Were you talking about computers, or about lawyers, politicians, CEOs, and salespeople?

Bitcoin is working well right now. Tulips worked well for a while. Pets.com had a Super Bowl ad. US housing -- remember the folks who said you can never lose money investing there? I can't prove Bitcoin will crash, but I think its only value is that people think it has value; if others decide they don't want your Bitcoin, you can't eat it or wear it or make anything useful with it.

Challenges here are a lot like time-outs in other sports. There's strategy in when you use them or lose them. That shouldn't be surprising. More than 90% of games don't go into extra innings. And if this new rule leads to a disparity that makes the game not fun, expect another rule change.

Very true about learned helplessness. How many of us can arrive in a city we've never been in before, and successfully drive somewhere without electronic navigation, only paper maps? But this isn't just an individual problem; this helplessness is societally-enforced as most gas stations don't have maps for sale and AAA no longer stocks the same depth and detail in paper maps they used to, thanks to our reliance on electronic nav. We used to read user manuals; now everything's online if it exists at all. But every generation says this; someone else will tell you they hand-tuned their spark plugs and kids are missing out.

Yes, businesses can respond to commercial signals. From the summary:

I have two problems. First, competition didn't CAUSE. It let people see things and make decisions, and make excuses for the decisions. Your competition doesn't run your business; you're free to be heterodox. The parent who says, "If all the other parents let their kids drink bleach, I have to let you do it too, because of competitive pressure" is guilty of child endangerment. OpenAI wasn't forced to do this; they were just greedy and not wanting to lose short-term market share to less honorable competitors.

Second, the commercial pressure that you are relying on to hopefully cause them to stop doing this is the very commercial pressure that was their excuse to start doing this in the first place. The blowback may be strong enough that they'll change things for the better this time. But do not expect the trend to be noble; people have a tendency to be lazy and self-seeking. Most of the bad press will move on when something newer happens, and then the feature will quietly return.

This generation had a Real ID Act passed in 2005. It was supposed to take effect in 3 years, in 2008. In reality, 20 years later they are mostly there. "On January 14, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration maintained in principle the deadline of May 7, 2025, but allowed flexible enforcement, for example by warning holders of noncompliant documents rather than refusing them altogether, until May 5, 2027."

Microsoft and the government are not the same, but we have a cultural history of holding onto things longer than someone in a central office decrees.

Interestingly, I read that the "cash for clunkers" program largely killed off demolition derbies. Why, you ask? Because they established a minimum sale price for cars. Californians could get $1500 for surrendering their old car to be crushed, and the folks who previously paid $500 or so for an old beat-up car that they'd modify to enter in the derbies could no longer buy a car for that price. The prize money in derbies wasn't rising, so people stopped entering and the events died out.

It depends. In aggregate, if 20-30 people leave the public school system, you have some meaningful cost savings -- you don't have the expenses of educating them. One less classroom to build and maintain, one less teacher to hire, fewer Chromebooks and handouts and so on. Maybe overcrowding is alleviated, or kids don't have to learn in portable trailers that cover up the ball field.

How much does the public school get per student in state funding? The smart voucher programs give the family a portion of that money, not all of it. And that's the magic right there. California per-pupil spending is almost $24,000 per year. A classroom of 21 kids costs half a million dollars on average. If you give a family a voucher for $10,000 of that, and they decide they can now afford to put their kid in a private school with the help of that $10k, the state just saved $14k on educating that child, money that it can spend on making school better for everyone who stayed in the public schools. The family is getting an education that they value. The state is able to better fund (per capita) the existing kids in the public schools. People interested in teaching can choose between public school and charter school and private school careers. You, the taxpayer, are not spending any more. Everyone wins.

This brings a question: given human nature, is there any way to prevent all the corruption, so that communism or democracy or a federated republic could be purely implemented? If you don't have one, then we're just playing No True Scotsman. Greed is a part of human nature, emerging at differing levels and expressions across individuals in the population, but it cannot be hand-waved away in practical philosophy.

Also, the average person has approximately one testicle. Really, average numbers are meaningless in a lot of situations. With my family not buying protein supplements, this means someone else is spending $280/year on them.

Not if you drive forward down the boat ramp with the boat behind you, as some do.

If you plus AI can make in a 32 hours week what you alone could make in a 40 hours week, then yes, there's an argument to pay (you plus AI) the same per week. So we just take the cost of AI out of your weekly salary, and voila! Until you can convince the big companies that AI just wants to be free, there's a cost for the tool, and the employer has to account for that when deciding what to pay you.

Looks like the very definition of a company town. This for a company which has been dumping untreated wastewater into wetlands and occupying others' property in Texas with their construction materials. Not confident that giving them streamlined processes will benefit humanity.

Excellent sarcasm, smooth wombat; I laughed. I presume you know how these subsidies are different, so I'll write out for others' sake: Suppose people want diamond tennis bracelets from Tiffany's, but they have a hard time buying them because the bracelets cost so much. Now a rich person for some reason wants to help more people get bracelets from Tiffany's and offers to give everyone half the cost of the bracelet, making them easier to buy. This works to expand access, only until Tiffany's learns about the deal. Once Tiffany's knows this is the deal, they can double their price and still sell as many bracelets as they used to, but make a lot of extra money from fleecing the rich guy. If they raise it less than double, customers are still getting a slightly better deal than before rich guy showed up, so they're happy to buy, and again, Tiffany's is making a bunch of extra money.

Now swap Tiffany's/colleges, bracelets/degrees, rich guy/federal government, half the cost/some need-based FAFSA calculated amount, and you're pretty close to reality. Colleges keep their status character by continuing to be selective in their admissions, and if everyone shows up with a government-padded wallet, that's less financial aid the college needs to give to attract customers. They can put more money into posh facilities and paying football coaches far more than professors, because everyone gets federal financial aid which they immediately cosign over to the college. Because people don't truly care about sticker price for college any more than they do for surgery when they have good insurance: they care about what they pay out of pocket, and to a lesser extent, how much they can tell people they saved off the sticker price thanks to loans/grants/insurance.

There are at least two other big wrinkles in the government education subsidy story, and they're probably what drive anyone to care about them. First, we may collectively believe that an educated society is a valuable thing, and that getting more college graduates is a way to achieve that, and therefore we like these subsidies. Second, we may acknowledge that the money doesn't come from thin air but comes from government's power to tax us, and may have feelings about what else the government could do with the taxes it collects, what else we could spend our money on if not taxes, who should pay how much in taxes and why, or about the efficiency of central taxation and distribution versus individual and local decision-making. But those are worthy of their own threads.

If someone guaranteed their weather forecasts, we would blame them for being wrong. So watch what the sales and marketing teams say (and how they say and in what context...). If they say, "We built an interesting thing that can suggest new ideas for you to test," that's quite different from, "Our product never errs on a cancer diagnosis."