> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
That's a property shared by any large scale government spending.
The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators.
Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.
Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
US states are free to build infrastructure without any federal involvement or permission. California just spent $114M to build a wildlife crossing bridge over Highway 101.
Starting with CodingJeebus' comment, the context of the discussion is what the US federal government can and cannot do, or does and does not do, at the best of a single person (the US President). They have the power to direct destruction, but not the power to direct creation.
Not only is a state government's capabilities irrelevant, it is also incomparable to the might of the US federal government, given its unique ability to sell US Treasuries and issue US currency. State governments are also in competition with each other, unlike the federal government which is in competition with other countries and has more power to restrict and negotiate trade agreements.
> but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
Sounds like you're buying into reddit propaganda. The US spends more on social programs than it does on war, so apparently we have and can definitely find the courage to improve healthcare and hunger.
In fact, hunger is mostly not an issue in the united states.
Seeing all of these investments in developer tooling projects makes me wonder/skeptical of what the next chapter of development looks like when the money spigot runs dry.
I've not used this app, but I wonder how tooling like this truly competes against an open source community armed with AI. Like where is the moat here, really? I built a personal tool that does some of this with a basic Claude subscription over the course of a few weeks.
Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this, but if it takes off, would not be that hard to clone as a FOSS app.
> Feels like vibe-coders are the real target market for something like this,
I think this is a potentially giant market: incurious people who don't know what they're doing, lack experience and wisdom, and are highly susceptible to empty marketing fluff. Selling junk to these people can't be very difficult, especially if they rely on an LLM (funded by many of the same investors) to explain it to them.
It's also a long-established principle in warfare that there's a large asymmetry between the force required to invade or occupy a foreign territory vs defending one's own land. The American Revolution, the US war in Vietnam, and Afghanistan are just a few examples of this.
This is insane. The whole point of the modern pharmaceutical system is to ensure that people are given the medication they need, not what they want.
Knowing how easy it is to jail-break LLMs, it's conceivable that this allows a knowledgeable attacker access to whatever prescription medication the system has the ability to administer.
If a corrupt pharmacist is criminally liable for abusing their power of the pad, then someone either on the private side or governmental side of this needs to be held to the same standard for "solutions" like this.
Probably better that they get their medication rather than waiting for an appointment if it’s keeping them from being psychotic or otherwise causing harm or being harmed.
If it keeps bipolar people on their meds, it will make the world better and safer, but also, those meds should just be able to be setup as "always fill this" in a saner system.
Looks like this guy tried to brandish a firearm while attempting to meet with the plaintiff, a restraining order seems very reasonable given the circumstances.
Agreed. (Reasonable) humans also don't ask for 20-50% raises year on year, but replacing workers with AI places incredible pricing risk in your business operation. AI may be cheaper in the short term, but the ultimate goal of AI companies is to capture as much value as possible, and they will have no problems pricing AI tooling as close to the replaced human salaries as possible.
Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can.
And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them?
It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
Let it go. Take pride that a company like Anthropic thought your idea was good enough to run with. Aiming for some sort of statement from them is a waste of time.
I'd happily take pride if they'd acknowledged it. A single reply. That's all. Instead I got silence. There's no pride in that,,just frustration.
But I sincerely appreciate your input.
Mountains Beyond Mountains is a pantheon read for me.
Farmer grew up incredibly poor, got into Duke and Harvard, had opportunities to make incredible money and traded it for a life of providing medical care to the third world on a shoestring budget while schooling organizations like the WHO on how to provide care along the way.
Agreed. Farmer's O for the P (provide a preferential option for the poor in health care) was clearly central to his life. I think about it often.
On top of that he was incredibly competent at navigating the combination of hostile bureaucracy, apathy, and disorganization. It's incredible what he and PIH accomplished.
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
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