Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

Providing 1.3 million round trip airfares between Houston and Washington DC for Texans who want to see the shuttle.

"assigned to them"? What an absurd phrase. They bought it, they paid for it. They may have paid to have it built in the first place. Or they may have paid someone else who paid to have it built and only did so because they were confident that they'd be able to sell it when they wanted to. Maybe they inherited it from somebody who bought or built it, confident that they'd be able to leave it to their children after their death.

Landlords don't have property "assigned to them". Where did you ever get that notion? Nobody would ever buy or build anything as expensive as a house or an apartment building if they thought it could be taken from them without compensation. Buildings exist ONLY because the people building them and the people contracting for them to be built are confident in the existence of property rights that guarantee that the building can be exchanged for money, whether rent or sale, at the owner's discretion.

If you take away the confidence that the owner of a building can exchange it for money, whether in the form of rent or sale, then you destroy the construction industry. The residential construction industry simply cannot exist if people who would pay for residential construction believe the legal system won't support their plan to exchange a building for money.

Also, the statement "a landlord doesn't do any labor" shows a profound ignorance of landlords. A really staggering level of ignorance that really really raises the question of how can a person be so fantastically ignorant.

But you can choose not to become a doctor, or a construction worker or a water treatment plant worker.

If it becomes possible to demand certain goods and services with no obligation to pay for them just by saying "it's a human right to receive that good or service" and no recourse for the provider of the goods and services when people flagrantly take what they "need" with no intention of paying, than it'll become obvious that those are the sort of goods and services that nobody should go into a career of providing.

Confiscating the work and property of people who currently have it is pretty much a one time thing. After you've made it clear that anyone providing those things is subject to having them confiscated without compensation, you pretty much kill any future hope of new people going into those lines of business, and anybody who can get out of those lines of business will be looking for alternatives.

If you're satisfied with never another apartment building being built, and with never a house being built without the future resident paying in full in advance, then go ahead and try to make it legal to for any current occupant to stop paying and claim that their current occupancies justifies their forever future occupancy.

But if you think it might be nice for new buildings to get built, don't try to justify why the moment somebody moves into it, the people who paid for it to be built have no recourse to compel payment from the people who will live in it.

Or ... issue the citation to the passenger who called the ride, and let him negotiation reimbursement for the fine and insurance costs with Waymo. I guarantee Waymo would fix the bug or perhaps even *ask* to be regulated rather than rely on this loophole.

Why burden the taxpayer with finding a solution to the consequences of early adopting a new technology? If you *choose* to summon a robotaxi, then you're responsble for the consequences of that choice. If you don't like it, then demand the company sort those out before you use them.

This is so unnecessary, I wonder whether this is some kind of social engineering operation being sold as a "service" to landlords.

Supercars this fast have tires that last less than fifteen minutes, perhaps eighty miles traveled on the track of you're lucky. And since the wear isn't linear, if you go just a little bit faster, you might only get a minute or two at the speeds this car goes before you have to change all the tires, which will set you back $40,000.

The point of such a thing is the same as one of those suborbital tourist space flights. The point is to *have had* the experience, which is too brief to be practically useful.

Wait ... isn't selling consumers on features that will be available real-soon-now-trust-us-on-that the way American electric car companies sell *their* vehicles?

Once again, Chinese companies are stealing American (ish) ideas.

I agree they are not socialist, in any kind of a strict sense. But any attempts to learn from those countries is inevitably branded as "socialism". If that's how we're using the word now, then we have to call them something silly like "market socialist".

If you give any tool to any large group of people, some of them will use it in harmful ways. The knife slips and cuts the user, the chainsaw kicks back, the LLM hallucinates superficially credible gibberish.

Once people get over the shock of how impressive LLMs are, they'll see how far we still are from AGI. Because we don't have an artificial *general* intelligence yet, we can't *generally* replace humans. But we can replace them in many labor intensive tasks that don't require common sense, experience with the real world, and advanced thinking skills.

Take copy editing -- a common and labor intensive task in any kind of publishing, public affairs, content management, and corporate communications. Today you can hand a terrible mess of prose to an LLM and it will tidy it up, correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes like subject verb agreement and confusing homophones like "they're" and "their' and "there". The output will be superficially perfect, but you still need a human to judge whether it does the job needed; someone with actual experience and understanding of the human audience.

I think this will be the story of AI between now and the day that we finally achieve AGI, if we ever do: the need for humans with advanced cognitive skills will actually increase as the jobs for people with fundamental cognitive skills like copy editing will decline. Those two things happening together is a big problem. If we don't do something about education in advanced cognitive skills, we will find ourselves in a pickle, because basic cognitive labor is the pipeline that produces people who can perform advanced cognitive tasks.

Weirdly, there's some skill involved in crafting prompts that give you what you want. The things are trained on all the code that's ever been posted anywhere on the Internet, and unless you can prompt them in a way that eliminates that bad code, that van be a bad thing.

I have read documentation that was clearly written by somebody who thought nobody was ever going to read or use it. It was worthless, but it sure would have been nice to have some actual useful documentation. This was pre-LLM by at least a decade or two, so I'm pretty sure it was written by a human who generated "slop". And now I'm not sure how to differentiate "AI slop" from human "slop".

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.