Look, the current guy is an objectively awful human being. No argument there.

Regarding most of your other points - you're letting the media frenzy maching lead you around be the nose. As one example, take the SAVE act. To Republicans, it's a massive (BIGLY) accomplishment that keeps out the hordes of fake voters. To Democrats, it's evil voter repression that freezes out huge numbers of legit eligible voters that don't have a valid ID. Both points of view are wrong.

The conservative view is wrong because there's basically no voter fraud in the US. The system works so well that most audits of voting records ends with the conclusions like "we couldn't find a single suspicious vote in the 10 million ballots that we looked at".

The liberal view is wrong because you can probably count the number of eligible voters without a valid ID on a single hand. In the US, if I don't have a valid state ID, I can't open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, buy alcohol, buy cigs, buy a car, sign up for utilities, or engage with any level of government in any way at all. If I don't have an ID, I'm basically completely off the grid. There's about 14 million undocumented people in the US, and most of them don't have IDs, but they were never going to vote anyways.

The SAVE act is a nonexistent solution to a nonexistent problem. But, if you listen to the media machine, you'd think that there's a world-war-level fight happening over it.

Nah. We're doing fine from a democracy point of view. US elections are monitored by tons of people around the world and they're considered pretty clean. Gerrymandering is actually something of a wash (both sides do it and cancel each other out) and voter suppression is more of a social-media hyperventilation than an actual thing in the US.

I live in the midwest, where lots of states went Trump, so I rub shoulders with people in both parties. The guy won fair and square. He's awful, but that's irrelevant here. Liberals still haven't come to terms with what happened. The last Democratic president overstepped - he tried to push things to the left, when all he really got was a mandate to keep the seat warm. He pretended the immigration issue didn't exist, and the country definitely didn't like that. He was showing his age in the worst way, and then the democrats nominated a candidate who was competent but vibed with about 4 percent of the voting population.

The democrats did so badly that the country actually let *Trump* back in for 4 more years, in addition to both houses of congress and the supreme court. Let that all sink in for a minute. That should tell you how bad the left flubbed the politics. The country has gone republican and right-of-center for the time being. That's hard for a lot of people to swallow. Until liberals and democrats come to terms with this, they will lose more elections than they win.

The thing to watch is the midterms and next potus election. As long as they happen normally, we're fine. I'm confident that they will.

Um. Sure. And, if any federal prosecutor decides to indict him, he can fire the prosecutor. He can also, almost certainly, pardon himself.

The potus is immune to federal law.

He's not a king. I was very careful to point out that the immunity applies to him, and him only. Not his appointees. Not the people who work for him. Not his goons.

Remember when those ICE guys beat an ICU nurse to death just cause they felt like it? And it was captured on video? If a federal prosecutor ever thinks that they committed murder, they can be indicted and tried. Sure, Trump could pardon them, but those lowlifes couldn't afford the bribe. They could be indicted any time after Trump leaves office. Also, Trump can't do squat about a state prosecution. If a Minnesota prosecutor decides to indict those ICE goons and issues a warrant for their arrest, they will be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives, and god help them if they ever step foot in Minnesota again. There's no statute of limitations on a murder charge, either, so that lasts forever.

The trials would be rough due to the Supremacy Clause, but who knows how it would play out. They would be in court for years.

Those as**oles are gonna be sweating bullets for the rest of their lives.

Our democracy is holding. Times are ugly, and our system is imperfect, but the democracy is healthy. Always remember, "we the people" voted for this. Were getting exactly what we (collectively) asked for.

Trump is using literally every aspect of his time as POTUS to enrich himself. He’s taking straight-up bribes, straight-up selling pardons and visas, using his power to put family members into lucrative business deals, selling presidential crypto, and Trump-branded everything. He’s siphoning money out of his PACs. He’s not even trying to hide it. He’s proud of it. He straight up said “doing this means I’m smart, the only people who don’t are naive chumps”. And his supporters love it.

Remember how icky it was to see Biden use his power to help his sons? That guy’s shenanigans are nothing compared to what Trump is doing.

And, for him, I’m pretty sure it’s all legal. I hear a lot of people say “the potus is not above the law”. Sorry, but the potus, as a single person, is indeed immune to federal law. The supreme court saw to that. He’s also immune to most state laws from a practical standpoint.

To be clear - just him. Just that one guy. Not his underlings.

The supreme court can control him, but only on narrow constitutional issues. Congress is his real supervisor. They could fire him. Obviously that’s not gonna happen, though. So, the guy’s basically got free game.

I’m not saying I approve or disapprove of any of this, but this is the way it is.

Unsure why someone downmodded this. Pretty sure the poster is correct. They’re gonna put the software in all sorts of systems. No, Anthropic would definitely NOT be the only one to develop.

I’m guessing that Anthropic wanted the power to verify their product wasn’t being used to create autonomous killing weapons, which would mean full audit access to basically the entire US military R&D ecosystem. This would not happen in ANY universe under ANY president. OpenAI was happy with a pinky-promise and a giggle.

agreement with the administration on this one. Military R&D takes place in secret behind layers of locked doors. The only way Anthropic could actually be sure their product isn’t weaponized would be if Uncle Sam gave Anthropic the power to poke into literally every corner of our government’s secrets and audit their work. No. Just no. Not. Gonna. Happen. Not under *any* president. Regardless of how you feel about the military, war, this administration or AI in general. No way the US government would grant that to *any* company.

So, what happened is this: Altman is in a meeting with a military rep. Altman says “you’re not gonna use our product to create fully autonomous killing weapons, right? *Wink wink* all I need is a pinky promise. The military rep blinks a few times and says “um, sure, but we’re not showing you what we do with it”. Altman says “la la la good enough for me just gimme the monaaayyyyyy”.

We’re getting close to the point where solar/wind will deliver an essentially infinite amount of energy when times are good. At least as far as our current needs go. Screw lithium ion for grid storage. That’s the right tech for mobile stuff. Dense, efficient, and expensive. Grid scale needs to be cheap and scalable. 50% efficient is perfectly fine.

That being said, who knows if this will actually happen. Silicon Valley companies announce grand projects all the time and then cancel them. There are a dozen big data companies, and every one of them is currently planning to build more GPU farms than there is surface area on the planet. Only a tiny fraction of it will actually happen.

Smog is a *very* local thing. If a local population wants to breathe clean air, the steps to do it are extremely straightforward. If a local population doesn’t care about it, they can allow all sorts of burning and exchange their health for a small amount of convenience and short term economic benefit, and usually it barely impacts the next city over. Smog is extremely egalitarian as well. If you live in the area, there’s no getting away from it. The particles are too small. They get everywhere. Everyone from the poorest hobo to the billionaire in the penthouse gets a dose of the aerosol particles, and the health effects of that stuff is very well understood.

Sorry, but the potus is most definitely a protected class. Between his formal powers and immunities, their direct control of the justice department aka prosecutions, and their immense power to inflict pain on the states, they are essentially above the law. Now, everyone under him? Thats another matter. They dont get the same effective immunity. Just the top guy. Trump orders ICE to roam around like the gang from clockwork orange and beat the first random person they encounter to death. Trump? Immune. The ICE officers themselves. Nuh uh theyâ(TM)re probably gonna be facing state murder charges eventually.

The Supreme Court can declare potus actions to be unconstitutional and he pretty much has to comply. At least at the malicious compliance level. Congress can impeach. Those are about the only hard checks on the man himself.

Unless your name is Edward Snowden, my understanding is that the US doesn’t care much if someone gets disgusted with our system and decides to move somewhere else. It’s their decision. And, what’s the point of employing an army of skilled people to make a few hundred unhappy people even more miserable? What a colossal waste of human effort for basically no return on investment. I’m fine if China and Russia want to utterly waste their human capital on that sort of thing. Us? We need good people to be working on too much stuff that actually matters to be flushing time and money down the drain like that.

Oh I totally agree about Starship’s readiness. Nowhere near ready yet. But at least SpaceX has a focus and intensity.

I get the feeling that the people who work on Artemis simply feel no urgency. Wake up at 10. Put in 2-3 hours of real effort to keep things minimally rolling, and cash a nice salary for the work. No sense of urgency. 30 year old technology. No real consequences if the project is delayed by 6 months. Or a year. Or 5 years.

Starship could fail. Musk is losing focus on space and liquidating his successful companies to fund Grok (I just vomited a little). He might now be a liability for SpaceX. It’s his toy and he’ll break it if he feels like it. If that happens, we’ll suddenly be grateful that we kept Artemis alive. It’s an insurance policy.

It would be interesting to see if that would smack the US out of its current state of “head-up-own-ass”. We’ve gotten too accustomed to winning and we’ve gotten a bit entitled on the world stage.

It might not be enough, though. The truth is that landing a small capsule on the moon using a large but conventional rocket is something that we did over 50 years ago.

I’m really, really, really hoping that the Starship development is a smashing success. If I had to list my top 10 most important projects that humanity is undertaking right now, Starship would make the list.

and set-top boxes are a dime a dozen.

It's not that xbox was bad. And some aspects of it were pretty powerful and advanced. Remember kinect? Cutting edge stuff at the time.

But, Sony was just better. Microsoft tried. Not their strength. No dishonor in admitting defeat and redirecting the resources elsewhere.