641–650 of 1001 posts
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Funny how democracy works, I recall an election recently not a coup. Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).
Nobody voted for Elon.
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That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating. If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off. You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.
You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
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Purity spiral. The left won't be competitive in elections until they learn what it is, why it results in alienation of people who would otherwise support them, and find a way to escape it.
In other words, the left needs to learn how to love the right (and many people within the left). But I don't know if that's the case. I think there are a lot of people on the right who want the left to love them but believe that the people on the left do not love them. I believe the problem is that people need to learn how to feel loved. To realize that even our enemies are trying their best and most likely care abou…
It's a big problem for the left because numerically they are now the minority of voters, but are still trending away from the center, and shedding their more moderate members.
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Similar (moved to the EU 12 years ago) The best thing I can think of is to make the EU a strong, powerful, wealthy democracy that can defend itself from invasion and try to encourage other democracies around the world. Which means we have a lot of work ahead, to put it mildly.
For that to work, the individual governments need to give more of their responsibilities up to the EU level, which is unfortunately somewhat unpopular.
This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…
As an expat in the EU, I have a surreal sense of being a bystander at an ongoing emergency scene. I don’t want to be yet another gawker as this situation is unfolding but am struggling to come up with actions that are within my power to take as a form of protest, resistance, or solidarity. What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?
This is a global phenomenon. It’s part grassroots, driven by discontent with sclerotic establishment parties that are not solving problems, but also being driven by propaganda from authoritarian countries like Russia and China. The latter is opportunistic.
Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…
This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no. It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unme…
This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court...). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against on the basis of their race. Just because you don't personally see the racism doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
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As an expat in the EU, I have a surreal sense of being a bystander at an ongoing emergency scene. I don’t want to be yet another gawker as this situation is unfolding but am struggling to come up with actions that are within my power to take as a form of protest, resistance, or solidarity. What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?
If you're in Germany or know some Germans, talk as much as you can about how this is what Musk wants to do via the AfD to us here. The election is a little over two weeks away. Right now, the CDU/CSU ("normal" conservatives) look to be getting the largest number of votes, but nowhere near enough to govern on their own. They've been a little too flirty with the AfD (currently in second place), and the worst thing that…
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Purity spiral. The left won't be competitive in elections until they learn what it is, why it results in alienation of people who would otherwise support them, and find a way to escape it.
One could argue the right with its views on abortion and religion suffers the same problem, one they've largely tackled by voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering.
The difference I think, is that the purity spiral on the left encompasses the entire party. If your perspectives are too moderate you are shunned from the entire hemisphere of politics and often suffer a barage of name calling (e.g. bigot) from your own 'side'.
On the right, this is far less often the case. The right is significantly more tolerant of people who fall outside of purity definitions. For example, the majority of republicans are pro-life, but co-exist with roughly a third of republicans who are pro-choice.
In contrast, most Democrats will not tolerate a pro-life member under any circumstance.
Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine. We need to do better. The US government…
If the complaints seem well reasoned, then you adjust course.
You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.
Carl Icahn has a story[0] about firing 12 floors of people that seems relevant