You need to fill it out because by doing so you're authorizing the government to take your money. Otherwise they're literally just stealing it.

> Yes, those religions do have some empathy in their philosophy, and it is the first thing to go when they feel threatened or if they find something of someone else's that they like more than what they have.

Empathy means the ability to see the world from someone else's point of view. It does not mean "giving your country to foreigners."

Empathy tends to lead to inqusitions, pogroms and wars because empathic people can understand the point of view of others and don't imagine that those people are "all the same under the skin." Then they realize they don't like those people much and want them gone.

The left love talking about empathy, but have none. If they did, they wouldn't be the left.

When the problem is easy credit, adding more easy credit just makes things worse. The only fix is a massive destruction of credit and the malinvestments it created, but that's impossible in a democracy as you'll lose the next election.

When I was travelling in the third world about 25 years ago one of the locals was telling me how, unlike developed countries, everyone who could afford it had to buy a generator to produce power when the grid couldn't.

Yeah.

Reliable power is just so 20th century. Probably fascist too.

> They were workers from Hyundai which were setting up a battery plant and EV manufacturing plant in Georgia who were there to oversee the construction and the training of American workers

And presumably didn't bother to get visas?

They seem to have dropped a lot in the UK as well if the Youtube video I watched the other day was showing real numbers.

Though much of the problem may be that most working people there simply can't afford any kind of new car any more. They have to be on welfare to buy one.

"He who does not work shall not eat" - Lenin

I now pay for high-speed Internet so I can sit waiting for 20 seconds for Cloudflare to "check I'm human" when I click on a link.

Technology destroying their 'security system' sounds like a good thing to me.

Ahhhh, tell me you're a midwit without telling me you're a midwit.

I got a STEM scholarship to one of the world's top five universities. It's now down to about twentieth because of DIE but at the time it was a pretty hot deal.

It was a waste of a few years of my life and if I'd had to pay for it myself I wouldn't have bothered. About all it does is help get my resume past HR drones.

> I do NOT want someone who has skipped college engineering my cars, my nuclear power plants, my wind farms....
> I do NOT want someone who skipped college treating my wounds, performing surgery, or teaching me advanced mathematics.

Good for you. Doctors and engineers would typically fit into the "subjects which require a lot of hands-on work with expensive equipment" category.

> The number of people who can learn fluid dynamics, system mechanics, aeronautical engineering, nursing, doctoring, or any other real technical subject by just going 'online' is vanishingly small. Like - near zero.

Tell me you don't know any smart people without telling me you don't know any smart people. Smart people learn things so quickly that it's astonishing that midwits think it should take years.

It's a midwit thing. They always want to pretend they're better than other people so they'll pick some group and claim that group are stoopid, stoopid, stoopid because the midwit has a piece of paper which says they're smart and the stoopid people don't.

Really it's just basic class warfare. A hundred years ago they would have been saying the same about blacks.

In reality, I know a lot of very smart people and none of them are liberals. None of them are conservatives either, but that's because it's obvious to smart people that conservatives are just liberals in drag and have never conserved anything of value.

Britain also switched from "if you're good enough for a degree, we'll pay for it" to "anyone can go to university but they'll have to pay for it" shortly after I finished mine. It was a disaster for the kids, but it made the government look good because those kids were no longer counted in the youth unemployment figures.

Ah, sorry. I now see you were complaining about companies demanding degrees rather than saying kids should need degrees.

In the US it's partly because of the Civil Rights Act. Companies who didn't want to hire black people weren't allowed to do that but they could achieve the same by demanding applicants had degrees, which few black people had at the time. It's now largely because the managers doing the hiring are midwits with degrees and therefore think they should only hire midwits with degrees because they want to hire people like them because they're so great.

Because I'm conscious.

It's quite possible that you and the other commenters on this threads are not conscious, but I know I am. So any attempt to make a machine conscious is obviously futile.

A random number generator is a program.

You could connect a physical random number generator using quantum effects, but then you're basically just claiming that consciousness is a random number generator. To anyone who is conscious that's clearly nonsense.

> It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Everything the "AI" does is the result of a program it's running. You can literally look inside it and say "oh, yeah, it did that because it ran these instructions with this data." It will never do anything except run instructions on data, even if you can change that data to make it do different things.

There's no "Ghost in the Machine" which can make it do anything else.