A full ring around the moon near a pole, so a percentage of each currently-sunward side is continuously charging the batteries for the entire array. Call it a Nosyd Ring.

The prime value of getting users to use AI systems is the interaction data.

1) Interaction gives you far more psychological profiling than mere consumption. They already have a good psych profile of you based on what kinds of stories you like to watch, but they can create intimate models of your personality and cognition based on what kinds of stories you want to hear - because that's what a Mind IS - a biomachine listening to itself tell itself a narrative that it constantly edits to fit incoming stimuli. For humans our entire interaction with the universe is writing a narrative.

2) You are ensuring the AI company can sustain its development by feeding it interactions (aka your Mind) which it can roll over into an updated training set for the next gen. The real genius of AI business models is that once you get a large enough regular user base you only need a handful of Math whizzes to make the engine tokenize accurately - meanwhile all the actual R&D and content production you outsource to the users who are having so much fun playing with the new shiny toy they don't realize they are directly giving you billions of dollars worth of labor that you never have to hassle with running payroll for.

As long as your belief in this central, unified control system is sincere, and you are therefore prepared to accept when the unified popular vote of Americans elects someone you dislike, passes laws you dislike, creates and executes police/prosecutory powers you dislike, etc., then I think your proposition is not unreasonable. It's not how I would choose to organize a continent-wide government, but it is an option that deserves serious consideration.

What doesn't deserve consideration would be if you propose central unified control of the entire continent, but then also propose to resist, deny, delay, depose, etc. that central unified popular control when the will of the masses goes against you. It would not deserve consideration because at that point it reveals itself to not be a proposed philosophy of governance, but instead to simply be "all things ought to be how I want them at all times", which is the innate ego-seeking belief of every toddler in human history, before they individuate and learn that others are separate and different from them, and therefore in our shared world we will often not have things the way we wish them to be.

Since you are posting as an anonymous coward, I have no way of determining which of those two you fall into.

Yes, that was my direct quote.
You then added what you "would assume", and you proceeded to have a spirited argument with those assumptions you introduced. If your purpose here is to argue, then that is a very effective method to ensure you have a steady supply of things to argue about. If your purpose here is to engage with other persons and understand each other's ideas, then introducing your own assumptions to what other people directly say, is not a very effective method.

You understand what you wrote, right? We should get free money and do whatever the fuck we want with it. Fuck the children, this legislator needs a new boat and this other legislator needs to be in control of the education funds with his new corp.

That is unrecognizable. The counterpoints you are arguing against are coming from inside yourself. This doesn't seem like it is going to be a fruitful or interesting way to discuss the subject.

Since this is slashdot, I can believe that you are stuffing a doll full of straw and then punching down on that strawman. It happens here often - people on /. tend to be seasoned discussion-forum participants, which has the unfortunate consequence of giving them well-honed arguing points they enjoy reciting, and a presumption that anyone who suggests Concept A must therefore also endorse Concept B, because in the past they have had numerous arguments with Concept B folks.

There is nowhere in my comments where I advocate for a for-profit corporate education system.

Indeed, our current public K-12 and higher-ed institutions are rapidly moving toward that all on their own as they accelerate their adoption of Ed Tech vendor products rather than building in-house systems. If you were to do a deep dive into the platform/delivery infrastructure of modern public education, you'll find huge swaths that are already corporatized. The taxpayers may still be signing the checks, but those checks are increasingly going to contractors and consultants and wealthy software corporations. This is not a good trend, and it's only a matter of time (I'd guess fewer than 15 years) before someone like Microsoft has usurped enough of the infrastructure and content-delivery to implement a full Embrace Extend Extinguish on the education industry.

I am glad to see that we agree completely.

The people of each state shall have the right to choose to establish educational systems and standards in accordance with their wishes, along with the duty to fund it in whatever method and at whatever spending level is in accordance with their wishes. Henceforth, we can dissolve the federal DoEd. If any two or more states wish to form consortia to pool resources and establish common standards among them, the people of each respective state can vote to do so. Or they may choose to submit to the oversight of accreditation bodies the way college and university systems do. This preserves a higher level of democracy than central federal control, and also encourages more deliberate targeted stewardship of the funds supplied by the people to their government to implement their will.

Let's move forward together.

Sounds like you and Kissinger would be good political comrades.
You both like to send the might of the U.S. Federal Government into regions to keep them from falling into the hands of the people who live there.

"The country needs minimum standards" is inescapably anti-democratic rhetoric, because people who say it always - always - turn out to mean "everyone in the country needs to have my standards".

What the country needs is to implement the will of the people, period. The only legitimacy of a government derives from the degree to which it implements the will of the people whom it governs. The people of Kansas should have schools which implement the standards chosen by the people of Kansas. Same for the people of Massachusetts; Florida; Oregon; etc. Not the standards you impose upon the people who live in those regions. You may indeed be smarter, wiser, and have better ideas than they do. So what? If you believe that gives your intellectual superiority endows you with the moral authority to impose your policies on other people, all you are is a retread of precisely the same colonialism and manifest destiny of the Cristopher Columbuses and Henry Kissingers and Andrew Jacksons of history.

Or is this yet another one of those situations where "the popular vote" suddenly becomes an inconvenient truth when you discover that beliefs, values, and goals other than yours exist and are in fact quite popular among other people?

Just like Ken Lay, when ruling class assets are being seized and you face potential criminal/financial troubles for the rest of your life, you fish through your couch cushions and cobble together 10-15 million dollars to "die" and spend the rest of your days watching the sun rise from your beachside mansion on an unmarked island.

Ask Stanley Milgram.

Every government decides to scope-creep every function or power they ever are given.
Use that information when voting whether to grant them a new function/power.

I remember there was a /. post about this. Huge argument, lots of comments.

It's metonymy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I encourage you to seek understanding rather than reasons to misunderstand. It is less fun, less personally reassuring, but more effective and edifying for your participation with other persons.

Precisely. The stock market hasn't been an investor clearinghouse for a very long time. It is merely the financial equivalent of a bunch of frat boys having a contest to see who can commit the most egregious sexual assault without getting caught - in a legal environment where as long as you're not the one actually holding the victim down when the cops bust in, you have neither culpability nor consequences. The stock market is the result of all the same social-psychology tendencies which make millions of people respond to a plaintive YouTube video with comments like "lol stop whining about jumping off the highway overpass and just jump my dude".

What irony?
Where did I say my goal was to establish a thriving high-trust society?

My problem with the bloody-handed revolutionaries isn't that they are murderous, per se, because every single form of life we know of gets its life from exploiting, consuming, killing, smothering, depriving, or in some way getting to zero-sum resources faster than another creature which therefore must starve, or die from the elements, or be killed by another predator, etc.

My problem with the blood-drenched revolutionaries is that they always concoct convoluted conceptual contortions to convince us that murdering makes them good people. That they have no choice but to execute dissidents, in fact they are morally praiseworthy for doing so because their ends (a thriving high-trust society) are so heavenly that the means are justified no matter how hellish. Everyone seems to think if *they* are the ones holding the bayonet this time, the solution will actually be final. And so it goes.