chmod600

How are these kinds of self-reinforcing systems usually brought down?

I doubt some shifts in the opinions of normal people are going to stop the elite flywheel -- there's just not enough connection between a machinist in Ohio or a nurse in Phoenix and the elite for their opinions to matter.

The Ivy League can fall apart one of two ways:

1. The levers of power move around to new groups of people radically enough that the jobs that were once elite are now irrelevant and forgotten, like a guild for some forgotten craft. AI is obviously one way this might happen, where many elite professions might just collapse.

2. Internal bickering over identity that just makes it impossible for normal people to attend. Think crazy stuff like requiring graduates to share their income for life with other graduates, or requiring some weird kind of binding pledge about who you can work for. Colleges already have a weird possessiveness over their graduates, this just takes that to the logical next level.

You seem to be suggesting that Congress making law is intruding on the power of an agency to make Administrative law? The latter is not (supposed to be) an actual branch of government. Congress has full power to rewrite all the administrative law as they see fit.

Idea: let's make it so all emergency powers have to be re-authorized every week by Congress at midnight on Friday with a 90% quorum of physically-present representatives.

If "emergency" action is needed because Congress is too slow, then let's make sure they are working through the process to create real law. Or if they aren't, I guess it wasn't an emergency, and there's no reason for administrative law to "fill in" using a non-democratic process.

"These reforms include currency devaluation..."

How does that reduce inflation and cause a surge in bond prices?

Sometimes hard choices need to be made. What's your alternative proposal?

"This ends up being self-fulfilling."

Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.

Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.

Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.

"no political will in the US to build publicly-owned transport"

There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.

At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.

Are the adaptations healthier?

Maybe some kind of smart network could only allow 911 calls through, and no data?

If phones in schools really are bad for kids, it seems like we could probably sort out some of these objections?

Maybe a dumb idea, but can schools use jamming or shielding?

But the article is about burnout. Surely that can't be great for existing doctors, either?

Renters might be an interesting case. Though in the long term charging at home will be available for renters, too.

Yeah, I've always found that particular argument unconvincing. If road usage grows, that means more people are benefiting, right?

There are some fundamental problems with cars crowding out alternatives (either due to cost or space). But saying that utilization is evidence that something is bad seems backwards to me.

An AI should be helpful to the user, unless it's a horrible question, in which case just don't answer.

Bring in whatever values you want along the way. If you ask your aunt or uncle a question, they will answer helpfully and maybe spread their values in the process. If they aren't helpful, their values don't matter because nobody will hear them.

What was the blunder?

EDIT: had to follow a link and read halfway down to find:

> When asked for a “historically accurate depiction of a medieval British king,” the model generated another racially diverse set of images, including one of a woman ruler, screenshots show. Users reported similar outcomes when they asked for images of the U.S. founding fathers, an 18th-century king of France, a German couple in the 1800s and more. The model showed an image of Asian men in response to a query about Google’s own founders, users reported.