Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is
"It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point
But I have also observed educated people supporting some parties, ideas or policies rather mindlessly seemingly as a matter of differentiating themselves from the opinions and interests of uneducated.
It's correlation, it's not direct cause and effect. The average guess of a group of people is closer to the true value than most of the individual guesses.
What if the people who are part of the problem are people who point out the people who are part of the problem? What if there isn’t an actual problem beyond that? Like, things are, you know, just okay?
I love how people blame anonymity for the current internet problems. Whereas when anonymith was the default we had almost none of the problems.
Most of the problems seemed to have started once anonymity stopped being the order of the data, and things like Facebook and Twitter became big where everyone's real identities became tied to their online behavior.
A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
China is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization.
Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.
I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.
If they wanted to do that, they'd pick stronger arguments for starters. But either way, social media updoots and shares aren't going to change anything with capital's plans, so it'd be weird for a foreign power to think that it would.
They don't need strong arguments they need emotionally resonent ones, "AI is using all your water" is a more primal, plus doesn't matter they just flood with a thousand different arguments.
And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.
So even will all the effort we've put into solar and decreasing coal, being more economical unless there is massive widespread international cooperation to suddenly and rapidly start deindustrializatizing the air we breathe will be doing us in less than 25 years.
Sounds great, at this point doesn't really seem to be anything I can do as an individual except enjoy the ride, because it's now a race to see whether swarms of killer AI robots do us in, the global economy collapses, the ocean currents fail, and if none of those happen the air will end up killing us all anyway.
Sounds like I might as well try and enjoy it while it lasts. Cheers!
> Our analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shows a trend in negative unit growth starting in mid-2025, masked by steady price increases. But since February 2026, units have stepped down sharply enough to pull sales lower across the US. Prices are still climbing 2% to 3% year over year,
Seems pretty straightforward. They increased their price to try and make up for losses, which in turn mean less people purchasing, which they responded to by increasing prices. A lovely little circle.
Maybe some economists should investigate how prices effects demand, could be groundbreaking.
No, that would almost certainly defeat the point of selling the models.
Hardware 2FA is not a new concept and is recommended by many people for many purposes. Only the authentication token is attested, and that is the purpose of an authentication token.
> No, that would almost certainly defeat the point of selling the models.
If the best models are so anticipated that people do anything to get them, seems like remote attestation fits perfectly here. There is no need to use it for lower quality models which are used by masses. Instead, it even works for marketing narrative where they do everything they can that their great models are used only those devices they allow, and no <name your country> can't easily use them. Maybe even helps setting higher price.
The government has a list of pesky troublemakers to target individually if they prove too annoying? I'm sure the good people of Germany can figure out something to charge someone with.
Won't that just unfairly displace the impact onto the economically disadvanteged as they are the least likely to have the flexibility in their schedule, inadvertently forcing more of the maintenance burden onto those who are int be least place to bear it?
You wouldn't just charge more for driving. You do it in combination with funding public transport, building safer cycling routes, and removing roadblocks from building cheap housing near PT hubs.
Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation. Make public transportation free to use. That would be far more impactful to the folks least able to bear an increase in driving fees.
In most of the US, people are forced to own cars because they don't have public transit available, or the available public transit is too infrequent, or there aren't dense enough routes. The reason behind this is funding.
Additionally, buses are less efficient because they need to sit in the same traffic as everyone else. Reduced traffic makes buses more efficient. Reducing car traffic is a win for basically everyone, and increasing public transit is additionally a win for basically everyone.
Car infrastructure is heavily subsidized, and congestion pricing is one way to make car owners pay for part of the cost. Why is it fair for public transit riders to have to pay per ride, when car owners get to use the infrastructure for free?
> Take the revenue generated from congestion pricing, and put it into public transportation.
Public transportation is often not viable for the car-centric design of many American communities. The above is necessarily to do, but development probably also needs to also change to pre-WW2 designs:
I disagree with that take generally. What is the difference between say a UK garden suburb and a new build suburb outside dallas? The commuter rail station really. UK suburbs are similarly labyrinthine. But actually, the dallas suburbs have great bones for a potential transit network. Even though the residential streets themselves look like they were laid out by wandering livestock just like they were in the UK, they have the great advantage of being rigidly bounded by generally 1x1 mile square, cardinal, arterial road networks which are very wide public right of ways. One could just lay a network of brt or lrt or heavy commuter rail on top of this space without even needing to acquire any property at all. And if the stations were say on each 1x1 mile intersecting node, everyone in the inner residential portion would theoretically only be a half mile or closer from their nearest transit stop, as the crow flies at least.
The only real issue is that these transit offerings are not being invested in at all. Not at the level of road expansion investment anyhow. Not that they wouldn't be possible to offer or that the built environment somehow precludes them.
We're talking about cities that would benefit from congestion pricing. If there's enough traffic to need congestion pricing, then it could immediately benefit from public transit.
I don't understand why folks always take this as an all or nothing thing. We don't need to redesign the suburbs. They're the ones causing the congestion, and they're also the ones benefiting from free roads. Taxing them to cover the their own externalities makes sense. If public transit is available and better than driving cars, the suburbs will either support them via redesign, or they'll pay the tax for the luxury of driving a car into a city they don't live in.
> In my city public transit fares only cover something like 10% of the cost. Isn’t that fairly typical?
Sure, but the budget for transit is also extremely tight, especially compared to car infrastructure.
If only 10% of the costs are covered, that's even more motivation to not charge fees at all, right? Why impose that burden? More people riding public transit means less cars on the road, and less traffic, which is good for everyone.
> charges a fuel tax to pay for roads
For the most part fuel taxes haven't increased to cover the costs of roads (it hasn't increased with inflation at all, federally), and they typically cover highways. Recently, a number of places have been looking at pausing or removing fuel taxes to reduce costs of fuel, due to the Iran war. Most states cover the cost of roads primarily through their general funds.
The US obviously loses out to places like Japan because you have the chicken and egg problem: to make money back you need enough people but for enough people to use public transport you need to invest in it.
> Every place I’ve lived charges a fuel tax to pay for roads.
Which, ironically, often only covers something like 10% of the cost :)
Sure, I wouldn't expect fuel tax to cover everything. Local roads are quite useful to people who do not drive at all, and major roads and interstates are disproportionately worn by commercial vehicles that also benefit many people who do not drive private vehicles.
Indeed. After all, roads predate the car by thousands of years. But still, often roads are overbuilt and their potential capacity is never close to being reached. The bog standard suburban design we see in america for example is generally severely overbuilt. Plenty of arterials nowhere close to being used to their theoretical throughput limits. If your experience of suburbia is mostly american centric, if you look at say english suburbia where major roads only offer a single lane per direction you'd wonder how society there functions at all. But it does, because those single lane per direction have enough capacity to serve a generally denser version of suburbia than what we might see on the fringes of Dallas, where giant empty roads such as this (1; note how there are barely any cars in frame) are found on standardized 1 mile square grids out of routine more than anything really. Compare with (2) which feels much more right sized for the road demand in this generally denser suburban area on smaller lots with attached housing.
I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.
And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.
I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.
In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.
So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
reply