A classic example of current cultural pessimism.

The present administration is said to be doing something dire - "The alleged administration never saw a math problem it could understand and has been busy cutting research funding that doesn't directly contribute to producing widgets for its industry friends."

But no numbers are shown to support this. Then there are the '"beancounters" - obviously a derogatory term, presumably for accountants, and they are supposed to be saying something completely stupid, and the sort of thing that accountants in real life never say, and if they were to, no-one would listen.

We actually need accountants. Without accountancy we would find it impossible to run a money based economy. You may not like what proper accountancy shows about a given project to which you are emotionally attached - that's one usual reason for a generalized resentment of accountants. But with all the imperfections of the profession, we need it and its a positive force.

And finally you arrive at the dire predictions which don't follow from your arguments, the attribution of racist denigration of mathematics. How you dragged racism into it? The US is going to run desperately short of mathematicians due to its approach to AI. OK, but how on earth are you to bring race into this? By arguing that the Chinese are visibly doing AI better, and that the only reason the US does not imitate them is racism about them. Oh, so its not the bean counters and the alleged administration at all - or maybe it is, but they are all motivated by racism. Or maybe its the administration that is racist too?

Its all completely incoherent, but its worth dwelling on for a few moments to see a pattern of doom laded resentment, with dire predictions associated, and no solutions, which occurs in the other great progressive issues of the day. Gender, climate/energy, race, periodically even diet, where we switch from demonizing fat to carbs to protein and back every few years.

No, there is not going to be an apocalyptic shortage of mathematicians due to the US approach to AI by this administration. There are lots of ways in which education for employment, and education in general for life, can be improved, not least by changing the attitude and objectives of the teaching profession. But we are not going to run out of mathematicians.

One can make similar points about the other great progressive issues of the day, but this is long enough and contentious enough already, so I'll leave it with that cryptic observation!

The laptop line seems to have great hardware, and I would buy it in a flash, except that I don't want what I see as an awful OS - not so much the OS itself, but the restrictions and app choices it ties you into. I know Apple enthusiasts see this differently, but I just don't understand their enthusiasm for the company.

Don't much like Windows either as OS, but sometimes for some purposes you need it, and it runs very nicely in a VM for those occasiona, and otherwise keeps out of the way.

When they let you run Linux on an Apple machine in the same way you can load Debian or whatever onto an HP or Dell, I'll buy, but the whole spirit of the company is antithetical to that -- which is why I'll never buy one as things are, and they are not going to change.

Pity about the hardware, but there you go. Some compromises are just not worth it, and they want and always have wanted too much. Whether its as in the past buying inferior hardware to get an OS you wanted, or as now, buying an OS you don't want in order to get desirable hardware, the price is always too high and the compromise too great..

Sorry, on mobile now and it's difficult to look up. You can search for the number of arrests and the number of lethal shootings during an arrest by race. Black people have far more interactions with police per capita, but each interaction is less likely to result in death than for other races.

What exactly? The tax return information is available from the IRS. Cross-reference it with Census district zoning.

So offices create value, not people in them? Do a mental experiment: replace offices with remote work. How much value remains?

No. Around 80-85% of people would prefer to live in single-family homes. People instead are forced by economics to live in dense areas that are designed to be hostile for humans (bike lanes instead of roads, forced public transit, no good grocery stores forcing people to eat junk, etc.)

Police are statistically less likely to harm Black people during an arrest.

This is simply false. Most of the US wealth is generated in suburbs. Or perhaps you think that companies are people?

Urban cores steal from suburbia by taxing company offices that are located in urban cores. But if you look at PERSONAL tax returns, suburbia is clearly funding the lifestyle of urban cores. And as usual, welfare queens always think that they're actually the hardest-working and deserve all they get.

Yeah, let's instead force people into 15-minute neighborhoods. With barbed wire and fences, so they won't dare to go out.

Cheaper housing, better jobs, more space for kids, better entrepreneurship, better general outcomes. There's simply nothing that urban cores can offer in these areas.

Yes, classic American suburb. And it IS cheaper.

The houses themselves tend to be more expensive because they tend to be larger. But the _services_ do NOT significantly differ in cost!

The problem is that construction and maintenance in cities is FREAKING EXPEN$$$$IVE. For example, Greater Houston Area is mostly suburban and has similar population as NYC. Yet GHA spends 2.5 _times_ _less_ per capita. If you look at specific services, it's a wash. Police is slightly cheaper in suburbs, sewer is more expensive, water is similar, electricity is cheaper.

Nope. It's cheaper to ban all commercial construction larger than 2 stories and just shoot everyone who proposes densification.

Because of toxic urbanism. Large cities subsidize the large companies by offloading externalities (costs of living) on population.

No. Leftists are morons. And you're right about the location: we need to dis-aggregate cities to make other locations viable.

Another way to look at it: city cores became so toxically dense that they force people to live in misery, because it's their only option. In other words: the country is getting strangled by bike lanes.

Nationwide. There are almost 1.10 houses per family, we literally have empty houses decaying right now because nobody lives there.

Bullshit. Suburbans are the CHEAPEST way to construct housing. And we have so many homeless because we _stopped_ constructing new suburbs.

Can you tell me without looking it up, how many housing units per family do we have right now?

Oldie but goodie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.

Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.

The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.

This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.

And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.

The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.

If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.

Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.

Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.

Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.

Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.

Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.

And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.

A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.

You know that it's not true! They're extremely understaffed in their legal department, they don't have enough lawyers to sue their customers for license violations.

??? This is pretty common terminology. Enhancers ("performance enhancing drugs") are designed to _enhance_ something above the baseline, not just to merely correct a pathology.

If you don't know this, perhaps you should go back and do some more study?