3,129 karma · joined November 26, 2023
Why? When you see a derelict pizzeria, you don't think "they must be devoting all their energy to making good pizzas!". Similarly, that a coffee shop owner uses AI for branding is a big signifier of their laziness or lack of attention to detail.
I don't understand why they still insist on inserting this line in every talk about advertising. Just be honest and address your piece to advertisers, no need to keep doing this pathetic and laughable sugarcoating.
> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
It makes me so mad. The Paris public transportation company (RATP) owns not one but two whole apps. Yet, whenever there's an incident they immediately reach for X (on which I can't access their posts), while their apps lag behind.
As far as I'm concerned, my government should issue a blanket ban on public actors using social medias for communication.
We are always downstream of a past violence. Let's stop with the simplistic "they started it, so we are allowed to kill thousands of them", and maybe then we can start building a better world.
Well, that led me down a wild rabbithole.
When you see a leaky pipe, you don't think to build a second one coming from a different faucet (with more expensive water) before fixing the first pipe. It really is that simple. But anyway, unto the larger picture.
> You're getting close. What causes the demand for these middlemen that the well capitalized financial interests (for profit schools and the like) seek to make buck creating?
> Say I get a borderline bullshit degree as a civil engineer from one of these degree mills. That qualifies me for an entry level job double checking beam calcs or drafting cookie cutter site plans. Where does demand for such services arise?
What? No, that's not the source of the bloat. Much more income is generated via capital gains than though salaries, today. Shareholders are the "middlemen" I was referring to, not the workers trying to put food on their table. Everything is inefficient because everything is designed to provide 4% growth yoy to shareholders, when this is completely impossible to achieve in a sustainable way!
Teachers in for-profit schools are severely underpaid, where do the ludicrous tuitions go? In buybacks and dividends, and other fluff like sport teams and stadiums to attract investors.
> Government contracts this stuff because as bad as the defense industry is government is worse.
I don't believe that, and I don't think you should either. For a single example, 18F was doing great work before DOGE cut them, so TurboTax could keep profiteering. Speaking of, with all the ruckus DOGE made, they just couldn't find much "waste, fraud and abuse" in public services, and just ended up slashing cheap programs on political grounds, to save face with their supporters.
> It's tempting to complain about regulation and red tape, but IMO those are a reflection of culture, norms and values. This is a values problem.
Look, ultimately, I'm a historical materialist, I believe material conditions are the source of our societal structure, and "values" as you say. Culture doesn't grow in a vacuum, these issues don't just spontaneously arise. They are consequences of how our societies were structured yesterday, and our societies let capital concentrate more and more in fewer and fewer hands, with zero checks and balances.
Our current world is one of all-powerful capital, that has grown to wield tremendous power, and has permeated every facet of our governance, media and way of thinking. It's not a coincidence that all those regulations and red tape end up benefitting private contractors, who charge more and more for less and less in return. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what our system does is transferring our public money into private hands.
It's why you end up with suicide nets on the Golden Gate billed at half the price of the damn bridge (adjusted to inflation), or single-use missiles at 15M a piece.
It's how we're unable to get a single politician willing to stand up to water rights holders in California, to correct an obviously inefficient allocation of natural resources. Everything is done to keep any threats to the interests of capital away. See how much vitriol someone like Mamdani receives from both sides, simply for not being 100% at the heels of capital.
> "Any explanation by Roger Penrose is bound to be good"
Is something wrong with my original comment?
Non sequitur. Better analogy: why dig new wells when you waste half of your oil anyway? Because that's what alfalfa is: wasted water. But it's slightly more profitable to the water rights holder, so that's what they grow. Could this fresh water be used in more productive ways? Doesn't matter to them.
> The only way to win sustainably is to make the resource, whatever it is, more accessible or less needed, somehow.
Yes, by cultivating more water efficient crops in regions under hydric stress, like California. Why do you refuse to engage with my argument in good faith?
> Yes, you do. It will just be spent on schools to tell the kids how to think and carrot/stick grant programs to financially incentivize compliance among the municipalities and subsidies with strings attached and inspectors to verify these things and studies and surveys and all manner of other stuff like that rather than bombs and missiles but you absolutely need to spend untold sums of money to enforce policy that is "bad" for whoever you're enforcing it upon.
Utter nonsense. You pretend to despise "centrally planned financial tomfoolery" so why do you spend so much energy to support the current water rights holder?
On your last paragraphs: again, why are you misrepresenting my arguments?
"Capital owners" doesn't mean CEOs and rich people, it's all stakes in the financial markets. So when you say "paying the football coach and the chancellor less isn't gonna fix the price of a college that has a non-teaching non-researching administrator for every two students", it's true, but that's not what I meant, at all. And I think you know it.
What I meant, is that for-profit schools and PE-owned football clubs are responsible for jacking up prices, to feed useless middlemen that weren't there before. That's the bloat. The actual economy is growing very slowly while financial markets have 4% annual growth. Do the math.
That's why a single missile costs 15M and 3 years of labor, and involves dozens of private contractors, when the US was able to build multiple planes a day during WWII under Roosevelt for pennies. So when you ask "Would putting the bloat into the public sector somehow make it less wasteful?", the answer is yes. The proof is the New Deal, how Roosevelt was able to wrestle the country back from the jaws of Capital and build public infrastructure using public workers, efficiently.
You only believe in private over public because of decades of propaganda, when the reality is the government has never subcontracted more of its work and we can't get anything fucking done! California abandoned its high speed rail project after feeding billions to various companies for literally nothing in return.
> If pivoting was cheaper/easier/more reliable than perpetually fighting they would.
The farmers aren't fighting, because there's no one in office to even fight them. Capital completely owns the government, to the point that a simple law such as "farmers have to use slightly less water in the middle of a fucking desert" feels so impossibly hard to pass that we can seriously entertain building a nuclear power plant and dozens of desalination plants to produce fresh water when we already have enough for everyone!
No of course not, people should be free to discuss and believe in dualism. What I find regrettable, is how often Penrose's name is invoked in an appeal to authority, as if his past (and very valuable) contributions to physics were enough to make him right on everything, including this subject.
Ultimately, I believe dualism is wrong, and I believe I have good reasons to think so. My previous comment was simply my attempt at deconstructing Penrose's argument, participating in the ever-ongoing popular debate.
Huh, yes it will? You don't need state violence to reduce wealthy farmers' water rights from 10B gallons per year to 8B, which will instantly free up water for others, more important uses. Their quality of life won't decrease if they have to switch a few plots from alfalfa to wheat, if that's what you're afraid of.
> for the pie to get bigger, you must actually build something for someone
I dislike how you just assumed that because I prefer a simple political solution over an over-engineered decades-long project on this one issue, I must be opposed to all new infrastructure. In this case, there's plenty of water to go around.
> state violence which isn't cheap and must be expensively maintained.
1, you don't need much (or any) state violence to keep a few rich families from stealing water, and 2, how is that more expensive that a fucking nuclear plant??? And what about the ecological cost? Nuclear is cleaner that most energies, but it's not free. And nuclear capacity could be put to much better use than offsetting inefficient use of the commons.
> Yeah, you can always use state violence to take from one group and give to another
Yeah, that's exactly what those problematic water rights are achieving: they take most of the available fresh water and give it to a tiny minority that benefits immensely from it. I'm suggesting we improve on that.
> Your comment is a great example of the sort of zero sum ignorance that gets us where we are.
I just can't get over how arrogant and mean this line is. The pie is continually growing, the only thing preventing people from getting a slice is that capital owners keep it all to themselves. We didn't get to this situation because the people is too greedy and impairing oligarchs from building stuff. It's quite the opposite.
We have bloated contractors receiving billions for very little in exchange, and in this situation, people like you are suggesting we don't solve this very simple resource allocation problem and instead shovel a few more billions of public money to the private sector for completely superfluous infrastructure we won't catch a glimpse of before 2048.
Grossly simplifying: he is a dualist, he wants to reconcile his belief in the soul and his physicist's materialist view of biology, so he resorts to putting the source of consciousness in quantum phenomenas, and seeks to prove that they occur in the brain. I disagree that there's an immaterial soul, I disagree that it puppets the material universe through quantum phenomenas, and I disagree that there are important quantum phenomenas in the brain. Most physicists are with me on these.
It's crazy how to some, building a whole nuclear reactor and dozens of desalination plants seems like a simpler solution than making a couple of very wealthy farmers a bit angry for a while. Capital really is all-powerful in the States, it even holds power in the very minds of its citizens.
But we are not in wartimes, and my comment wasn't telling people that they should act as if we were. If anything, tolerating and overlooking bigotry isn't civism, it's how we invite incivility in our societies. Hence why I believe we shouldn't normalize the views of MAGA more than they already are. We're not in the same place Germany was in the 1930s, and I don't intend us to ever get there.
No, what actually got rid of Nazism in the post-war era was how shameful it was to be perceived as one. That's how we overcame racism and homophobia too: by making it socially unacceptable to be such.
So if you care about anything, you can't just treat "support for Trump" as simply another mundane personal preference. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't treat Trump supporters with empathy, just that ignoring their garbage views is not helping anyone or anything.
I'm tired of pretending this is a "both sides" issue. One side, and one side only, is diving further and further in their hatred of blacks, gays, trans, women, progressives, you-name-it. Progressives haven't changed their tunes, they're still on equal rights and public healthcare, as they have been for decades. It's on conservatives to do some introspection, and ask themselves why their views have become so toxic that the world is slowly distancing themselves from their country, now that their guy is in office.
Therefore any argument about them being "not so bad" in the water/noise/energy department is worthless. You can't Spock your way out of it. People feel AI, in its current incarnation (A tool of the oligarchy), only brings negative value to the world. Hence they're opposed to its avatars, like datacenters or the anti-features popping in every app and websites.