But what the republican party has, is a lot of isolationist voters who cannot be moved by appeals to markets or international trade. They don’t care about that stuff.
Sure, the republicans will look hilarious trying to replace Trump for a while … but those Americans aren’t going anywhere and will gladly vote for the next Trump whenever they show up, same as they voted for Reagan and Bush II.
The American attitude driving this current period is much deeper and wider than one man, and people thinking it will all go away when one old man steps down are going to be “surprised” when we’re dealing with this again in ten years or twenty years or three years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to jump up and say there’s a deep cultural rot in America that, if it weren’t for the fortune of incredible financial success, would have us be seen as a hellhole of antisocial maniacs.
That being said, I just don’t buy into the notion that the strategy of the party from 2016-2024 (maybe 100 Trump rallies per year?) can carry over into the late 2020s / early 2030s.
If anything, this is me saying everyone is aware that the current window for reactionary politics in America is closing as Trump loses his vigor and gets closer to being too old to do what he did between 2014 and 2024. The reactionaries in the government and behind the scenes may make one last desperate grab at maintaining power.
That's not the point: the point is America did this twice. The world is not going to deal with America radically flip flopping every policy position every 4 years, and escalating that every time.
The US has just finished (maybe?) threatening to invade a NATO allied country. The occurrence rate of that has gone from "never" to "at least once". The delta change on that is infinity: there will never be a world in several generations where that is not a strategic risk the world has to deal with every 4 years.
> That's not the point: the point is America did this twice. The world is not going to deal with America radically flip flopping every policy position every 4 years, and escalating that every time.
I’ll admit, I’m becoming confused about the point of our back-and-forth.
All I’m trying to express is that probably by the end of 2026, and definitely by 2028, the people who are trying to enact reactionary change (Stephen Miller, PayPal Mafia, Heritage Foundation, etc.) will have to adjust their strategy. They are losing their charismatic leader, if not because of constitutional limits on presidential terms, then by his very obvious reduced vigor (he will not be able to do 100 rallies in a calendar year again).
On the world stage, yes, America has stumbled. Maybe even worse, some international folks are realizing that the America that they thought existed was just a Hollywood mirage, and that we were always one recession and a few thousand votes in Florida from becoming a global pariah.
It's something of an open question whether MAGA will follow him or not. I would bet against it, for the same reason few of them followed Jeb after George. I would bet on some in-fighting between Don Jr, JD and some of the others, and a new MAGA champion will emerge (maybe not for a decade) who we aren't really paying too much attention to right now.
> the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age.
They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
They won't. This is the same line of people that voted for Reagan and Bush II. I used to be one, most of my family still is. Whatever Democrat gets elected (if we have reasonable elections) will get the blame from them and it will be used to fuel the election of the next populist.
This is the mistake a lot of people made with Bush II and Trump I, thinking that "this will all go away" when the man at the center goes away. It won't, no man rules alone, they represent a large population of anti-intellectual isolationists who are not going anywhere. At best you can hope that the intellectuals will govern in a way that helps everyone next time they get a chance, leaving less fuel for the next populist wave.
I think it's inversely correlated with power, influence and reach. HN and Reddit don't have guns, can't throw you in prison, and there are lots of social medias to choose from, so a fair bit of censorship can be tolerated. Apple can't deport you, but you also don't have a lot of other choices, very low tolerance for censorship. The Government can really ruin your life if you get on the wrong side and your options for changing it or escaping it are pretty limited, we should demand the highest levels of transparency. Sure, some secrecy around military and intelligence for a little while, but we should eventually know what they decided and why.
This is dogmatic reasoning. If censorship wasn't necessary, neither would the government. At sufficient scale, humans stop behaving in the best interest of the group, and you need ways to correct that. It'll never be perfect, but much like democracy, we don't know of a better system.
Surely, in a conversation, the most damaging thing you can do to the integrity of that conversation is to selectively nullify the voice of a participant.
It ceases to be a conversation then. It is something else, posing as a conversation.
Maybe it would be better if this censorship-power is democratically controlled. But if this power is given to an individual. Well that's different.
In order to have a conversation at all, you need to deal with the guy with the megaphone first. If you do not have moderation, you drown in spam, and do not have a conversation at all.
I’m still surprised by what AI can do. It’s amazing. … but I still have to double check when it’s important that I get the right answer, I still have to review the code it writes, and I still am not sure there is actually enough business to cover what it will actually cost to run when it needs to pay for itself.
… is it? I hear people saying that. I see “improvement”: the art generally has the right number of fingers more often, the text looks like text, the code agents don’t write stuff that even the linter says is wrong.
But I still see the wrong number of fingers sometimes. I still see the chat bots count the wrong number of letters in a word. I still see agents invent libraries that don’t exist.
I don’t know what “rapid” is supposed to mean here. It feels like Achilles and the Tortoise and also has the energy costs of a nation-state.
Agreed there really isn’t any metrics that indicate this is true. Considering many models are still too complex to run locally. Llms are getting better for the corporations that sell access to them. Not necessarily for the people that use them.
No, obviously not. Smartphones are a mixed blessing, I'm not sure we're better off with the little distraction machines, but both them and electric cars were things that could plausibly have developed more slowly, deliberately and thoughtfully over time without being "juiced" by distorted market incentives. They could have developed by companies simply evolving phones and cars over time.
They are quite useful as GPS/camera/general info lookup devices.
But virtue of having web browsers they also channel social media. Having social media come in through our phones does make it worse, but it was already bad even on laptops. (Writing this on a social media site using my phone is kind of funny).
No, right now you probably have no opinion on the subject. And depending on context are perfectly willing to entertain either or neither. The world will be a much better place when people stop having opinions on things just because someone asked them to pick a team.
A reasonably mature thinker holds beliefs in terms of Bayesian estimates, and as Dennet says, one should always be willing to entertain evidence that contradicts your current Bayesian estimates. That doesn't mean you don't have beliefs.
Sure, the republicans will look hilarious trying to replace Trump for a while … but those Americans aren’t going anywhere and will gladly vote for the next Trump whenever they show up, same as they voted for Reagan and Bush II.
The American attitude driving this current period is much deeper and wider than one man, and people thinking it will all go away when one old man steps down are going to be “surprised” when we’re dealing with this again in ten years or twenty years or three years.
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