Shareholders definitely push a company to focus on profit, which can lead to short-termism.

However, going public also forces discipline on a company, in a way that privately held ones lack.

For a while, Zuckerberg was fixated on developing a goofy online world that looked like a 15 year old MMO. Oh yeah he called it Metaverse, right? He flushed billions of dollars of internal money to developing it, because nobody can tell him "no" when it comes to running the Facebook empire.

If Musk's companies become subject to more shareholder scrutiny, the shareholders might eventually balk at an AI that specializes in neo-nazi philosophy and revenge porn.

Nobody does AI on Linux so it makes so much more sense to keep playing three legged racing with Microsoft tied to you. NOT.
NVidia has always been tied to MSFT and their Linux software has always looked like it was done by a single NVidia employee after hours in the basement office.
Besides, Windows is sooo 'yesterday' no matter how much Microsoft pays Qualcomm or NVidia to tie themselves up with.

LoB

You’re wrong about a lot of types of medication. Some medications are last-resort. Sure, you don’ t give a patient chemotherapy unless there are no better options.

However.

For people who have seasonal allergies, the smart thing to do is take second-gen antihistamines for the entire allergy season. It’s not a last resort thing. If an allergy sufferer skimps on the claritin, their eyes tend to swell shut (misersble) and polyps grow and clog up their nasal cavities over many years, leading to a surgery that could have been avoided by taking a tiny, cheap pill that has almost no side effects.

Most humans evolved to survive in conditions of food insecurity. Most of us are biologically very poorly equipped to live in a “burgers and fries are available any time you feel like it” environment. I suspect GLP-1 drugs will eventually be the best way to deal with this mismatch for most people. There’s also the meditteranean diet, which is solidly proven to work. But, not everyone can sustain it. I sure havent succeeded.

I agree that, nowadays, anyone who judges an overweight person and says “just have self control” is either ignorant of a big chunk of modern science or a grade A pile of horse manure.

But, the core of the problem is more complex than “dah hungeerrr”. You mentioned the problem of shovelling burgers and fries down your throat and then being hungry a few hours later? Yeah, we evolved that way because most of human history included a heaping serving of food insecurity. The idea that you can eat a burger and fries anytime you like - that’s unprecedented in our evolutionary history, and our bodies aren’t built to deal with it. So, yeah, modern diet makes most of us fat. For most of human history, you managed to get a “burger and fries” meal once or twice a week when someone in the tribe successfully hunted something larger than a rabbit. The rest of week you got by on roots, shoots and grubs because you had no choice. No opportunity to get fat except for a very small window of time at the end of the summer and fall, and you burned off ALL the fat by the end of the winter/dry-season. If you were lucky enough survive another year, that is.

Now, the flip side is that you’re wrong about diet. There’s actually a really simple system that works for weight control, for most people, even the overweight ones. It’s called the mediterranean diet. Basically when you’re hungry, you stuff your face with veggies and fruits. You eat only very moderate amounts of meat, fat and just enough carbs to hit around 2000 calories. It’s very, very simple. It works for almost everyone. And it’s almost impossible to pull off when the modern grocery store is shoving high calorie food in your face from every angle.

When it comes to weight, exercise and fitness are almost meaningless. It’s all about diet, diet, diet, diet and diet.

I’m actually pretty positive about the future of GLP-1 drugs. In a decade or two, they’ll understand them way better and newer generations of the drugd will mitigate the side effects. Nowadays, if you have seasonal allergies, people don’t judge you if you take antihistamines. It’ll be the same with GLP-1 drugs.

Just to be clear, I’m not lecturing you to “eat a carrot and git skinny”. I’m sitting on the couch eating a bowl of ice cream while typing this.

This is really just semantics, but ... most of that stuff that you define as conservatism and right-wing ideas? I would call that stuff "classic liberal".

You say conservatives and right-wingers are about decentralized government? Try telling that to the liberal cities where random US citizens are getting curb stomped or executed by ICE agents.

Your statement about abortion are out of date. Nowadays, most red states have locked abortion down so badly that doctors can't do anything to help a miscarrying woman until she's basically already dead from sepsis. Most pro-life states have passed laws that are literally killing women of child-bearing age.

I can't even bring my self to address the thing about empiricism. No, US conservatism is most definitely *not* about falsifiability and empiricism. No I'm not claiming that US liberals are any better.

SV is hard-core capitalist. They always were, and always will be. Maybe also a bit libertarian, but pretty socially liberal. Capitalism and conservatism are two different things. Actually, conservatism and right-wingism are also two distinct things. A few of the trillionaire class are right-wing (Musk and Thiel), but I can't think of a single one that I would actually consider conservative.

Why would you say it doesn't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_deities

It might be or it might not, but my god that article sucked. Way too general, and not specific enough. The picture was obviously wrong, If you encrypt an image, it looks like the option on the right produced by perfect randomness. You could not tell the difference between the two. Unless they are using some really dumb encryption method that highly depends on perfect randomness somehow. I'm not aware of what that might be, but no one should use it. Obviously even if this is a source of perfect randomness, you can of course Man in the middle the data and subtly shift it without anyone being able to tell.

Hit dogs holler. You're a redneck, hillbilly Yankee. I have no ill will towards hillbillies or rednecks, they are certainly in my family, but they don't accept me as one of them. I'm from the Yankee branch of the tree.

You won't let us come in the front and seemingly only door known to ever exist. Fine, good. Good and great. That solves the problem forever. you've suitably defeated us squarely. We know of no other way to achieve our goals than a peaceful, upfront takeover of a company. We shall take our mayflower ships and leave from your shores. We Yankee pilgrims know how to leave the Netherlands when we aren't wanted.

A child-surveillance conservative is a liberal who was bullied in school.

There was very little real opposition from the federal government. Sure, subsidies are gone, and the current elected administration talks a lot of trash about renewables because it plays well on right wing social media. Meanwhile, red blooded, MAGA-hat wearing conservative businessmen in Texas have been quietly installing solar and wind power as fast as they can because it gives the best ROI. Oh, and the turbines and solar panels? DEFINITELY Chinese-made, because those are the cheapest. The rhetoric and the reality are nearly orthogonal.

Oh, people are DEFINITELY gonna die and wreck their bodies in gruesome ways if this event becomes an established thing. Im not sure how to feel about this. One one hand, it feels icky and dystopian because of the chemical enhancement. On the other hand, how different is it from MMA? Bloodsport has been a thing for literally thousands of years.

You’re totally correct. Unions played an incredibly important role in the 1800s and early 1900s, forcing employers to treat their workers like humans. It would take several pages to describe the good that the unions did back then, because employers at the time largely treated their workers as serfs.

However.

More recently, the track record for unions has been pretty dismal for a solid 50 years. Teachers unions are particularly bad. I’m in one. During COVID, the teachers unions were a big reason why large liberal cities kept their schools on remote learning for years after the virus was under control. The result is that kids in big blue states got measurably dumber compared to the ones in red states. The effect showed up in test scores.

I watched my own union start a histrionic fight with the administrators because they changed the location of the printers in the building.

It’s nice that unions advocate for higher pay, but nowadays these things are determined by market rates. Last decade, there were several states in the US that were particularly stingy on teacher pay. Oklahoma and Arizona were especially bad. Neighboring states started actively poaching their teachers. Texas actually put up billboards in OK and AZ cities offering more pay. Virginia did the same in NC. The states bled teachers until they, gasp, started paying the market rates.

I’m not sure unions are needed in modern, western capitalist economies any more. If an employer or a state treats me badly, I can move to the next state over and get another job.

Not trying to start a fight here, but US history suggests that you’re probably wrong. 100 years ago, the biggest US companies had names like US Steel, AT&T, GM, and several railroad companies with names I can’t even remember. Even though AT&T and GM are still around, they’re nowhere near the biggest any more. You’re right that companies get purchased and merge all the time, which confuses things. But, even accounting for that, the wealth and power didn’tt stay with the same people and family lines. Rockafellers, Carnegies, Mellons, Fords, etc. The richest/most-powerful US families from 100 years ago are no longer in the top spot. They arent poor but they’ve all fallen out of the top spots.

Extreme wealth and power turn over quickly in the US. It’s one of our many strengths that few people discuss. Multimillionairre families are a dime a dozen. But, once you get above a billion dollars, it’s almost impossible for a US family to sit on a pile of wealth and power for centuries unless multiple generations of the family are truly extraordinary. Which basically never happens. “Regression to the mean” is almost imevitable.