Edman274

How did you arrive at the 3.2 million people + 100K figure?

Even before the penalty for non enrollment was set to zero, you could have still paid the $700 tax penalty and then had whatever plan for health insurance you wanted. If the market decided that there was no demand for those non eligible plans, then it means that the market collectively decided that keeping the old plans + 700 dollar additional annual cost was not a good value proposition compared to what replaced them. The net effect of everything taken together was that you would have to pay additional taxes.

You know, tariffs and gas prices going up have the effect of raising taxes. When the things you buy and the gas you buy costs more, you have to pay more in real dollars in sales and gas tax on those items. The tariffs and the gas prices also have the effect of killing industries locally, which might be more impactful nationally than predatory insurance plans that basically only cover going to the doctor's office for checkups. If you have an objection to things being forced on people, do make sure you're thorough.

It violates people's internal sense of morality in a strangely strong way to do that for whatever reason. It's a white lie but ultimately it's an act of kindness to take the electronic intercom from RadioShack that your father is pretty sure "just needs a new rheostat"

If a senior leader at Doordash swore to God that your sandwich would 100% guaranteed make it to you, regardless of whether or not there was a car crash, then yeah, maybe you should complain

Stagflation is when the economy stagnates yet inflation is higher than ideal. Inflation and economic activity are typically correlated, and the conventional wisdom back in the day was that you couldn't have unemployment going up and things costing more, because it was expected that demand going down puts a downward pressure on prices. When people aren't hiring and buying but things cost more and more, life just kind of sucks. The last time this happened was in the 1970s in the aftermath of a few oil embargoes that made oil prices go through the roof and a disastrously expensive failed war in Vietnam, there was gas rationing, it sucked.

You may notice a few key similarities now with oil embargoes, reduced hiring, an extremely expensive war, and rapidly expanding government debt as a result of that war. If you want a qualitative feeling about people's moods in the 70s, you can watch such movies as:

Taxi Driver The Deer Hunter The Warriors Americathon Network

So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.

Do you always judge the validity of a statement according to the implications of it being true, or do you get to do it just this once as a treat? Further, how does saying a court is "corrupt" not call for "extreme measures" but referring to it as "illegitimate" does? What's the meaningful difference?

Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.

You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.

> in the mind of the observer

In the what of the observer? Are you accepting that minds exist but consciousness doesn't?

> words for things that don't exist

This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.

In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.

Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.

If you take the strategy that you will create a definition, create a label for that definition, and then say that any deviations from the defintion that was chosen makes usage of the label incorrect, then yes, it's the same everywhere in the universe -- according to fiat, and I don't believe that that negates that it is a label, just that validity of usage of the label derives from the perceived authority of the labeller. God didn't come down from on high and say that a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of the time for 9192631770 cycles of radiation of Cesium 133. People in rooms chose that it would be based on the circumference of the Earth with a line passing through Paris, France (how convenient), and if there were an academy in the 1790s that invented the concept of "fat", and "fat" means a BMI exceeding 30, then fat would be true everywhere in the universe too (BMI after all is defined as a ratio of height, measured in meters to weight, measured in kilograms, which are both fundamental SI units), and there would be no ambiguity.

People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?