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Your statement about abortion are out of date.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.

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.

If feels like that, I agree. But if you actually look at the history, we will be fine in the long run. Look at the history of wealth in the US. Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman and that crowd are currently riding high, but in the US, extreme wealth almost never transfers past the second generation. Its quite different in Europe, where the wealthiest families have had the same surname for centuries. Musks wealth will certainly transfer to his kids (85 of them), but if they dont have the same mojo, most of it will quickly diffuse to other people.

NASA is a weird thing. NASA money spent on science is smart. They do the best space science in the world. Their launch program, um, well, let’s just say it isn’t nearly as impressive. No, let’s just be blunt. For the last 25 years, NASA has absolutely sucked when it comes to development of launch vehicles. The current division of labor has actually worked fairly well. NASA continues to do bleeding edge space science and the money for the launches has mostly been outsourced to SpaceX, which is a full 2 technological generations ahead of literally any other entity on the planet.

Corporate purchases and rich people, where 500-1000 extra bucks doesnt matter much to the budget.

Not too long ago, one of my kids wanted a surface pro for college. Really nice hardware. Total cost for the unit and magnetic keyboard was under a grand. For a few hundred extra, we got wayyyyy nicer hardware compared to the low-end student laptops. But, 2k, for the lowest end model. would be a nonstarter. I’m not wealthy. They’re probably not serious about selling very many of them. More of a tech demo thing.

FFS, for just a few hundred more I can buy a late-model macbook pro that probably runs windows faster, even though it’s in emulation mode.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the touchscreen makes the extra 500-750 bucks worth it for some people.

PPP matters if things are locally sourced and produced. Its not perfect but without adjusting for PPP its possible to seriously underestimate an adversary economy. I would go with PPP adjusted numbers rather than raw GDP.

A powerful military, without a similarly powerful GDP to support it, doesnt stay powerful for very long. It used to be that a military could survive on plunder, but that time is centuries gone. Nowadays, a powerful army relies on an industrial base, and a modern industrial base relies on a willing hard working population. When you neglect the underlying GDP, you get Russia or North Korea. Dangerous? Yes. Powerful? Hmm. Nowadays the best Russia can do is to kill/maim 2 million young of their own men, and a few hundred square kilometers of low value territory is all they have to show for it. Iran will fare even worse. They dont have much conventional military anymore, weve stomped their economy and cut off most of their oil revenue. Now were just waiting for it all to take effect. This is a form of siege warfare. There will never be a big massive decisive victory on either side. The people currently in control of Iran will probably claim a win for simply surviving, although their ability to influence world events will be mostly gone, which IMO is the real reason the US is doing this. Enlightened people everywhere will wring their hands for all sorts of reasons. War is ugly.

Yeah somethings weird with this story. Utilities are highly regulated by a lot of laws with teeth. I might be wrong, but suddenly cutting off the electricity of an entire community thats paying its bills probably isnt allowed unless there are alternatives. It could be that there are two other electricity providers the community can jump to over the same grid.

Analog circuitry beyond an RLC loop? Actual individual transistor understanding?

Nowadays, about the only people who learn that stuff consistently are physicists. With a few exceptions, even most EEs are 99% digital now. Whatever analog most EEs learn in their single advanced analog class is quickly forgotten and swamped by the digital stuff.

Also, are you absolutely sure that your view of the industry is correct? In my experience, most of the time, when a business says “we can’t find qualified applicants” what they really mean is “we can’t find *perfect* employees to hire, or the truth is we just don’t want to hire at all right now”. The real reasons a hiring downturn are always something else that they don’t actually want to talk about.

Also, for the last 5,000 years, every single 60 year old has reached the conclusion that “kids these days are dumber”. Not mathematically possible. That conclusion says something about 60 year olds, and basically nothing profound about young people.

Yes, the internet and covid have made peole measurably dumber - by a few IQ points. Measurable, but it’s not Idiocracy.

The true root causes are usually things that people don’t actually want to talk about.

Yeah, I know that game all too well. Anthropic writes down an exaggerated value of the "usage credits" that they provide, but IRL it doesn't cost them much at all since most of the datacenter costs are already sunk.

So, Anthropic can claim that they're providing a hundred trilllyyooonnnnn dollars of AI support that in fact costs them almost nothing extra, the Gates foundation gets free AI, and Anthropic gets to harvest the usage data from a massive foundation. Always remember the value of the data. Everyone wins. To top it all off, I wonder if Anthropic gets a tax writeoff since providing services to a nonprofit might be deductible?

I'm not grumbling about any of this. It's the way these things work.

Holy crap someone who remembers the OJ trial accurately. Your beard must be as gray as mine. Remember detective Furman? The detective who handled OJs evidence at the crime scene and then took the fifth in court when asked questions like “have you ever framed a suspect?”, “have you ever taken a bribe” and “detective, did you frame OJ in this trial?”. The guy said nothing but “I invoke my fifth amendment rights” for a full 30 minutes of cross-examination.

OJ is a stone-cold blooded murderer, but finding him innocent was the right thing to do.