amalcon

ICE and DHS were both consolidated in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The functions they perform existed before, it was just a re-org whose goal was improved information sharing.

The most common variant of the "abolish DHS" opinion simply holds that this re-org was unsuccessful and should be reverted.

Most of the growth is. If we removed AI, the US would be in a severe recession right now. Most of the absolute market cap, employment, capital, and other metrics that are not directly coupled to growth paint a better distributed picture.

Of course, growth like this can only continue for so long without changing that.

So, "commoditize your complements". A big part of Microsoft's old playbook (and a smaller part of its current one), so we know it can work.

You are simply incorrect about that. More people voted for Trump in NYC (the typical exemplar of "the northeast") than in SFO (the exemplar of the part of California that is more pro-AI than NYC).

If you were in NYC, some of this may be a Boston/NYC difference. NYC is much more anti-Waymo (which I interpret mostly as an extension of being much more anti-car in general). There are also substantially different cultures between the two re: art and finance, which may have reflected on the AI questions.

I don't think you can decouple Trump from himself in this way without a concrete explanation. If some factor causes one to dislike something just because Trump likes it, then that same factor would influence voting. We have numbers for voting. When there are lots of other plausible explanations than Trump, the onus would be on you to demonstrate why more people are taking reverse-psychological cues from Trump in a place where more people also voted for him. Gesturing at "culture" doesn't do that.

You did claim that it was political:

> Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

That's what I'm refuting here -- that people here dislike AI just to be contrary to Trump. This is implausible.

And trying to lecture a life long New Englander who currently lives within the MBTA zone on what the culture is like in the northeast is maybe not the best look. We aren't afraid of Waymos here; the only people I've met who weren't jealous of them were taxi or Uber drivers. That supports my hypothesis, not yours.

That observation[0] isn't particularly useful for arguing that it's a political allegiance thing. A lower fraction of voters in the pro-tech part of California (SFO, roughly) voted for Trump than, say, in NYC. Your observation cuts against the argument that political allegiance is the main driver, not in favor of it.

[0]- Assuming it's true, which in my experience it isn't especially, but this isn't the best argument.

I think "your everyday liberal professional" is more likely to be anti-AI because it is being advertised as a direct threat to their livelihoods, rather than for any more abstract reason. The latter includes both political allegiance stuff and the reasons those professionals would likely cite, like its energy requirements or the economic damage if the bubble bursts.

Whether or not you think it likely that this threat will materialize is beside the point. Workers never like it when someone is advertising that they will put you out of work.

I don't think a bifurcation of cognition is necessary to explain this. You get both people who claim to always think with words (to the point where they don't understand how it's possible to think without one), and people who claim never to outside of linguistic tasks like writing (to the point where they need "internal monologue" explained to them). In my experience, if you get down to it -- most people will have experienced cases of the thought preceding the word (you can skip the word, or not, but either way it demonstrates a thought without a word) and of the word preceding the thought (people who claim not to have an internal monologue will usually still do this sometimes when writing).

It's just that subvocalization is one powerful technique for organizing thoughts, but not the only one. If you had a swimmer who only ever learned the crawl stroke (freestyle), they might wonder how someone can swim without it. The difference, of course, is that the breaststroke is a demonstrable physical act whereas cognitive techniques are not. The monologuers are just more practiced at subvocalization-based reasoning, and the non-monologuers are more practiced at other types.

It's not that hard to exert limited control over which technique you're using -- and I think there are multiple nonverbal techniques. I'd encourage people to explore the space a bit. Subvocalization-first approaches are very good for linear progressions, whereas subvocalization-last (or never) approaches are usually better for big-picture reasoning.

The obvious solution to the problem of abuse of the asylum system (which is in fact a real problem) is to hire more immigration judges so that claims are processed in a timely manner. Apart from getting rid of the asylum process entirely, that's the only long term solution. It's something Joe Biden made progress on (though he did overstate his progress), and Donald Trump reversed.

It doesn't show up in the short term numbers because it is a long-term solution. But Americans aren't interested in long-term solutions.

Congress has remained in technical session (by having one member open and close the House each day) constantly for decades. Actually ending the session would be a rather significant departure, and I've heard of no plans to do so.

I know, right? It used to be easy: just look for writing in a very long-winded style, almost as if the author is being paid per word, in a place where that sort of writing didn't belong. I think it was because that type of writing represented a disproportionate fraction of the tokens in the training data due to the long-winded-ness. Somewhere around a year ago, they figured out some way to deal with that problem.

Making election day a (normal) national holiday would not help. The type of service sector or emergency service job that makes it a problem to vote needs to work more on a national holiday, not less.

Making it a kind of super holiday where we mandate closure of everything from gas stations to non-emergency hospital services might help, but you're never getting the votes to make that change.