Seamus Culleton is allowed to leave detention, he just can't stay in the US. He is choosing to stay in detention while he pursues legal challenges to his deportation order.
that wouldn’t survive if a significant share of that production wasn’t smuggled into Latin America
Let's look at actual numbers. ATF says 50,000 guns were smuggled into latin america between 2015 and 2022. So about 7,200 a year. There are about 15-20 million new firearm sales per year in the US.
So assume ~.03% of production gets smuggled out. I think the industry would survive if that was cut that off. It actually would be better for them because it would make lies and slanders about the industry harder to make.
It’s not even close to 0.3%, the last time the Obama administration tried to get accurate numbers the republicans blew a head gasket. The fact that supposedly every American owns 4 or 5 guns should hint at how bad the smuggling problem is, and Americans are supporting it with a wink and cooked statistics, they are basically willingly exporting death.
0.03% is ten times less than 0.3%, so I agree it is not even close. The money to manufacturers from smuggling is a rounding error. The numbers are from anti-gun activists, so they are incentivized to over state, not understate the smuggling.
The fact that supposedly every American owns 4 or 5 guns should hint at how bad the smuggling problem is
I think it shows how disconnected non-gun owners are from people who own guns. None of my liberal gun owning friends in California have fewer than 4-5 guns. My conservative gun owning friends in Texas have 20-30 guns. I've never met a gun owner that had 1-2.
I know people who don't like guns don't want to hear it, but guns are tools. You wouldn't ask a carpenter if the only tool he needed was one saw. You don't just need a saw, you need a hammer, a screwdriver, a drill. And you don't just need one saw, you need a few specialized saws, and many screwdrivers. Maybe one hammer is enough.
I am #3 and there are a lot of us (every close friend I have is #3). we don't talk about them publicly so every non-close friend I have would lose a house betting against me owning a gun (I am as non-conservative politically as it gets)
It is pressure from the gun control lobby. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, is the brains behind it. The states moving this legislation (California, Washington) are very hostile to gun ownership, and already have bans on assault rifles and printed guns. This is just another step in tightening the noose.
Part of the economic distortion, and difficulty in making these comparisons, is that a 1970 Ford F-100 and 2025 Ford F-150 are pretty radically different. Both by design, government mandate, and customer demands.
2 door single row -> 4 door two rows
drum brakes -> anti-lock disc brakes
lap belts only -> shoulder belts with airbags,
normally aspirated V-8, no catalytic converter -> twin turbo v6 and dual catalytic converter
manual transmission -> 10 speed automatic
If you wanted to make a Ford F-100 today, without the modern safety, emissions, fuel efficiency, and comforts, you could probably do it for less than $17,000, which is what $2,000 adjusted for inflation is.
And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.
In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.
(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
Yes I agree they are MUCH more expensive relatively. But they are more expensive entirely by choice, not because of inflation or stagnant wages. People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute
And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
> People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.
Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?
If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:
- Streets are in disrepair
- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")
- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)
- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century
Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
It is happening with cars too, it just that features are being added even faster than the price can come down. If you wanted Ford F-150 in 1970, you could do most of it, but it would have been a multi-million dollar car. You get all that for 50k. You are getting a lot more per dollar.
This reminds me the housing discussing - a part of the affordability problem is that houses have gotten much bigger. And have air conditioning. And have to comply with strict building codes. And have to be fire safe.
Which is a problem. I know a people who would be happy with a smaller house, but there just aren't enough on the market, and the scarcity of them leads to bidding wars that drive the price up. Meanwhile huge houses sit on the market for months, because no one can afford them.
I don’t think this is true. Advancements in technology often make things possible that previously were not at any price. Engines, for example, are better than ever in part due to computer modeling that would have been impossible in the 70s. Same deal with aerodynamics, safety features, and a million other things. In the 70s, you couldn’t have those things for any price. They required decades of development in other sectors to open possibilities for automobiles.
Most technology on cars existed years or decades before the became commonplace and affordable enough to use outside racing or exotic cars.
Airbags were patented in the 1950s. Modern ABS in 1971. Fist electronic fuel injector in 1957. You could take the Formula 1 level technology of 1970, and with enough money, apply it to a pickup truck. It would be shockingly expensive - and not as good. T
hat's my point! You are getting so much more for your dollar today, even though prices have risen faster than inflation. You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”
When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.
"A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. "
Yes, it pretty much is. You have to consider technology in cars is moving on two seperate/distinct paths.
1: improving manufacturing processes, materials, quality, which is lowering prices over time. Megacasting aluminum car parts is an example.
2: Adding totally new complex parts and systems that cars didn't have. This is things like airbags, antilock breaks, infotainment system, catalytic converters. This adds to the total cost.
#2 is far outpacing #1, which is why prices of cars are going up faster than inflation, wages, etc.
Again, the old car comparison is demonstrably untrue. To put the same example forward, computer modeling has wildly changed and accelerated car design in ways that were impossible for any sum of money in the 70s.
I think part of why this is hard to believe is that people strongly believe in the concept that time is money. On the margins for decisions like hiring someone to mow your lawn, it is true. For large scale things, you often cannot accelerate processes no matter how much money you dump into it. A good example of this is how long it has taken China to industrialize.
To be clear also, you have to prove your point that #2 is outpacing #1. The fact that the price keeps going up is not proof as there are other explanations. The poor quality of domestic manufacturers and their bad business practices, for example.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
There is if we are comparing 2026 to the 70s. Technology has increased productivity overall. If those gains were distributed more evenly, it is more likely that the cost of, say a car, would be similar to the same percentage of income.
Productivity is up ~3x since 1970, but the car price has gone up 25x. It is driven by the massive increase in features/complexity on cars, and that means it will cost a bigger percentage of income. There is no possible redistribution of gains that would have driven income up 25x to match the car prices.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
This is only true because real income has barely budged since the 1970s.
If real income had tracked productivity during that time, we would have plenty. But it didn't. All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy, in a variety of ways.
All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy
No, the productivity gains are eaten up by expensive items with low perceived value. You don't think about the $1000 catalytic converter in your car, or $5,000 set of airbags. You just think you are paying more to do the exact same drive to work that you could have done in a $2,000 1970s car. And that's true! Nonetheless, there is real added cost and value to the car.
I don't think this is an example of the hedonic treadmill. People who believe that a new 2026 Tacoma is the hedonic equivalent of a new 1970 F-100 are simply wrong, in the same way that people who imagine taking all the flights they take today with the level of service provided on 1970s passenger planes are wrong. The extreme increase in reliability and build quality has shifted the dynamics of the car market, with essentially all new vehicle sales pushed upscale as budget-conscious buyers have no reason to buy new with even an infinite time horizon.
My $15k used car with 100k miles on it is just as reliable, just as stylish, and sparks just as much joy in me as the new cars my grandparents could have bought in 1970.
It's one of the problems with saying healthcare prices have "gone up". An x-ray in 1976 cost like $100 in 1976 dollars and one today costs like $100 in 2026 dollars, so it's significantly cheaper. But you couldn't get an MRI for any price in 1976 and you can get one in 2026 for $800, so the cost of "imaging" has gone up notionally.
There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.
Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.
Yes, but there are no ~17k pickups in the US, which would be the inflation adjusted price of the F-100. The cheapest truck is the Maverick which starts at 28k.
And the $9,000 salary adjust for inflation would be $75,000 today. Then adding in the difference (since we did that with the truck, and since worker productivity has doubled) that $9,000 should be $150,000 today.
Not entirely, the problems are also that wages haven't kept up with inflation; $9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today, and the automakers realized they make more profit in financing than on the vehicle itself, optimizing the maximum they can squeeze someone who needs a vehicle, hence 96 months for an auto loan.
Also if we are going to say the truck of yesterday is better now, productivity today is 2x what it was, so that $75,000 should be more like $150,000 (since we have to account for things improving for their higher price, we can't ignore productivity improving, that would make for warped comparisons).
Both the quotes of this, otherwise empty, article are reasonable and do not make him a Kremlin mouthpiece.
Stating that the west, and the US, has actively used Ukraine as a puppet in the geopolitical game is a fact.
It's also a fact that US troops and NATO forces have increasingly surrounded Russia since the 90s.
Mind you, I think that the NATO argument is bogus.
What happened in Ukraine was not a matter of Russian security, but Putin's own ambitions and paranoia against democratic waves in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
"it is already showing up as stagnant or declining Western salaries"
Real median salary, and real median wages are both rising for the last couple years. Maybe they would have risen faster if there was no AI, but I don't think you can say there has been a discernible impact yet.
I’d like a source for that. College graduates are no longer at an employment advantage compared to their uneducated peers. The average age of a new hire increased by 2 years over the past 4 years.
Young people in the west have definitely seen declining salaries, if only by virtue of the fact that they’re not being offered at all.
I don't think that's true, if you trust gemini at least.. "In 2025, U.S. software engineer pay is barely keeping pace with inflation, with median compensation growing 2.67% year-over-year compared to 2.7% inflation. While salaries held steady or increased during the 2021-2023 inflationary period, many professionals reported that real purchasing power remained stagnant or dipped, making it difficult to get ahead. "
He gave a non answer, quite surely on purpose. Since the interviewer didn't explicitly ask "Only in the Phillipines?", I can see the guy retorting "I never said there weren't operators in other places" (again, without saying which other places, or even if there is any other place)
Us does spend the money on healthcare, it is just very inefficient. US government spends much more per capita than any other country. 50% than the #2 country, Germany.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers but according to OECD, the per capita spending in the US is 13k. That's public and private spending. I don't think your 12k per capita number is just public spending.
Don't you think it has gotten an order of magnitude better in the last 1-2 years? If it only requires another an order of magnitude improvement to full-on replace coders, how long do you think that will take?
Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when handling users’ sensitive information?
If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot read/write code (as “all coders have been replaced”), does Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users for systems its tools/models build? I assume not.
How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn’t want to drive on an “autonomously-generated bridge may contain errors. Use at own risk” because all human structural engineering experts have been replaced.
After asking this question many times in similar threads, I’ve received no substantial response except that “something” will probably resolve this, maybe AI will figure it out
Who is responsible now when human coding errors leak user's sensitive information? I'm not seeing programmers held up as the responsible party. The companies who own the code are vaguely responsible, so it will be the same.
The bridge scenario is simply addressed: Licensed Engineer has to approve designs. Permitting review process has to review designs. Not sure it matters who drafted them initially.
So perhaps this is just semantics - when we say that “coders have been completely replaced”, to me that means all humans capable of reading/writing code are replaced. In the bridge analogy this is the Licensed Engineer who actually understands and can critically evaluate a system design/implementation in depth.
If the only point being made by “all coders are replaced” is that humans aren’t manually typing the code from their keyboard anymore, I don’t think there’s much interesting to argue there, typing the code was never the hard part.
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