And you can't post that if you understand nuance.

I agree it was a terrible terrible decision, I hated it at the time and I believe it's been responsible for millions of deaths, but I think the motive wasn't as bad as you suspect.

Basically, the Middle East outside of Israel was a bunch of dictatorships, some theocratic, some military, and many awkwardly allied to the US, but none of the Arab nations had a functioning liberal Democracy.

The neocons believed that they could go in, overthrow the dictator, and a functioning Democracy would pop up in it's place and they'd have a grateful ally, one whom they didn't need to look away as they went around murdering dissidents.

The initial returns on Afghanistan seemed to support the idea is would work, the Taliban melted away from the major urban centres and there was a government in its place.

WMDs and terrorists were both an excuse to go in and try this grand experiment in one of the few friendless dictatorships in the Middle East (the other being Iran, which they were planning, but was a much tougher target).

The problem of course was arrogance, they failed to understand the country they were attempting to launch a revolution in, and they failed to realize the kind of situation you needed for a Democracy to take place.

I think if they just stayed focused on Afghanistan, and basically ruled them by edict for a decade while they nurtured local political actors, then they might have had a shot.

But instead, it was an incompetent administration attempting to implement an extraordinarily ambitious and difficult plan.

That skill proved useful in his later career.

Think of the physical brain as the TV set. "Consciousness" is the program sent to the TV set. Without the TV set you can't see the program, but no one would claim that the TV set IS the program. In essence the program manifests via the TV set. There is nothing particularly special about the brain. It's grey matter is as physical as the TV set. There is no reason why a sufficiently complex and advanced TV set cannot host consciousness. Karel Capek dealt with this very idea in the very first use of the term, "robot" in "RUR Rossum's universal robots" (They were actually androids, not mechanical, but the point remains.) One day this will become a serious issue.

This is Vancouver, so I don't think they're too concerned about the winter.

This is like a cop show video that stops in the middle.

Because the extremely polarizing Elon Musk bought Twitter with the intention of making it a having for the far right.

Perhaps the site survives is politics and meddling, but I don't think we've ever seen a major social media platform this vulnerable since MySpace.

We year about it because people are rightfully interested.

The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it. Usage among women (15.2%) continues to outpace men (9.7%), but both groups have more than doubled their use in the past year.

It's crazy that more than 10% of Americans are taking these drugs. Especially since it sounds like a lot of insurance plans don't cover it (which actually seems surprising considering how much obesity related conditions must cost in healthcare).

Ignoring the whole fact that we don't even know how they set up these bots to trade, it looks pretty damn random.

That's my opinion too.

Unfortunately, after a certain amount of actual progress we are now regressing again.

Yeah, we have a long history of not practicing what we preach.

Remember when the USA took pride in being a melting pot?

Even if it's higher, it's only possible for someone who is single, or a single earner family.

The only way to do that at scale is to remove half the population (presumably women) from the workforce.

Honestly, if this is really happening, that's probably why.

SF is full of AI systems that resist being shut down, LLM are trained on human media, including SF.

The models see that they are in the role of an AI being shut down and act accordingly.

The one good thing with China's authoritarian state is they can drive rational national policy.

They know they need to rapidly industrialize, and they also know that global warming is real and will be a disaster for them.

So they're doing what you'd expect. Expanding power generation as quickly as possible in the short term with coal.

And in the long/medium term building and developing non-CO2 alternatives like Nuclear, solar, and batteries.