Whilst you're almost certainly correct (AI would be unlikely to conquer a problem requiring any meaningful original thinking, even with help), this gives the aforementioned student an Erdos number (which is not quite as exciting as a Fields medal, but nothing to sneeze at either) and it's entirely possible that the conjecture will turn out to actually be useful in some area.
....a series of satirical reels someone has been posting about Spirit Airlines. But, in all honesty, it seems like a genuine failure due to genuinely incompetent management. This is different from some of the early attempts at budget airlines in, say, the UK, where British Airways and other major airlines committed acts of fraud in order to redirect customers.
Each week here in Santa Clara County, a pedestrians is killed by someone driving a car or truck, but here we are attacking ebikers--right in the middle of gas crunch, at $6.00/gallon?
Car manufacturer CEOs have to eat. Do you hate car manufacturer CEOs?
You cannot just put pedals on a Harley and call it a bicycle. There are some so-called ebikes that can go highway speeds.
Not legally. Class 3 is already capped at 28 MPH. We don't need a new law to prevent them from going highway speeds. The existing laws already do.
The only way to "save money" by using an H1B is to advertise, say, that you need a full stack dev for $50k in an area where 200k is what they normally earn, then try to convince the authorities that 50k is ACKSURELY the going rate, and that the reason you didn't get any qualified candidates was that Americans are dumb.
The usual way of doing that is to say, "But those $200k jobs are Software Engineer III. We're hiring for Programmer I".
By allowing developers to build structures with inadequate parking
That's an interesting statement. I never would have considered that developers, while estimating the size of a complex's parking lot, would need to add an additional allotment for... lodging? I wonder if there's a formula to calculate this, and what the variables in this formula would be.
Oh, sorry, that's not what I meant. I wasn't saying that homeless people live in their cars and occupy parking places in housing complexes; they usually occupy street parking.
What I meant is that if you're trying to build low-income housing to accommodate the extremely poor and/or homeless, you shouldn't assume that they won't have to have parking places for their cars.
Anyone with a low-income job is probably *more* likely to require a car to get to a job far away than someone with a higher income (who is more likely to live close and work close to transit, is more likely to be able to afford an Uber, is more likely to have shuttle service from their employer, etc.).
And most short-term homeless (because of joblessness, rather than chronic problems like addiction or psychological problems) do have cars. (Whether they have valid insurance and tags may be a different question, but those cars don't just cease to exist.)
Yeah, but if you figure many households have kids or elderly non-drivers, if it was roughly two people per household per car, then the high speed rail budget would be about $10K per household, which is in the range of the latest Chinese electric vehicles (without tariffs):
Example from: https://money.usnews.com/inves...
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The average new car in the U.S. in March had a list price of $51,456, according âOEto Kelley Blue Book.
In China, there are more than 200 battery-powered models, including hybrids, for sale at less than the equivalent of $25,000, according to DCar, an information and trading âplatform.
Reuters compiled a list of the five best-selling electric vehicles in China that start under $12,000 using DCar data.
These small EVs aren't available for sale in American showrooms - and may never be - but for about the price of an average new car in the U.S., a consumer in China could buy all five of these EVs.
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Geely [now parent company of safety-focused Volvo] EX2: Starting price, $10,060
The pure electric Geely EX2 was the top-selling model domestically for any kind of âvehicle in 2025.
The small EV comes with a bevy of nifty features: a front trunk, storage compartments throughout the cabin and a 14.6-inch âcentral âtouchscreen running on a system that âGeely developed. The top-trim version âhas a range of about 255 miles on the Chinese test standard.
Known as the "Star Wish" in China, the EX2 was a hit from âits 2024 launch and Geely began sales âin Brazil, Indonesia and Thailand last year.
"When you get in, you don't feel like you are in a small car," auto analyst Felipe Munoz said. "It feels better in terms of quality and bigger in terms of size."
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It's actually more like 0.75 cars per person in CA looking it up. Admittedly I am doing some handwaving here. But, self-driving cars could pick up some of the slack by making it easier to share a car when needed.
Overall, my point is just to see that there are various surprising alternative options for spending lots of money ostensibly to help people. The point is not so much whether I have the numbers precisely. The point is that they are surprisingly close given *externalities* (like healthcare costs from pollution, the cost of the Persian Gulf deployment force, and so on) which an loosely-regulated market-based system often ignores.
Also, what all this leaves out is that my original argument was that giving people luxury free safer electric cars (almost twenty years ago when I wrote that) may make sense given avoided costs for insurance and healthcare (accidents, pollution).
If you then add another $10K per car from avoiding building high-speed rail, it makes the case even better, and we may be looking at $20k+ avoided costs per better car.
On your point on running up deficits, that's apparently the plan:
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
"First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus."
As another example, the authors say it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property values by making it impossible to build affordable housing (including things like rooming houses, which are often prevented by minimum lot size requirements and also minimum parking area requirements for occupants who generally don't own cars).
Worth pointing out the elephant in the room, which is that not all homeless don't own cars; some of them live in their cars. By allowing developers to build structures with inadequate parking, it creates an undue burden on the folks at the margins, who often have to own a car to survive (getting to work), but still can't afford to live in a place that lets them own one (because of parking fees or higher rent for units that come with parking).
So it's not nearly as black-and-white as your sentence implies, IMO.
Bingo. My essay on that idea from 2009: https://groups.google.com/g/op...
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity.
The book "Abundance" has an entire section on the failure of high speed rail in California despite ldecades-long government support at all levels. In general, the argument they make is that regulations created in previous generations (to avoid the worst excesses of reckless construction) now get in the way of creating solutions to today's issues like a need for clean energy, improved transportation, and affordable housing. The authors claim the book is written "by liberals, for liberals" and there whole point is to show how a previous generation of "liberals" made it impossible for this generation of "liberals" to get anything done. This also happens in conjunction with conservatives who stop liberal projects by using laws liberals created, since it is much easier to stop things using the law than to make them happen. As another example, the authors say it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property values by making it impossible to build affordable housing (including things like rooming houses, which are often prevented by minimum lot size requirements and also minimum parking area requirements for occupants who generally don't own cars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller. Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development.
I'm really not sure why they bothered to rev the CPU. Nobody who used one complained that it was too slow. What we complained about was:
Those were the biggest flaws, and two years later, Apple has still done nothing to address literally any of them. Until they do, this product isn't likely to do much in the market, IMO.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurence of the improbable. - H. L. Mencken
