"1) Canada has already lost its status. Its hard to see how that is Trump's fault."

It is the fault of people who cause other people to hesitate or not vaccinate. We call them anti-vaxxers.

"2) Trump has only been in office for less than a year. Its unlikely the measles outbreak is a result of any of his policies."

Trump appointed an anti-vaxxer to head the CDC. This is his policy. His actions drive this as much as RFK and other anti-vaxxers. No one seems to disagree that the folks who vote for silly policies view his silly policies as legit, and legit policies as silly. That means they are the same problem -- ignorance masquerading as a relevant choice due to people's fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The same things any flim-flam con-artist would brag about.

"3) The outbreak is all along the southwest border with large populations of people who lack access to regular health care."

Yes, it is truly sad to see how terrible healthcare is in the United States. Why do you view that as a reason to not try anything new, and give up what little is being done? We seem to agree that what exists is not satisfactory.

"Blaming anti-vaxxers is attributing way too much power to a fringe group."

Wrong. That's like saying the person who drove the car off the cliff isn't responsible, because the other people in the car could/should have wrestled the wheel away from the driver. The driver is responsible. It is ridiculous to claim otherwise (you sound brainwashed).

"Perhaps we should look at years of neglect of public health in those states instead. With millions of people lacking access to basic health care what did you expect?"

Yeah, normal people have decried the terrible state of public US health policy. The only improvement in the last 2 decades was Obama Care. What's with the Republicans taking that away? How far into the dark ages do they want us to go?

""Trump did it" has become the standard excuse for the widespread failure of our political class. You can just point the finger at Trump and pretend the problems will be solved when he goes away. So his rival politicians will spend the next three years talking about Trump instead of addressing how to make our lives better."

Like you are doing? This "point" seems weirdly self-antithetical. Trump is one part; there's also Justice/SCOTUS, Senate, Congress. All aspects of government are in government, otherwise it's not government. Seems tautological.

"Its not that there isn't a lot to criticize about Trump. Its that most of the criticism is directed at minor sideshows like this one. And I say that as a former community health worker who spent a couple years knocking on parent's doors to increase the level of MMR vaccinations in local schools. I may have run into one parent who opposed vaccination. The rest just lacked the personal resources to get their kids immunized. They had a hard time making sure their kids had breakfast and got to school."

You know, programs that provide food to those in need + vaccine resources were cut by Trump and his cabinet of doom? This "point" also illustrates that this problem is big and has many factors at play, like problems that humans have traditionally banded together to face. That's why most developed countries (just the USA abstaining) use socialized healthcare policies.

Frankly, your confused post just shows why the problem seems intractable to the occupants of the country most victimized by their own medical policies -- the current USA medical policy is rake-stepping! You have people who make more money than god from medical care profits which are in the bleeding-from-your-eyes-numbers of over ,000 markup, because no-one shops around for things like bullet extractions. It's not a service that does well in unregulated capitalism (unless you own the company selling heroin, in which case you're billionaires and don't care).

Trump is also a promoter of that. It's valid to mention the toxic effect his cabinet and policies have had during *BOTH* of his terms, because that is literally what's happening now. These are the issues we agree on, and these are things driving those issues. The learned helplessness and unwillingness to challenge ignorance you seem to suggest isn't helpful, in my opinion.

Lincoln was a Free Soiler. He may have had a moral aversion to slavery, but it was secondary to his economic concerns. He believed that slavery could continue in the South but should not be extended into the western territories, primarily because it limited economic opportunities for white laborers, who would otherwise have to compete with enslaved workers.

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

The politics of the era were far more complicated than the simplified narrative of a uniformly radical abolitionist North confronting a uniformly pro-secession South. This oversimplification is largely an artifact of neo-Confederate historical revisionism. In reality, the North was deeply racist by modern standards, support for Southern secession was far from universal, and many secession conventions were marked by severe democratic irregularities, including voter intimidation.

The current coalescence of anti-science attitudes and neo-Confederate interpretations of the Civil War is not accidental. Both reflect a willingness to supplant scholarship with narratives that are more “correct” ideologically. This tendency is universal—everyone does it to some degree—but in these cases, it is profoundly anti-intellectual: inconvenient evidence is simply ignored or dismissed. As in the antebellum South, this lack of critical thought is being exploited to entrench an economic elite. It keeps people focused on fears over vaccinations or immigrant labor while policies serving elite interests are quietly enacted.

I rather suspect that it means "valid under the WIPO" treaty.

To be fair, there are lots of negatives about the Chinese approach. And we're so used to the negatives of the US approach that we almost don't see them...but other people do.

As "dominant world power"s go, the US has been quite lenient. This is known as damning with faint praise. OTOH, China shows every sign of being going to be worse...but probably not worse than Britain was.

It's different from humans in that human opinions, expertise and intelligence are rooted in their experience. Good or bad, and inconsistent as it is, it is far, far more stable than AI. If you've ever tried to work at a long running task with generative AI, the crash in performance as the context rots is very, very noticeable, and it's intrinsic to the technology. Work with a human long enough, and you will see the faults in his reasoning, sure, but it's just as good or bad as it was at the beginning.

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

I think your model is only one of several alternatives. I don't foresee a unitary intelligence as likely, but an executive function delegating different tasks to different experts depending on context. And it can't be limited to language, it needs to interact more directly with the physical world. But we're already taking steps in that direction.

Yes, it's difficult. Perhaps it will take awhile. But there's absolutely no reason to expect human intelligence to remain the top measure. (Even now there are lots of contexts where it isn't. Try to out-calculate a spreadsheet. What the spreadsheet can't do is design itself.)

Good points, but not necessarily eternal truths. I suspect you could use magnetic fields to strengthen the cable. Of course, that would collapse if the power failed. But perhaps there are other alternatives that nobody has thought of.

Still, my favorite skyhook is the PinWheel, though it needs a hefty mass in a fairly low orbit (as well as long arms that reach into the stratosphere). But you need to lower as much mass as you raise (on the average) or the orbit decays.

Looks like you're implementing LISP.

What I wonder is whether it's any good. Admittedly, I don't wonder hard enough to listen to it, but then I generally (almost always) avoid podcasts.

There will be tools. But there will also be the more general intelligence. One can argue about the time-line, and that's quite reasonable, but denying it requires accepting spiritualism or some such.

For that matter, people are often used as tools. It's not an "either/or" choice.

The only way you could reasonably predict what jobs will be available would be to predict exactly how much more advanced AIs are going to get and how quicly. And any prediction is a "Wild Ass Guess".

FWIW, there's a company in China building humanoid robots for assembly line work. So far it's only sold less than a thousand, so it's probably still in the experimental stage, but if it's "nearly ready" then it will soon be ready.

Now most assembly line work is basically rote repetition, with only a limited number of special-case scenarios, to this is far from a general purpose robot...but it's enough to eliminate LOTS of jobs...if it's cheap enough. And if it is, one can expect incremental expansion into other roles.

It's not going to be an LLM. The LLM is just what it's going to use to talk to you. But "world models" are being built, and that is going to be the basis of real intelligence.

The thing is, it wouldn't help things for one player to quit.

OTOH, as someone else pointed out, the government isn't exactly trustworthy either. (I consider accepting funds from lobbyist groups to be accepting bribes, just like accepting funds from individuals.)

On the third hand, open source approaches can't limit the use to which something is put.

Perhaps the "corporate powers" are the least bad choice...but that sure isn't encouraging.

Sorry, but "death by GPS" is a label, not a reality. Someone decided to follow the instructions of the GPS. So this is not analogous to an actually self-driving car.