The data show that some boys and young men in the population are experiencing declining outcomes. More than than in the population of women. That tells us nothing about any individual.

For instance, if black men are having a hard time that would be reflected in the statistics for the overall population of men, but would be meaningless with regard to other men. And the problem could be more about race, than gender. There have always been far more men in prison than women. What ought to be obvious is that a lot of jobs and other activities that used to require physical strength, which some men excel at, have become less valuable. So you aren't talking about men in general, but men who had physical strength as an advantage. The other side of that is that there may still be many jobs requiring physical strength available for men without a college education that aren't available to as many women. So fewer men are going to college because a larger number don't need to.

In short, this is entertaining media statistical bs. It likely serves somebody's interest, but it should not be taken seriously.

And Democrats get elected (by promising) to cleanup Republican engineered messes. And both of them fail to do so because those "messes" benefit the interests of the powerful and wealthy classes of which they are both the servants. Our failed retirement system, health care system, higher education industry, tax policies, judicial and criminal justice system, national debt etc. are all bipartisan messes.

They are products of a narrowly drawn intellectual ruling elite who only talk in a echo chamber of people of their same class, training and experience. They may be too polite to say it out loud, but they think the rest of us are "retards" and "morons" and incapable of contributing anything useful. They honor Alexander Hamilton as a "founder" because he s the only "founder" who agreed with them that people were incapable of self-government. When in truth it is elitists like them who are incapable of self-government, while they are very good at fighting over the power to govern others.

All you have to do is look at the mess they made of COVID to understand how truly terrible they are when given a real crisis to manage.

The answer is after the 1830 census.

If you doubt some people thought size mattered, you should read the Federalist papers. Not to mention the original unratified first amendment to the constitution in the Bill of Rights passed by the first Congress. As one of those "idiots", I am apparently in pretty good company.

I don't live in a fantasy world where the existence of "political will" emerges by magic.

Bill Gates has the "right" to use a private jet and so do I. But that doesn't makes a private jet a realistic solution for my transportation needs. I have a right to donate to all 435 candidates for office and hire someone to build a personal relationship with each of them. That doesn't make it a realistic political solution for me.

In most trillion dollar companies the majority of those millions they employ are not Americans. What is your point?

Yes, there are trillion dollar companies, but there are very few government decisions that will have enough financial impact to justify spending money electing and lobbying support from 8000 representatives. Trillion dollar companies need a financial return on their investments in politics.

No, only for a little over 100 years. When was the last time a house district was smaller than 50,000 people?

I suppose those who recognize that "scale" matters. That understand from experience that getting 10 people to agree to your idea is harder than getting one person to agree and that having the experience of 10 people results in different decisions than decisions based on one person's experience. And that the "scale" of difficulty increases as the numbers increase.

For someone who lacks any experience with the politics of human beings consider another example where scale matters. There is a shortage of housing. You don't think increasing the scale of home building will help solve it?

Well, no you don't. That was the point. The original first amendment already passed Congress. It has been ratified by a handful of states. So their support has already been given. So ratification only requires getting a majority of the legislators in enough of the remaining states.

And yes, it is a matter of political will. So what? Political will is something you create, not something you find. The question is whether people are dissatisfied enough with how the system is working to try a radical revision. If they are, the original first amendment is an opportunity for them to do that.

If you had to get Congress to pass any change, it would be a non-starter. The system has worked to give them power and prestige. They have little personal interest in any changes that might threaten that.

How is it easy? You mean its easy enough to say but only someone totally oblivious to reality thinks its easy to do.

You are confused if you think lobbying 8000 people is simply a question of "workload". Lobbying is about building relationships, identifying each representative's interests and then organizing those interests around your clients' legislative agenda. The scale of that effort increases exponentially with the number of votes you need. If you need 4001 votes, instead of 218 its not going to be just 20 times as much work.

I'd love to see some of that evidence you think is available. In fact, all you have to do is actually talk to typical state legislators in most states compared to the US congress to know that they are not the same group of people.

We can't fix the culture. We need a political system that works despite it. The current one isn't. But that certainly serves some people so changing it is going to be hard.

No we don't. You don't get a sample. You get to vote for one of the 435 members of congress, you have nothing to say about the other 434. And your choices are limited to those running which is limited to those who can raise the money needed to run. In any case, there is no way that 435 people can be representative even if they were a random sample of the population.

Congress doesn't lack power, it simply exercises that power to maintain the status quo on behalf of the wealthy and powerful who fund their campaigns.

Of course it will. Its tough to pay people to lobby 8000 people and its a lot easier for one person to be lobbied by the people they are supposed to represent. The wealthy have the same amount of money in the pie of money to spend on 8000 races, each portion of that money pie is smaller. But each individual vote is much bigger proportion of the voter pie. You make it dramatically harder for a few powerful people to control the outcome.And much easier for one person on the local level to effect the outcome.

And those 8000 people are likely going to be people chosen from all walks of life rather than selected from a narrow elite with access to big money.

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Actually, its government in general that we have empowered with the assumption "they'd never use that power" against people like us. The idea of self-government is that we elect representatives who collectively act on our behalf, not rulers. We need to ratify the original First Amendment and create a house of representatives that is really representative in fact with one representative for every 50,000 people. Instead of a group of rulers who all belong to the same ruling class and defend its interests.

From the essay:

While interesting intellectually, I think both the essay and its list of "attributes" of fascism ignores the more important considerations, the conditions that lead to fascism. Ultimately fascism is a populist movement that leaves the existing ruling elite in power. It arises when that elite is challenged by demands for progressive change brought on by the failure of that current ruling elite to serve the population. A lot of what is pointed to as attributes of fascism are really just parallel responses to that same failure. Conspiracy theories, skepticism of elitist claims to special knowledge and expertise, religious revival, rejection of "modern" change that serves the powerful and wealthy at the expense of everyday people, demands for unconsidered change/action that promise to bring relief, frustration at their lack of power to control their lives.

One of the great myths of World Wat II history is that there was this large society of "good Germans" who had Hitler and Nazism imposed on them by terror. In fact, the Nazi's succeeded in Germany because they successfully answered the demands for change that grew out of the depression. Germans embraced the Nazi's and stuck with them to the end. Fascism does always lose when it demands perpetual war because every war is a gamble. As someone said of Hitler, "I never trusted him, he is a gambler and gamblers always lose." If you take your winnings and bet them on the next roll of the dice eventually losing is inevitable. Franco was a fascist but he wasn't a gambler, so he declined to bet his winnings on Hitler's adventures.

I don't think Trump is the source of our problems. He is just one symptom of the failure of our experiment in self-government. With the democrats lacking any real populist alternative to deal with people's disaffection he has free reign to try whatever experiments he wants. The only opposition is whining to no effect. We will see how long even that will last. It seems that he is prepared to test the boundaries of what the oppressed will tolerate. Given the lack of alternatives that may be quite a lot.

So the quality of your credential gives you some kind of "ownership" of the attention of recruiters and employers? And someone with a lower quality credential is stealing it?

Only if they fail to produce as well or better than the person who would have been hired instead. But that raises the issue of whether the quality of the credential is actually useful for evaluating prospective employees. Or is it essentially a marketing gimmick to attract the attention of recruiters and employers.

Are those different things? I agree AI "understanding" is anthropomorphizing the process. But I would think it can, at least theoretically, parse the code, determine what it does and then compare if to a world full of other code that solved the same problem in the past. Including code that is used to add similar features.

But you missed the important point. Spaghetti code implies code that follows a path that can't be easily followed and understood by humans. I see no reason to think AI is likely to produce code that AI will be unable to easily follow.

I question the claim that AI is less able to create something new than a human programmer. Mostly because there is very little new under the sun and most programming is copying and modifying past code.

The possible uses for human work are limitless. There is no reason to think there will no longer be anything for anyone to do. If basic necessities require no human input they will be all but free. Humans will do other things that still have value to them. Value is a subjective judgment. You can make a million reproductions of a Picasso, but the original still has value even to all those humans that can't tell the difference between the original and the copy.

Depends on how much you anthropomorphize AI because the AI "employee" will certainly "understand" it. But how important is that? There are millions of companies using computers who have zero employees who understand the code for the programs they use. In fact, I suspect few programmers would be able to decipher the output of a compiler. But the computer "understands" it and we test its output against the desired results.

Isn't it likely AI will be able to untangle the spaghetti? It would seem to be ideally suited for that. All the information needed to untangle it is right there in the code. The whole idea of "spaghetti" code is that programmers can't easily understand what it does. I am not sure that is problem for AI.

How does someone "cheat" in college? The answer is that college education has turned into a diploma mill that produces a credential. And the person cheats to get a better credential. Who are they cheating? The person they provide the credential to and employers don't actually use the credential to evaluate people for very long. Those straight A's don't matter much if you can't produce results.

So the danger of "cheating" to get a better credential is if by cheating you fail to develop the tools you need to be a productive employee. In that case, you are cheating only yourself.

Colleges don't really "teach" any content of value any more. The information is out there for the taking. What they do is provide opportunities for people to develop, practice and polish their learning skills. And coaches to help people do that in a focused way for the skills needed in their field(s) of study. The whole diploma mill, including tests etc, is just a distraction. So if by cheating you can waste less time on the diploma mill tasks then you come out ahead.

I don't think it is politics. If it doesn't serve/profit them personally its waste. Picking up the garbage and cleaning bathrooms in national parks is not really a political issue, but you only care if the trash cans or toilets are overflowing if you visit a national park.