quadragenarian

My hope is that all wealth becomes concentrated in the hand of one person, thereby becoming worthless.

I guess one could make the argument that with enough control, a trillionaire could amass a private robot army. But I think regular humans still win (after an epic battle of course).

There are many things you are better at than a machine. Giving love for example. I’d bet your dog or a child would rather spend 5 seconds with you than 5 hours with an LLM.

Because compassion is emotional and they are all emotionally vacuous.

I'm aghast. I guess I'd like to pose a question to you - what is the purpose of your life? I found my purpose years ago, but it took me a while to figure it out. Here it is: the purpose of my life is to give love to others. Through words, through actions. Notice that it's wholly driven from an emotional underpinning, and not related to success, or fame, or money, or what little ephemeral things we humans physically build in our lives.

From that lens, a human driven by this purpose can never have LLMs/AI take any purpose from us. Raising children, helping the needy, and caring for our spouse and parents suddenly becomes divine work. It's work that the world needs. The world does not need more software or more buildings. There is currently a lack of human connection and compassion and care, perhaps bigger than there's been in the history of our world. And that's why I think this purpose should be paramount, especially today in the age we are living in.

Take raising children. If you love your children, if you truly care for them and raise them with compassion and understanding, they will raise their children that way as well. And they will be good human beings. They will be kind. And your love can be a sort of benevolent virus that will ring through the centuries, through the generations ahead.

Ha - I still remember when I worked on the IBEX-Lo Sensor, we had to hand carry it to Switzerland. One lucky member of our team got to fly first class with it because it wouldn't fit in a coach seat!

Keep in mind though that by entering into a 20% down mortgage you are effectively levered up 5x against your local real estate market. So it’s not like you’re totally reducing your risk. Luckily for homeowners, home prices only go up since the GFC so this leverage seems like a good position to be in.

The irony I see here is that she is relatively young. By making these declarations, she and others in this administration are making an implicit bet that there won't be another sensible e.g. law-abiding administration in the future that won't put them in jail.

Politics is a fickle world -- being brazen by breaking laws is a risky business. You might be in charge now, but are you sure your people will always be in charge?

These are the very people who would help him rewrite history that yes he indeed did earn the Nobel Peace Prize as it is obviously and prominently displayed in his office, the words and records of the Nobel committee be damned.

I love how you put that! Suspicious is too gentle of a word.

What about if the administration lays off staff during the shutdown instead of furloughing them? I would think that would not require any compensation.

This already does happen for nighthawk coverage for example where a non-US radiologist will provide a wet read and then a US rad will sign off. The US rad will always bear the liability however.

You do realize that in order to interpret imaging for a US based patient, any physician needs to have a US medical license?

Radiologists are often the ones who are the "brains" of medical diagnosis. The primary care or ER physician gets the patient scanned, and the radiologist scrolls through hundreds if not thousands of images, building a mental model of the insides of the patient's body and then based on the tens of thousands of cases they've reviewed in the past, as well as deep and intimate human anatomical knowledge, attempts to synthesize a medical diagnosis. A human's life and wellness can hinge on an accurate diagnosis from a radiologist.

Does that sounds like an assistance's job?

Interesting - living near a large city, all of the radiologists I know work for hospitals, spending more of their day in the hospital reading room versus home, including performing procedures, even as diagnostic radiologists.

I think it may be selection bias.

So the night before, was he at the wrong venue as well?

Separate from the phone and screen time discussion, you are at an important juncture of your life, a transition to parenthood that could change everything. I say "could" because I fundamentally believe that half of people who have children don't have the self-awareness to change and adjust their habits and emotional state.

One of the monumental realizations for me when I became a parent (not necessarily the first day but over the first 5-7 years) was distinctly what my parents did right and wrong. My dad told me on the phone one day that I shouldn't show my child my feelings, that I should hide any negative feelings and only show positive feelings. And now I see that this is what my father did to me and it constrained my ability to share negative feelings with my friends and family, instead leading to me bottling up negative feelings like anger and sadness.I realize that this is not the correct way to parent, your child should see the full range of human emotions from their parents and although you want to be careful to not put too much emotional burden and stress on them to create an anxious child, you want to also be sure they see you at your best and worst. They should see you discuss your feelings with others and with them and when you lose your temper, as we all do, you should also afterwards rationalize what you were feeling with them, apologize if necessary (and it's usually always necessary because there is no need for any human to lose their temper with another human that's been on the Earth for only a few years).

Any way, I think of parenthood as a journey of self-reflection and improvement, much like childhood. Just like some people have a negative painful childhood, parenthood can be similar. The goal for you is to be open and honest with yourself and your growing family, and to be constantly looking for ways to improve.

Apologies if this sounded like a lecture but wish you the best in what may turn out to be the most important job of your life.

Having had a stint in my youthful life where I studied Technocracy a great deal, I still see some powerful concepts that I can't let go of. The emphasis on standardization and elimination of the price system, even if nothing more than a though experiment on human nature, seemed like worthwhile concepts to consider. Rather than demonize the technocracy movement, I would recommend some investigation into the ideas that underpinned it, especially as we now witness a transition from a limitless growth world to steady state.

Not to be overly pedantic but there are more than 3. It's just 3 that are commonly used in asset management (S&P, Moody's, Fitch). Others include Morningstar DBRS (Dominion Bond Rating Services - rates primary Canadian debt issuers). Kroll is another one (used to be Duff & Phelps).

It's very difficult if not impossible to design a system that allows for a madman to be in charge, because to do so, the system would have to severely curtail the executive's powers which would render him or her useless. The tacit assumption has always been that the voters would not select a madman to run a complex system but here we are.

The value of life isn't your work. Work can be turned off any moment, due to tyrant or recession. Work is fleeting. The value of life is your personal relationships, your family, your own character and ability to deal with difficulty. We don't know what the future will bring, but stay strong, we all have an uphill climb ahead.

Another example of the idea that "treating people like objects" is evil and in fact, is the cause of most evil in the world.

If foreign investors like China dump our debt, prices will go down and yields will go up. As long as we increase our debt ceiling and don’t do anything intentionally crazy like try to renegotiate existing debt (which would be a technical default), we could always issue more treasuries at the higher rates with the caveat that more money will need to be spent servicing the debt, which requires even more debt be issued. A vicious cycle for sure.

New debt would be cheaper. Most US treasuries are fixed rate debt. There may be some FRNs (floating rate notes) floating around (pardon the pun) but not many. Tbills are discount instruments but also wouldn’t be affected until they mature and new ones are issued.

Could you provide more information on what you mean by "repudiated the debt"? Does this mean reneging on US Treasury bonds? Because that's nuclear. That causes fixed income markets to implode and brings upon GFC 2.0.

As someone who's worked at Lincoln Labs, I do wonder if the poster here has considered this. Although, it is worth noting that LL requires citizenship for many/most of its divisions.

As mentioned in the article you linked, the president has a veto over any law to restrict his own tariff powers; the only way to override his or her veto is to pass the law with 2/3rds majority in BOTH chambers, the House and Senate.

That does mean a fair number of Republican Congresspeople would have to join Democrats. This level of cooperation seems to be in itself anathema to Republicans, notwithstanding the actual principle of the bill itself.

I may be wrong but shipping via a third country doesn't work - I believe that Section 301 allows the US to re-assign the correct country of origin. Sure, some product may come in via this trick, but anything at scale would be found out. I doubt anyone in the US would mistake a BYD car from being a product from a country other than China.

I know very little however, so if someone with more knowledge on this can chime in on how this works practically, it would edifying.

I thought I had heard that there were some details on CIA operatives, such as names that were mentioned in the chat as well. Is it possible there is more that Goldberg is still sitting on?

[citation needed]

Assuming this is true, how did they determine what a "top" government official is? So if you're the SecDef you should use it but not the deputy SecDef? How would this guidance not pertain to all government officials?

I worked for an FFRDC on a DARPA project a bit more than a decade ago having to do with communication jammers. It was terribly managed. There were two projects going on at my organization that were basically the same thing but with two different PIs, teams, test beds, etc. We ended up wasting so much time and money doing non-R&D work with very little oversight from DARPA.

I honestly feel that US military money is thrown around like you said in such a fragmented way, that I can't imagine other countries NOT being an order of magnitude more efficient. It kind of reminds me of our healthcare spending and how much we spend but for such little ROI compared to other developed countries.