From the essay:

While interesting intellectually, I think both the essay and its list of "attributes" of fascism ignores the more important considerations, the conditions that lead to fascism. Ultimately fascism is a populist movement that leaves the existing ruling elite in power. It arises when that elite is challenged by demands for progressive change brought on by the failure of that current ruling elite to serve the population. A lot of what is pointed to as attributes of fascism are really just parallel responses to that same failure. Conspiracy theories, skepticism of elitist claims to special knowledge and expertise, religious revival, rejection of "modern" change that serves the powerful and wealthy at the expense of everyday people, demands for unconsidered change/action that promise to bring relief, frustration at their lack of power to control their lives.

One of the great myths of World Wat II history is that there was this large society of "good Germans" who had Hitler and Nazism imposed on them by terror. In fact, the Nazi's succeeded in Germany because they successfully answered the demands for change that grew out of the depression. Germans embraced the Nazi's and stuck with them to the end. Fascism does always lose when it demands perpetual war because every war is a gamble. As someone said of Hitler, "I never trusted him, he is a gambler and gamblers always lose." If you take your winnings and bet them on the next roll of the dice eventually losing is inevitable. Franco was a fascist but he wasn't a gambler, so he declined to bet his winnings on Hitler's adventures.

I don't think Trump is the source of our problems. He is just one symptom of the failure of our experiment in self-government. With the democrats lacking any real populist alternative to deal with people's disaffection he has free reign to try whatever experiments he wants. The only opposition is whining to no effect. We will see how long even that will last. It seems that he is prepared to test the boundaries of what the oppressed will tolerate. Given the lack of alternatives that may be quite a lot.

So the quality of your credential gives you some kind of "ownership" of the attention of recruiters and employers? And someone with a lower quality credential is stealing it?

Only if they fail to produce as well or better than the person who would have been hired instead. But that raises the issue of whether the quality of the credential is actually useful for evaluating prospective employees. Or is it essentially a marketing gimmick to attract the attention of recruiters and employers.

Are those different things? I agree AI "understanding" is anthropomorphizing the process. But I would think it can, at least theoretically, parse the code, determine what it does and then compare if to a world full of other code that solved the same problem in the past. Including code that is used to add similar features.

But you missed the important point. Spaghetti code implies code that follows a path that can't be easily followed and understood by humans. I see no reason to think AI is likely to produce code that AI will be unable to easily follow.

I question the claim that AI is less able to create something new than a human programmer. Mostly because there is very little new under the sun and most programming is copying and modifying past code.

The possible uses for human work are limitless. There is no reason to think there will no longer be anything for anyone to do. If basic necessities require no human input they will be all but free. Humans will do other things that still have value to them. Value is a subjective judgment. You can make a million reproductions of a Picasso, but the original still has value even to all those humans that can't tell the difference between the original and the copy.

Depends on how much you anthropomorphize AI because the AI "employee" will certainly "understand" it. But how important is that? There are millions of companies using computers who have zero employees who understand the code for the programs they use. In fact, I suspect few programmers would be able to decipher the output of a compiler. But the computer "understands" it and we test its output against the desired results.

Isn't it likely AI will be able to untangle the spaghetti? It would seem to be ideally suited for that. All the information needed to untangle it is right there in the code. The whole idea of "spaghetti" code is that programmers can't easily understand what it does. I am not sure that is problem for AI.

How does someone "cheat" in college? The answer is that college education has turned into a diploma mill that produces a credential. And the person cheats to get a better credential. Who are they cheating? The person they provide the credential to and employers don't actually use the credential to evaluate people for very long. Those straight A's don't matter much if you can't produce results.

So the danger of "cheating" to get a better credential is if by cheating you fail to develop the tools you need to be a productive employee. In that case, you are cheating only yourself.

Colleges don't really "teach" any content of value any more. The information is out there for the taking. What they do is provide opportunities for people to develop, practice and polish their learning skills. And coaches to help people do that in a focused way for the skills needed in their field(s) of study. The whole diploma mill, including tests etc, is just a distraction. So if by cheating you can waste less time on the diploma mill tasks then you come out ahead.

I don't think it is politics. If it doesn't serve/profit them personally its waste. Picking up the garbage and cleaning bathrooms in national parks is not really a political issue, but you only care if the trash cans or toilets are overflowing if you visit a national park.

And yet they are the focus of public debate while the things that do effect our lives are ignored by both parties. Trump has won because he has set the terms of debate. And the Democrats will lose as long as they spend time "resisting" Trump's various provocations instead of developing and supporting an attractive alternative that delivers on the things that do effect people's lives.

You can argue legalisms and constitutional pixie dust all you want. Its not a free country when the government can grab people off the street and send them to prison with no recourse or review.

Right. They are ambitious people trying to make a better life for themselves and their family. They are productive workers. They are a lot of things that are neither alien nor illegal. What they lack is a proper work visa. So, like Elon Musk when he started out, they have found someone who will bend or break the law by employing them.

You missed the point again. Higher pay motivates employers to invest in increasing worker productivity.

Yes it does. Because "better workers", as measured by productivity, are largely driven by employer investments and organization. The company that makes its workers "better" is more competitive against companies that poorly organize production, don't invest in productive tools and rely on cheaper labor to compete.

So some other poor slobs will end up doing those dead end jobs for poorly managed companies using out of date tools. The notion that workers can somehow make their jobs more productive is silly. If we want better jobs with more productive workers we need to provide incentives to companies to make their workers more productive. Higher wages are the incentive.

You asserted that without any evidence. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that the cost of living adjustments do not actually reflect the cost of living of low income families. And, as you note, adjustments based on the cost of living mean the actual wages received are constantly lagging behind actual the cost of living.

It appears to me that the last two increases in minimum wage both happened under Republican Presidents. Preventing increases in wages of the lowest skilled workers has been a bi-partisan effort. Lots of noise, with few results outside of occasional state increases.

Even there the "tip credit" has made those increases marginal for a lot of workers with the tips going into the pocket of employers in the form of lower wages. You can see the effect in restaurants where "server" jobs are scheduled even when there is no one to serve. Those "servers" do a lot of other work during the slow times paid for with tips they receive during rush hour. The employer's incentives for efficiency almost disappear when they are only paying people $2 per hour.

You are right as long as the political debate includes silly arguments about how workers can magically make their jobs more productive. If you understand higher wages as incentives to get employers to invest in increased productivity then 5% becomes a more realistic target. Instead of making workers desperate to "work harder" we need to make employers desperate to "work harder". Because employers are actually the ones in control of worker productivity.

Which makes clear that the argument that higher wages will cause hyper-inflation is nonsense. You think egg prices went through the roof because higher wages at the factories that produce them? More generally, individual higher wages lead to higher productivity, not higher prices. The inflationary effect of wages is that when workers are collectively compensated more demand increases. Worrying about the wages of individual minimum wage workers is economists looking at the world upside down through the eyes of their wealthy corporate employers.

I know people know this, but we seem to forget. The web is not free. We pay for it whenever we buy an advertised product whether we see the ad or not. If the web stops working because no one sees the ads, then advertisers will find another way to sell us their product. That may cost us more or less than the current web advertising model. But whatever the cost, we will pay for it when we buy the product.

That said, I think the web would be more valuable to us if it weren't for the advertising revenue model. Good content wouldn't equal clickbait. And content with no value other than clickbait would disappear.Making what was left far more valuable.

I am not sure the subscription model really works either though. How do you find out about the subscription service? But the current model has failed, so if AI kills it so much the better. Someone will figure it out or the web will become another dead end. My guess is that the likely solution is some sort of packaged products with multiple services in addition to web content.

The real barriers to nuclear power. But in this case the funding will come from a potential customer. The public subsidy will be hidden and only noticed when something goes wrong.