You believe "rank and file workers" are the ones who choose branding strategy for a trillion dollar company?

VPs and Senior Marketing consultants get together at a $3,000 per person Visioning Retreat weekend and come up with these things.

It isn't?

The last several presidents of both parties have all run up trillions of dollars of debt year after year. I know that isn't "Monetary Policy" from strictly economics/central banking terminology, but... the entire economy depends on the aggregate effect of every decision the government makes. There's no longer any such thing as federal policy that doesn't determine market behavior. Indeed, that is literally the point of most of the biggest laws and policies of the past 24 years -- to change the economy. To change the availability and cost of goods and services, to change investment/savings behavior, to incentivize certain assets of the population and punish others. Were the massive bailouts of banks and mortgage lenders not monetary, or not policy? Is sending hundreds of millions of people "stimulus" checks or "Covid relief" checks not a policy that injects monetary supply (ie more debt spending) into the economy?

Would abolishing the SSA overnight not be as economically catastrophic as abolishing the Fed, even though the SSA isn't "Monetary Policy"?

Is not? Or you want it not to be?

I saw you posted this same sentiment earlier in the discussion, and then followed it with a statement that the regulatory bureaucracy should be made a co-equal 4th branch by changing the Constitution. If your above statement is true, then why would we need to change the Constitution to make it true?

Which of the men who framed the Constitution wrote arguments in favor of creating segments of government which have the power to regulate the people's daily lives, but are independent of the control of those whom the people elect to carry out the will of the people?

Yes? That's the point?

That's what a "working model" is. It isn't the thing itself, it's a model that allows us to make the thing work regardless of whether we can fully deconstruct everything down to the subsubsub-bosons. That's what makes it useful.

Over centuries of thought, thought experiment, and direct experiment, we have developed highly precise working models of gravity and fluid lift. This allows engineers to calculate in advance what size and shape to build an aircraft so that it will experience lift sufficient to overcome gravity at a certain speed/weight. I do not need to be able to show you a graviton before I can use my working model of gravity to confidently and perfectly bolt together a bunch of sheet metal to make an airplane that flies, or calculate the precise angle to aim my catapult so boulders slam into the weak parts of your castle.

We are nowhere close to a working model of human cognition. We have zero systematic understanding that would allow us to assemble a bunch of electronics, then just flip a switch and -bam- conscious self-aware Person.

I'm not sure what I've missed, but "first you need to know what the question is" is exactly the entire point of my post.
We don't even know how to go about answering the questions because we don't know what questions to ask. Taking gravity as an example, we're still somewhere in 800 A.D. with an assumption that gravity is not something you would even think to understand because everyone knows things fall downward because The Lord hath caused them to. End of story. So if you want to fly, pray harder.

That dark-ages mysticism level of knowledge is where the AGI folks are today. They believe Consciousness happen because you string a lot of electrical gates together. End of story. If you want to make Consciousness, compute harder.

The AGI folks have more in common with alchemists than physicists.

Sounds like it might have been a test to determine:
1) If you had enough concern/confidence in the quality of your work to review it and determine there was no error.
2) If you had the personal confidence to point out mistakes to upper management.
3) Your ability to communicate and negotiate with people on your team when there's a disagreement.
4) How you respond to criticism.

The entirety of the world's wealth, resources, food supply, infrastructure, governments, etc. are embedded in stock markets which are linked together in such a way that a crash in one not only dominoes to all the others but can spark runaway reactions far beyond the original devaluation.

Everything these traders do affects all 8 billion humans on the planet.

The past 5 years and 10 months have been a nonstop wild ride of irreconcilable contradictions in whether we are, or or not, responsible for the social consequences of our individual choices.

This is why I enslave children.

I strongly believe child slavery is evil and should be illegal. However, there are people out there enslaving children. If I "take myself out of the race" to child slavery, children will be enslaved by other people I have no sway over and so the average experience of child slaves will be far worse. Thus, I enslave children in order to ensure that they get better food and medical attention than other slavers, and also it allows me to join the Child Slavers Union and influence their policies to be kinder to their child slaves.

Your entire comment is well-stated and sticks to chains of propositions that follow each other logically even if the reader doesn't agree with all of them. But this paragraph I would quibble with somewhat, especially the two bolded sentences.

For the first sentence:
From what basis do you say that silicon-based intelligence will have advantages, and that those advantages are obvious? What do we even know unequivocally about how the human mind works, and without other conscious species to examine we have no way to compare/contrast and identify "Features of the underlying infrastructure with are advantageous" vs "Features which are disadvantageous". We do not in fact know, nor yet have any scientific way to know, if the deterministic binary precision of etched silicon logic-gate chips is better for producing conscious thought. For all we know, the messy imprecise illogical kludgy bag of biochemicals in our skulls may be the very thing that makes abstract conscious thought easier. Silicon-based intelligence may turn out to be incapable of abstract thought specifically because of the precise logic constraints baked into its infrastructure - regardless of whether we eventually get 150 trillion GPUs networked together.

For the second:
From what basis can you confidently presume that Moore's law (ie improvements in miniaturization) + signal speed, produces higher abstract thought and reasoning? It definitely produces more powerful machine function for our current non-conscious machines. And yes, even in humans we already know chemical stimulants can amplify the speed of thoughts. But even if they do, the question of whether caffeine and cocaine and meth make for better mental function and output more robust and intelligent thoughts, is arguable, and highly subjective to all sorts of biological and sociological cofactors. We do not have the science of Intellect we would need in order to be confident in axioms such as "faster signal speed gives rise to higher order thinking". See my comment in the subthread above this one

What is the Self?
What is a mind?
What is thought?
What is understanding?

To my admittedly incomplete knowledge, all the world's scientists put together do not have even a basic working-model for the explaining these phenomena, nor even an answer to the question of how we ought to go about answering the questions.

The best we've got right now are descriptions, but descriptions are not explanations, and the currently extant descriptions border on tautology:

The Self is some kind of emergent phenomenon of the persistence/continuity/narrative function of the mind.
The mind is some kind of emergent phenomenon which attempts to understand both external and internal phenomena.
Thoughts are some kind of emergent phenomena arising from the brain as it does electrochemical snap-crackle-pop stuff.
Understanding is a persistence function where the mind becomes aware of connections between thoughts, recognizes abstract supra-categories for its persistent thoughts, and can accurately make predictions about other potential thoughts which might fit those same categories.

From these vague, circular descriptions, our coven of would-be chatbot/superintelligence summoners propose the following:
1) There are ~150 trillion synapses in your brain.
2) We just need to link together 150 trillion Nvidia chips and make them do electrical snap-crackle-pop stuff.
3) ???
4) Superintelligent Profit!!!

Thanks for the thoughtful follow-up. Yes, your description is exactly what I meant by "spontaneous combustion" and is precisely why I followed that statement with the conditions which - deterministically, via known scientific processes - combustion occurs.

I'll add that my message about listening to others isn't aimed at the politicians and the multi-billion dollar election-marketing industry. I am speaking to regular people on slashdot (insofar as anyone still here can be described as 'regular') about how they perceive the regular people on other sides of issues. Starting from the belief that everyone who believes differently from you is the downstream victim of an astroturf campaign, and therefore their fears/concerns/hopes/positions are beneath listening to, is how we end up with the surreal tragicomedy of the current and previous U.S. presidents. The irony is, the more you ignore other voters and focus on the political machines, the more you dig in to your own political machines, as do other voters, and then we get locked into this insanity of spending 3.5 years talking about principles and policies and nuances, and then everyone dumps all that thought and logic into the trash and spends the final 0.5 years saying, "We have to vote for My Guy no matter why! Because otherwise the other side's machine will win!"

That's one small gain for some content companies; one massive step backward for all humankind.

I am rooting, as always, for the entire canard of modern IP law to be vaporized with prejudice.
In a world that runs on technology and content, everything is IP.
IP controls are the absolute best way to incentivize and ensure future consolidation of every nanometer of human civilization into one giant globe-spanning monopoly that owns everything and everyone.
We will not avoid the trillionaire Weyland-Yutani dystopia so long as IP exists the way it does now. Indeed, we may already be past the event horizon of inevitability.

To watch the 21st century progress of IP law among voracious competing tech/content firms is nothing more than watching a recap of the 13th through 20th centuries as voracious entities like the Dutch East India Company and all the European colonial powers competed for exclusive control of new territories.

When the hunter-seeker drones and genome-specific contagions come for you and your children, and all the tools you might use to defend yourself are illegal, remember that you and your children built the drones and diseases with your own hands - with every purchase, every tap, every stream, every meme, every prompt, every license, every subscription.

We built the circus of this Colosseum, together. And now, do you hear it, Clarice? The roaring of the lions?
Ask not for whom the lions roar, citizen. They roar for thee.

It sounds like Google's answer to Microsoft Power Automate, with the results rendered in a way that mimics a browser GUI.
Fitting, since the results are likely to be similar to what happens when RPG characters think they're opening a treasure/loot box and it turns out to be a toothy Mimic.

For the same reason - it doesn't change the original comment's conclusion.
I can fully stipulate to framing the last 130 years of U.S. history with a dystopian MIC Imperium narrative, and that neither strengthens nor weakens the OC's conclusion that "Sooner or later every country will realize that, politics and racism aside, there simply isn't the capability to absorb more immigrants. Excessive population will lead to catastrophic collapse of the nations currently accepting immigrants. There is no easy answer to this situation."

Even if 100% of every social and environmental ill in the world were directly caused by the USA, that would not change a conclusion that the USA cannot continue absorbing tens of millions of immigrants without economic and cultural consequences that could prove annihilative. The question that matters is, what do we do about that possibility? And there's a complex range of potential responses to that question.

The problem leftward folks don't understand is, their messaging - whether intentional or not - over the past few decades sounds to rightward (and some central) folks like "We deserve to light ourselves on fire to save everyone else as punishment for our past/ongoing sins". And the truth is that for a not-insignificant percentage of leftist thinkers/influencers/polemicists, that is literally what they believe. The reason that's a problem is simple: it isn't a political argument; it's a moral one. And you'll only get enough people to vote a moral belief into policy if they also share your moral values surrounding guilt and punishment. You can quote all kinds of statistics about replacement birth rates, about migrant workers being a net positive to GDP and essential infrastructure services like roads and housing, and how the pyramid-scheme of the welfare state requires us to import new taxpayers to delay SS/Medicare austerity until GenZ are 65. None of that will ever be heard over the moralistic fatwa that "America is the great Satan and we don't have a moral right to want to close the doors now, because we had them open in the past and also it's our own fault so many people want to enter the doors in the first place so we should feel ashamed of our self-preservation instincts".

That's the kind of deeply conflicted doctrine that leaves a huge gap for a chaotic outlier like DJT to bull his way into the West Wing china shop.

Same, on all counts.
A couple decades ago there were several years when Opera was absolutely the most advanced, most feature-rich, most user-centric, most customizable browser on the planet. Especially if you were a researcher needing to do lots of nonlinear browsing where you are constantly spawning/closing/reloading multiple tabs. KB shortcuts and mouse gestures were killer; I helped several visually-impaired people get it configured so they didn't need to rely on precise clicking of screen-rendered buttons and site navigation features. Using any of the other browsers of the day felt as laborious as trying to play an graphical MMORPG over a 4800bps modem without call-waiting disabled.

Because it doesn't alter the poster's original conclusion/assertion in any way, so it doesn't add anything useful to the discussion.
Because its value therefore begins and ends with scoring Zing-The-Empire points, which are basically emotional NFTs -- you can collect them, and then... what?