edwardbernays

Extremely myopic take. "Real" things can be just as pleasurable as not-"real" things, and not-"real" things can be just as painful. I don't even know by what criteria you're making these distinctions, but it has the smell of an embittered person.

Completely agree. Neoliberalism and its consequences have been a disaster for mankind.

Lying or misrepresenting a product for a paycheck is not a fumble. It's a propagandist making a bag. Once they have put effort into creating a polished piece of propaganda, which they then release, it can not be considered a fumble any longer. It is something that they endorse. If they rescind it within some critical window that meaningfully impacts their bottom-line, maybe then I can believe them. Otherwise? No, I see no reason to offer them the benefit of the doubt. There are many people doing actually good work. Veritasium is not unique in their content or quality. We should not reward propagandists.

Sponsored content is fine. Sponsored content with improper public disclosure, or with irresponsible claims that do not reflect reality, is not fine. Super simple standard: if they lie or substantively misrepresent for a sponsor, they can no longer be trusted.

Including FOSS software is so wild in this conversation that it's ridiculous. You mean creating a product as a loss leader to get people into an ecosystem, farm social capital, create a sales funnel, or get free labor from the community to provide QA? The creation and release of software is NOWHERE NEAR the same category as "doing actual real scientific research" that it just smells of incredibly bad faith argumentation.

Economic analysis? Another intelligence product that requires essentially no staff, no actual R&D, no equipment besides computers? Brother, you have to be kidding me.

The hardware thing is just companies evolving to a shared standard.

Do you have even a little bit of a clue how hard it is to do good pharmacological research? Toxicological? Biological? Chemical? Physical? You have mentioned intelligence products with 0 investment cost and 0 risk of failure.

This is perhaps one of the most fart-sniffing tech-centric perspectives I have ever been exposed to. Go read some actual research by actual scientists and come back when you can tell me why, for instance, Eli Lilley would ever make their data or internal R&D public.

Jonas Salk did it. He is an extremely rare exception, and his incentive was public health. Notice that his incentive was markedly not financial.

Market entities with a financial incentive, whose entire business model and success is predicated on their unique R&D results, have 0 incentive to release research to the public.

There is no private market entity with an incentive to provide research to the public, so in this sense there is no crowding out. Providing research to the public enables the discovery of new products which would otherwise have not been created. Public research is a public good that makes our nation happier, healthier, and wealthier.

TWENTY thousand a month? Surely this is wrong. Even $2k is ridiculous, but that's just criminal. Honestly, at a certain point, you might consider learning organic chemistry just to synthesize it yourself. It's fairly easy using unwatched precursors.

It's both sardonic and genuine. If he's genuine, then I genuinely wish him the best luck. However, it is very hard for me to believe that any billionaire would ever do something generally disfavorable to the current billionaire class. It's even harder for me to believe that, if one of them was to do so, that it would not be for their own further gain, just to the detriment of their peer cohort. I'm a bit jaded from having been lied to too many times.

Again, however, if he is genuine: I genuinely wish him the best luck taking on his matched opponents.

true, we wish this brave and powerful man the best of luck as he takes on his matched opponents: the people in his socioeconomic bracket. amen.

What distorting effects of public funding? What about the distortionary effects of the market? I'll offer the suggestion that what you read is brainrotting private market propaganda designed to erode the public institutions that make America happier, healthier, and wealthier.

Nah, he transparently accepted money from waymo to peddle propaganda. Once somebody takes propaganda money, there's no trusting them anymore. From then on out, everything they do is in service to propaganda paymasters. Even just doing regular, good quality work can only be viewed through the lens of acquiring social capital to liquidate into financial capital later.

See: Brian Keating licking Eric Weinstein's jock strap in public and then offering mild criticism on Piers Morgan.

Forget China. The greatest threat to American freedom and global power is robber baron billionaires. We live in a full-on kleptocracy. It's about time we add some new amendments to the constitution to relevel the balance of powers.

I have been reading the yoga sutras recently and it strikes me how applicable it is. The weird stuff about attaining magical powers is... cool, but samyama and the nature of the reflective consciousness have a lot of explanatory power imo.

It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.

Wouldn't there necessarily be more lead pipes at the peak and post-peak? Assuming that pipe-building was some non-linear function of dominance, which seems a fair assumption, we would start with 0% pipes at 0% rome and asymptotically close to 100% pipes at the asymptotic 100% peak rome. Is this a bad assumption, or is it basically just pedantry?