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Comment Re:Every Bubble Pops (Score 1) 61

The real answer entirely depends on if they succeed or not.

If they manage to build real, strong AI, then it won't be a bubble. If they manage to replace a significant amount of the workforce with automation, then it won't be a bubble. The LLMs have already proved useful in some areas, but probably not enough to justify the valuation.

If it's mostly vaporware, then that bubble will pop hard.

Comment Approval voting or Run-off voting. (Score 1) 157

Thanks for the reply. I'd point out that other countries with plurality-elections have managed to acquire more than two dominant (well, prominent) political parties. See Canada, for example.

Canada is a parliamentary system. Turns out to behave differently.

As for alternatives to plurality, approval voting might be better. Instant-runoff ranking might be even better still, but would require some changes to existing voting processes, and education of the electorate. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting method can be perfectly fair in all situations. However, I recall that runoffs are the best compromise.

Arrow's theorem doesn't actually cover approval voting, since it doesn't quite fit the requirements (short answer, Arrow's theorem has a built-in assumption that the choice function is deterministic based on individual voters' ordered preferences, while approval voting adds an additional voter preference that is not deterministic, the cut-off between "like" and "dislike". You can model this as an additional parameter, but all the ways I know of to modify Arrow's theorem in this way have problems.) Nevertheless, the basic point of Arrow's theorem is important: don't try to find a system that's perfect in every possible case, just look for one that works better in real-world cases.

Run-off voting is, indeed, much better than plurality-takes-all. I will argue that it may be better, but still has problems (e.g., a centrist candidate who would beat either of two opposite wing candidates on a one-on-one election could be eliminated in the first round). But, possibly more important, approval voting completely utterly simple.

Another system that is straightforward is simple numerical scoring: everybody scores all the candidates from zero to 10, and you add up all the scores, highest number wins. That is also trivial to explain. Fast to count votes (only one pass, consisting of addition) but can't be done without modifying existing equipment. (Oddly, this is mathematically identical to approval voting if voters are perfectly rational. But voters aren't, of course.)

Comment Care to name them? (Score 1) 61

I would love for you to tell me what of my post represents a thought terminating cliche and for you to actually debunk anything in my post.

And I would love even better for you to explain a path forward for humanity that doesn't involve guys like you getting the shit all over people beneath you on the social ladder. I'm not going to bother pointing out again that you will be at the bottom because there is no way in hell your mental facilities could imagine or envision that happening. You are simply too amazing and too glorious to end up as one of the many billions stuck on the reservations occasionally being fire bombed by drones...

Say hi to the world leaders at G5 this year for me.

Comment Re: the world should reward them (Score 1) 157

The US is a two party system.

I know what you mean, but strictly speaking, it's not a "system."

It is the net result of Duverger's law, which is a consequence of the voting system where the plurality takes all; which tends to suppress third parties.

If you want to see more than a binary choice, advocate for a system that does not squeeze out third parties. My choice would approval voting, a system which has the advantage of not needing any change whatsoever in the existing voting process, only requiring removing the current constraint that if a person votes for more than one candidate, their vote is discarded.

Comment Your impression is wrong (Score 0) 54

And it's actually even worse then you think it is. Foreign students can and do get the same loans or sometimes better loans and better government assistance then locals. There are entire programs at major colleges that exist to bring people in from overseas who are basically already trained and ready to go, give them a little bit of specific skills that corporations want and then hand them over to the corporation to make money for that corporation.

If the corporation decides they want to keep the H1B then yeah the loans do get paid off by them or the corporation.

But if they don't keep them here which is not uncommon then the taxpayer just eats it

Meanwhile as an American you simply cannot apply for these programs. I mean technically you can but they're not there for you. I have had H1B coworkers ask me why us Americans aren't taking advantage of these programs only to have to explain that we can't because they're not for us.

You're also missing the point. These programs don't exist to educate those people it's just job training. The actual expensive education is done in their native country. That's typically where they get their bachelors and or masters degrees. That is billions of dollars worth of education spending that happens overseas where American billionaires don't have to pay for it.

That's the real cost savings. They can completely do away with 90% of education funding in America and get other countries to pay for it.

Which is a great deal for the billionaires getting tax cuts but for anyone who has kids and now has to come up with an additional 40 or $50,000 to pay for tuition because your kid is competing with somebody from India or even China good luck with that.

And if you bring this up the left wing will scream at you for being racist and the right wing will try to bury you in the algorithm and the centrists will tell you that it's fine because GDP go up and so line go up and line go up is always good.

Comment Re:And the solution as always is very very (Score 1) 61

EU here... Housing in the city is so expensive that minorities can't find a home there. Hope that helps.

So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.

I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.

The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.

It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet

Comment Let them have them (Score 0) 54

It's no coincidence that we began the slash funding to higher education and actively attack higher education as soon as widespread Visa programs existed to bring in trained workers. Why would you as a billionaire want to pay the taxes for local citizens to be educated in college when you can just have another country pay that and pull those people over?

So when I was a kid the government paid 80% of tuition and now they pay about 30%.

Again, this is not a coincidence.

This of course creates enormous amounts of social instability from vast swaths of people who are cut off from middle class living and higher education. So yeah let China have that social instability.

The trade off is that America doesn't get those patents but I don't get anything out of those patents they are owned by billionaires. I can pretend that the companies owning those patents will somehow pump up my 401k but thanks to you multiple economic crashes and a handful of layoffs following those crashes I don't have much in the way of savings and I sure as shit don't have the money to go out buying stocks or the ability to risk buying into a startup that might go tits up.

Now would I like to live in a country where immigration increasing the GDP directly improves my quality of life instead of cutting me off from middle class employment? Yeah I would love to live in that world. I don't. I live in a hyper-competitive world where your entire quality of life is based on the job you get.

If somebody wants to suggest a viable way of changing that I'm all ears but every time I seriously bring it up I get modded down into pulp by people furious at the prospect of paying somebody to not work. Or I get a handful of libertarians talking about Ubi replacing all the other government programs and need to stop and explain, uselessly, why that is not going to work and solves nothing.

So if you don't have a third way I don't want to hear it.

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