It would be interesting to see the list of past trees. The most famous I can think of Donar's Oak (also called Thor's Oak), which was revered by Germanic pagans, and felled by Saint Boniface.
>US on the other hand, has flatlined to the point where we think stuff like trans athletes in sports are a drastic enough reason to elect a president who is a convicted Felon.
This is very one-sided and unfair. The trans stuff is indicative of a larger social movement. For example, in the U.S., it would be illegal to use IQ tests to hire employees while in China, that's practiced. China is far more meritocratic. The U.S. is driven far more by ideology, and the trans stuff is an example of that.
And someone on the other side of the aisle would point to the prosecution of Donald Trump as politically motivated, where opponents found an obscure law that he violated and charged him with 34 counts based on the 34 forms he submitted with the expense mislabelling.
> China is far more meritocratic. The U.S. is driven far more by ideology, and the trans stuff is an example of that.
I'm guessing you never lived and worked in China before? People who get jobs because of guanxi are not rare, even today, and ideology is far more important in China than in the US, it is just that the ideology is very different from what people are used to in the states.
China definitely relies on ideology quite a bit, the difference is the government controls that ideology because they understand correctly that the people can't be trusted.
The Chinese government’s territorial claims in the South China Sea show near-total disregard for international law. China has constructed heavily militarized artificial islands roughly 200 kilometers from the Philippine coast — and more than 1,000 kilometers from the Chinese mainland — in order to assert control over waters that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and a binding 2016 ruling by an international arbitral tribunal, lie squarely within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. China lost the case on the merits and simply rejected the ruling.
I'm on the "outside" of this argument - never owned a gun yet and not in the US, but the right to life (not to be shot) can be exercised by protecting oneself from guns, with a gun.
Here we're discussing how attacks against privacy are totalitarian and how more and more governments are on their way to become totalitarian regimes, but we don't agree that people having guns is a good defense against a totalitarian government. We talk about police or ICE overreach, but don't talk about what would happen if that overreach expands even more.
That's kind of a jump. The 2a is cool, but gun deaths outpace car deaths now and 2a people refuse literally any of the protections we have against car deaths. Whereas a 15 year old jerking it to a pornstar hurts no one and these people want to completely ban the 4th amendment.
The great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use it at a significant scale because of irrational fears about meltdowns.
It is not rational aversion. Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Regulation is inescapable, because the maximum damage from a nuclear accident would exceed the value of the company operating the reactor. A rational business treats any liabilities larger that what it could pay as equivalent, regardless of how large they could become, and hence will underinvest in safety measures.
And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do.
I agree fossil fuels should go, but that's not an argument they should be replaced by nuclear. It's the argument nuclear advocates used to be able to lie back and comfort themselves with, but then you all got blindsided by renewables and storage zooming past you. You have to address those now, not the old competition you wished you were still running against.
Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix.
On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.
That’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.
If they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.
NPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs.
Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.
Since the 1970s, large construction projects have been layered with several major regulatory regimes that didn’t exist when most affordable infrastructure was built. In the U.S., NEPA (1970) dramatically expanded pre-construction environmental review and litigation risk, causing planning timelines to extend by years. Around the same time, OSHA began rapidly increasing the degree to which workplace processes were regimented, which permanently increased labor-hours and limited on-site automation.
For nuclear specifically, this was compounded by post-Three Mile Island regulatory response. This increased the tendency to use bespoke designs, i.e. discouraged standardization, which prevented automation and the benefits of learning curves. That's why Baumol-style cost dynamics took over.
This same pattern shows up in subways and bridges. It’s not that 'big things can’t be built cheaply anymore", it’s that we changed the rules under which big things are built.
It's clear from the development trajectory that AGI is not what current AI development is leading to and I think that is a natural consequence of AGI not fitting the constraints imposed by business necessity. AGI would need to have levels of agency and self-motivation that are inconsistent with basic AI safety principles.
Instead, we're getting a clear division of labor where the most sensitive agentic behavior is reserved for humans and the AIs become a form of cognitive augmentation of the human agency. This was always the most likely outcome and the best we can hope for as it precludes dangerous types of AI from emerging.
The 1870-1900 period experienced the greatest expansion of U.S. industry, and the fastest rise in both U.S. wages and U.S. life expectancy, in history.
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.
The Executive can't actually cut approriated federal funding, since budgets are congress's job.
The executive, in fact, must spend money that congress appropriates. Unless it is illegal/et al to do so, or the funding otherwise allows prseidential discretion, they are required to do so.
Yes, they did some EO's purporting to cut funding. None that related to non-discretionary funding have been upheld, even by "trump" judges, and so far all non-discretionary (IE explicitly directed by congress) funding cut has been restored, AFAIK. All are a wildly clear violation of separation of powers, and so far no judge has disagreed.
(Though don't confuse whether they have to spend the money the way congress directs with whether they can or can't fire federal employees, etc)
There is a path to the president impounding appropriated money through the impoundment control act, but they haven't done it or followed the process so far.
Isn't it more dangerous that people live their life out without ever trying anything, because they are beset by fear and doubt, and never had anyone give them an encouraging word?
Let's say the AI gives them faulty advice, that makes them over-confident, and try something and fail. Usually that just means a relatively benign mistake — since AIs generally avoid advising anything genuinely risky — and after they have recovered, they will have the benefit of more real world experience, which raises their odds of eventually trying something again and this time succeeding.
Sometimes trying something, anything, is better than nothing. Action — regardless of the outcome — is its own discovery process.
And much of what you learn when you act out in the world is generally applicable, not just domain-specific knowledge.
I am confused by the tone and message of your comment — are you indeed arguing that having corporations use country-scale resources to run unsupervised psychological manipulation and abuse experiments on global population is one of just two choices, the other being people not doing anything at all?
I'm saying that what you have referred to as "psychological manipulation and abuse experiments" is in reality a source of motivation that helps people break the dormancy trap and be more active in the world, and that this could be a significant net benefit.
I just want all sides of the question explored, instead of reflexively framing AI's impact as harmful.
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