maybe we can have the AIs fight out the civil war for us, claude vs grok or something. automate the unpleasant work.
@admitsWrongIfProven he is! i'm sorry things went down that way today.
@admitsWrongIfProven if everybody else gets dumber they won't feel quite as dumb? i dunno.
@admitsWrongIfProven the former would be the intelligence that would qualify as AGI, and the latter would be human intelligence.
if AGI is intelligence superior to human intelligence, we're testing the proposition you can achieve it by reducing the latter rather than raising the former.
elon musk is a one man swarm of locusts.
Orban just had to kick Central European University out. Trump has so many!
@Phil @dcc @p as i've said before, i think you wouldn't like what you think you're asking for. you're investments might flee as fast as a memecoin dump without an SEC, or you'd have to guard your gold at home. and you'd have no social security to fall back on. if you think you are too clever for this, what about the millions of others also trying to save for retirement who might not be.
@dcc @Phil @p spending money badly is not "socialist policy".
The US spends as much public money as most social democracies do on healthcare, and spends as much again privately. That's not the fault of "socialist policy". Universal health care works great many places. It's the fault of private sector incumbents blocking any sane arrangement of the health care system so they can continue to suck at the teat.
@Phil @dcc @p i've saved money for retirement as well, relying upon the government to regulate brokers and fund sponsors to ensure the bankruptcy remoteness of my assets from dangerous financial institutions. if you invest in the stock market, you've benefited from extraordinary stabilization and acceleration of those assets by policy, from a Fed that drops rates to stimulate the economy to a Trump that drops tariffs at first hint of a fall.
@p @Phil Liechtenstein’s full population is 40K and it’s a tax haven. If you think Norway is a special case… I guess by most standards it’d be villages that in practice have the right to secede. I don’t think Liechtenstein can serve as a persuasive governance model for anywhere else.
Good point that the UK has its own nukes.
Whether Finns are grateful or not for the nuke umbrella, free-riding off it doesn’t explain their success.
Finns are not cattle.
@Phil And yet by pretty much every measure of well-being they do better, cost of living measures don't incorporate education quality or health care expense volatility.
The US gloats about its high "real GDP per capita" but it apparently buys nothing good with it. Much of it just covers tolls people elsewhere don't have to pay.
@Phil Anyway, I can tell you what country I want the US to be more like, in governance and outcomes. To put aside oil wealth quibbles, I'll say Finland. What's yours? Don't say Argentina, that wheel is still in spin.
@Phil I hope we won't, but if we do, I promise I won't gloat and say I told you so. We'll have to work hand-in hand to, um, build back better.
@Phil You my friend are completely snowed and completely brainwashed.
Which countries provide the highest quality of life, including material prosperity, to the broadest group of people? The Nordics, by a long mile. Small government is not the key. Argentina has been a basket case for decades, and I don't know what the result of its current experiments will be, but whatever happens the mechanism will not be "small government universally good".
@Phil I wish you had examples of a stable, actually existing, actually prospering state that proves your point. What country in the world do you want the United States to become more like. Obviously not Argentina. It's going through changes, it's not a stable thing. Is there anywhere that approximates what you want?
@Phil The US has been destroyed from within by the neoliberal experiment that began in the 1970s and 1980s, and has worked to paralyze governance for the narrow and short-sighted interests of people, who like you, perceive burdens but deny benefits. 1/
@Phil The US will have to recover the capacity to actively govern and superintend its economy to become a hopeful outlier again. That will require investment in a capable state. Your path will bring "strength" to government only in policing, in crushing internal dissent. That is the worst kind of state. You will find that you, and your business, don't like it either. /fin