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> Man... How did yall white Westerners turn out to be the weakest people in the world?

Slowly, and then suddenly.

The cracks were obvious when digital records made record keeping more practical, and the first electronic payment systems appeared, but once everyone was doing everything online the damn just burst wide open.


Democracy had enemies before the founding of the Republic. Our founders warned us that it would require constant maintenance: "a republic, if you can keep it," warned Franklin.

Washington cautioned us that political parties would allow unprincipled men to subvert the power of the people.

Jefferson highlighted the criticality of public education: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

For Adams, it was the willingness of citizens to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community. He cautioned against purely self-interested rugged individualism, now a fake American ideal.

All of these have eroded from a combination of assault and neglect. This problem is asymmetric: those who assault democracy have more to gain than those who defend it (e.g. by looting it, or getting compensated by a foreign power, etc.)

In 1971, 2 months after Lewis Powell argued businesses use their political power to aggressively influence the law, Regan brought him on as a Supreme Court Justice. It was much more efficient to buy a justice for life. He helped set the stage for First Amendment protection of corporate speech, and Citizens United; ultimately legalizing the ability to secretly give a political candidate money.

The rot is really, really deep.


See also "boiling frogs".

But then I'm replying to @mr_toad so you probably knew that already.


> fighter jets can't operate on batteries

Gas turbines can run on a variety of fuels, natural, synthetic or a mixture of both. It’s actually one of the reasons that a turbine was chosen for the M1.


Yeah but gas turbines by definitions run on "gas" kerosene based fuel. If you're talking about a battery powered fan or prop that's very different.

Kerosene is a mundane chemical.

It is made with from water, carbon dioxide and energy. Use green energy and atmospheric CO2, and it is carbon neutral.


> someone downloads an xls file and uploads it to Tableau

Sometimes this is because of red tape and not because of software. I’ve run into many situations where you can log into the system and download a spreadsheet from the web interface, but the equivalent API hasn’t been configured (or has been deliberately disabled).


> Regarding art, what do you feel about museums? Why would you go see an original instead of simply looking at a jpg.

Generally you get a much better ‘view’ of the artwork in a museum. It’s higher ‘resolution’ you can view it from multiple angles etc.

There are some exceptions. You’re probably going to get a better look at the Mona Lisa online than if you try and see it at the Louvre.


Eh, there is plenty of artwork with high resolution scans online in which you'll have to take a magnifying glass to the museum if you want a closer view.

> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.


closed source

You talking about the billion dollar model training efforts done in secret?

> fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Sometimes it has. The amount of generated code that selected count(distinct id) from customers would produce is huge.


> And as the article alludes to, the real question is when? In general you can build a data center faster than you can build a power plant, which is exactly the reason data centers can cause short-term electricity prices to increase.

Musk is bringing turbines in on trailers. They’re not even bothering with permits. This is getting really wild west.

https://electrek.co/2026/03/03/elon-musk-xai-data-center-und...


> For a personal loan of money

The seven are doing some fancy accounting to pay for their data centers, but I don’t think Larry, Sergey and others are taking out personal loans.


They’re pledging to do what they were doing anyway. No one with any sense is building large data centers and assuming the grid will supply the energy.

Isn't that contradicted by the fact that data centers are increasing electric prices in the areas they are built? It seems to me that either the data centers are drawing power from the grid or the utilities are gouging people. Either one should be stopped.

move to northern virginia - the capital of data centers - and see what happens to your energy bills…

It has some multitasking on the latest versions of iOS. You can drag a YouTube window up by the bottom right corner and open a Reddit window on another part or the screen if you truly need to be distracted from distraction by distraction.

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