""The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" is a quote from Shakespeare.

"Call me Ishmael" is a quote from Melville.

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration" is a quote from Herbert.

And, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is" is a quote from Adams.

This is the way quotations work.

Before or after you bought it? If it's afterwards, it's an agreement made under duress.

No, it wasn't a turning point, by itself. Wars rarely turn on a single such event. In this case, drones were a game changer because they enabled an attack that could not have been carried out with more conventional weapons.

Your response had context before it, which you are now ignoring. The context was a discussion about the devastation being Trump's fault.

Yes, cuts affect things. But that was not the issue with Kerr County. The county already had access to funds specifically designated for life-saving infrastructure such as warning sirens, but they chose not to use it, or at least to delay use of it, because it came from Joe Biden's leadership. https://www.chron.com/news/art...

I agree that cutting funding causes damage, but that isn't what happened here.

The more interesting observation is that the part containing those 2 switches has been replaced twice since the advisory was issued. So presumably the questionable switches in the advisory were not used in the much newer replacement part.

I don't know what those parts are made of, but if they're metal, they might well survive. We'll have to wait for the final accident report to see what they learn about that aircraft's switches.

I'm not necessarily worried about unemployment. Humans will always find something to do, even if it's not "productive" by current standards. Pre-industrial people would be puzzled by the work most 21st century people perform and most probably wouldn't call what we do "work."

Many people may not have any purpose in terms of physical production, but there is a lot of room for care work that doesn't require any real skills other than some basic human compassion. For example, daycares and nursing homes never have as many people as would be ideal. Imagine if 90 year olds in nursing care had one person who was always there for them instead of someone responsible for 12 other people just popping in every hour. Imagine if preschool teachers only had 4 or 5 kids at a time. In some countries, they have been trying to use robots as a substitute for human beings in situations like nursing homes, but the fact is that a machine can never provide companionship like another human can.

In our current world, most people are still preoccupied with directly or indirectly making the physical "stuff" that makes society run. But if robots and AI are taking care of that stuff, there's more room for people who just take care of other people. 200 years ago, there wasn't much room at all for caretakers. Only royalty (literal or figurative) had servants who just took care. Most people had to work all day to maintain daily life and any caretaking was with leftover time. What if the machines take care of daily life instead?

Every word from every character in every work by Douglas Adams is a word written by Douglas Adams.
I can't make that any clearer. Every single word.

William Shakespeare wrote that.

Dick the Butcher doesn't exist, he's a fictional character.

*I* think AI is real, in the sense that it's a useful tool. It's absolutely true that many companies, intent only on riding the wave, have implemented AI in ways that are not helpful. But the real players--ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and a few others, are showing us the real potential of what these tools can do. These tools save me time literally every day. No, they aren't perfect, but the improvement over time is clearly visible to those of us who regularly use the tools.

It it "real" intelligence? No, of course not. But that doesn't make it useless.

Nobody should be shocked that parents are advising their children based on what worked (or didn't for them). All you can do as a parent is try to provide the benefit of experience.

However, there is one thing that I doubt will ever change: who you know matters quite a bit. Humans are fundamentally social animals, and someone who known to the organization doing the hiring and is perceived as "one of us" is always going to have a leg up over an anonymous resume. This tends to benefit the children of those who already know a lot of people with good jobs. If you don't come from money, you are left to try to break your way in from alternative means (such as gaining admission to an elite university where most students are from wealthy backgrounds).

One of the sneaky ways that very high-end (i.e. well-paid) entry level jobs gatekeep is by having very idiosyncratic hiring procedures that you are unlikely to know unless you are part of the right networks. For example, if you want to work in management consulting, you really need to attend one of the "target" schools and be familiar with the unique interview questions and hiring timeframe. If you got to random State U and apply to McKinsey as a Senior, there is close to 0% chance you get hired. You had to go through a target school on-campus process in the fall of your junior year to get in the door. Similar process (albeit with different criteria and timelines) for high-end law firms and investment banking. These special procedures tend to weed out a huge number of applicants who were simply in the wrong social circles and didn't even know to ask about these career paths. I say this as someone who completely missed the boat on consulting out of sheer ignorance. As a college senior, someone suggested I look at consulting. When I did, a realized it was already too late and didn't go to a target school. But this experience helped me quite a bit in law school, where I had researched the game in advance and tailored my search to it.

I mean, it still "glows" right? What else to the investors want?

Well, the singularity at the center of the black hole is a point (or, is a point if the black hole isn't spinning.) The term "black hole" refers to the event horizon and everything inside it. The stuff inside is not observable-- the math says it's a singular point (ignoring quantum mechanics, since there is no theory of quantum gravity), but that's not observable.

Technically, when we say it's spinning, the actual meaning is "the black hole has angular momentum." The word "spin" is just shorthand. Same goes for elementary particles, for what it's worth. An electron has spin, but don't think of it as having some part of it is moving in circles.

Yes, the singularity at the center of a black hole with nonzero angular momentum is theoretically not a point, but a ring.

Could go either way, depending on whether the angular momentums of the individual black holes, and the angular momentum of the two holes orbiting each other, are aligned or anti-aligned. Also, the gravitational radiation of the merger carries angular momentum away, so the angular momentum of the merged system is less than the (vector) sum of the angular momenta of the two individual black holes and the orbital momentum.

So you're calling people who have 401(k) investments in S&P 500 index funds, "parasites"? I'd suggest that to qualify as an investor "parasite," the filter criteria would need to be a bit more specific.

FOMO. That's the reason.

The college degree loan thing was already becoming a problem when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago. It was fine when one might be borrowing $5000 per year as even entry-level college grad jobs that actually used degrees paid enough to make repayment of those loans doable, but the trouble was that far too many truly entry-level jobs started preferring college degrees when they didn't really contribute, so more and more demand for college degrees among people drove up prices for the limited seats. Which led to a balloon in both traditional colleges increasing their programs and their tuition, and for-profit colleges springing up to try to get in on the act.

What does "late stage capitalism" look like, exactly?

I'd suggest that it look like most markets being controlled by a few big players, so that new small businesses don't have a chancre to get started before they are stamped out. Such an environment would completely stamp out innovation, while being an environment hostile to consumers.

This is certainly not the environment that I see, certainly not in Western countries. The US Treasury https://home.treasury.gov/news... says that small businesses are thriving, while the Chamber of Commerce says there is "cautious optimism" despite tariff threats https://www.uschamber.com/smal....

You seem to be saying you agree with this take, but I know many who don't. Whatever the case, I do agree with your subject that it's *not* late stage capitalism.