2000s.

Probably would’ve put the Opium Wars to shame.

Citizen is also nakedly a rightwing propaganda platform. Its primary value proposition is to create fear and a paranoia to boost tough-on-crime politics. Just because it’s an app doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda. The users are the product.

Until it’s your civil liberties being infringed upon and you have no recourse against the faceless authoritarian bureaucracy propped up by a fallible surveillance system owned and operated by racists and bigots.

Edit: we’ll be arguing about “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” for the rest of time, won’t we.

Furthermore, in a way that’s conveniently equivalent to ethnically cleansing the land.

Yeah, if anything I feel as if I’m working twice as hard for the same pay. I’m working through 10 “concepts” per week rather than 5 “concepts”. It’s like taking an accelerated university course (Calc 1&2 or Chem 1&2) except it’s every day for the rest of my career.

Context matters here. Are you a freelance website designer? Are you a CRUD app codemonkey? Do you work for a glorified data integrator, maybe in the healthcare industry? Are you an embedded engineer? Do you write code that if something goes wrong someone will die?

I can also ship slop if the stakes are 0. The code I write has stakes. Thousands of dollars per false positive, which happens to be approximately the entire margin that we’re operating within. If a false positive occurs and I can’t explain it because I shipped slop, then it’s curtains for me - and our contract.

The linked definition doesn’t unequivocally support your argument.

Good thing GOTO was the only footgun that was ever invented in a formal programming language.

> Human knowledge is compressed in the weightspace in ways we don't understand. At their core, current models are essentially predictors of what (expert) humans would output given a prompt.

I’m in agreement. It’s a very effective compression (and access patterns) of the sum of the digital representation of human knowledge. Black hat “hacking” is included in this space. Language models, by design, can not be limited to subspaces of this digital knowledge space of which we don’t even understand the topology. “Yeah Bob, just remove the part that causes them to be less empathetic and retrain it.”

It’s an arms race between sandbox engineering and breakout engineering. And the frontier model providers have a financial incentive to limit the effort they put into sandbox engineering. That can be corrected with fines and regulation, though.

Okay what happens when an AI agent hacks a children’s hospital and turns off the all the ventilators? “Lol whoops”?

What about power infrastructure?

There’s uncountably many ways to cause severe economic (and public welfare!) damage with malicious code generated irresponsibly with language models.

Cool, this will be added to harnesses and then it’ll stop being effective and we’ll move on to the next magical incantation.