> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
Why? Isn't Amtrak that, but just geographically-scoped? Isn't Caltrain workable? Subways also function fine in NYC, DC, Boston, and even LA
(to be clear, I don't think the other poster is correct that having trains would satisfy the desire of the guy who wants a self-driving Rivian. I consider his want/need there to be fundamentally different)
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.
the actual cost of a trip between times square and the national mall is about $200 all things considered based on the ~0.80 federal mileage reimbursement rate for 250 miles. that train corridor is overwhelmingly successful as well so the idea that amtrak isn't a good deal is at odds with reality.
That's assuming you don't already have a time-depreciating asset in your possession. Per mile cost is about halved if you drive significantly more than average.
Amtrak (where it exists) is often deprioritized for freight travel, and other times is often limited to extremely low speeds, resulting in extremely slow travel. Your road trips are only possible if you have extremely relaxed time constraints and specific destinations in mind.
Fees are also very high for such a slow option.
As for the future, well... it is bleak. This administration is actively trying to block transit expansion, presumably due to their undying affection for the fossil fuel industry, going so far as to withhold funding from already awarded grants to regional rail.
So while the northeast can sort-of pull it off due to its relatively compact nature and history of more progressive policies, this leaves the vast majority of the country in a no-mans land.
Amtrak simply leases the lines in the West from freight providers rather than owning the track outright. The reason Amtrak can offer so much better service in the Northeast Corridor is because they own the track. Incidentally the NEC is the only part of Amtrak operating at a profit.
It's better if trains prioritize freight travel and car-focused roads prioritize passenger travel, than the other way around. Human beings have more pressing time constraints than nearly all shippable physical goods.
Amtrak started out as a holding company for private passenger rail companies that went bankrupt. It's never had a static amount of funding (until the Biden admin, Amtrak had to renegotiate its budget regularly) and many of its stations are just pet projects for rural Congress reps who want to give their district a way to leave their area, so Amtrak runs many trains at a loss.
Building new rail projects in the US is very hard because of capital costs and regulations like NEPA (and CEQA in California) which require environmental review for everything. Brightline in Florida was able to get around this by working in an existing highway ROW.
The remaining dregs of Amtrak are the result of the nationalization of the failing private passenger lines in the US.
We used to have passenger rail. Even the desolate nowhere of semi-rural Ohio was well-served. Street cars to get around town, inter-urbans to get between nearby towns, and proper passenger trains to get to points far-away.
It didn't work out. There's reasons why it didn't work, like the literal conspiracy between General Motors and Firestone Tire that deliberately sought to destroy it.
Whatever those reasons were, they are are behind us. So it may seem superficially easy to just put it all back... but it isn't.
When the lines stopped being used, we tore them out. They're gone. And where the lines are gone, old stations are also mostly gone. Cities had once been built around (and because of) rail, but were subsequently built for cars as time marched forward and things continued to expand.
In some cases, whole communities have disappeared in the transition away from rail. In many other cases, we let our central stations decay and rot or demolished them to make space for things like convention centers.
So what's left is what we have: We have cars.
It's easy for me to see a future where I can buy a car and curl up in the back seat with a movie (and maybe a cocktail) while it ferries me from A to B.
That's a future I might actually live long enough to see, and it appears to be inevitable.
And I'd love to be freed of the chains of having to drive myself from A to B.
But I'll be dead and buried before we get passenger rail to be even 1/10th of what it once was.
So I choose to dream practical dreams. I can only play the hand I'm dealt.
Isn't a big draw for reunification the advanced manufacturing in Taiwan?
Forced reunification would risk destroying that, either as incidental damage through military operations, or as sabotage.
Far better would be to sit back and allow the US to continue proving itself incompetent and unreliable, until being subsumed like Hong Kong doesn't seem like such a bad deal.
Leading edge semi that's already largely denied to PRC via export controls that overwhelmingly underpins US semi advantage and economy. Glassing TSMC would actually only close advanced semi gap between US and PRC by simply taking most of US semi high end pipeline offline. Meanwhile PRC retains the most complete semi supply chain, they don't have leading edge but they do have almost fully indigenized semi vs decentralized western semi, a lot of which are in PRC missile range.
> doesn't seem like such a bad deal
This fundamentally doesn't address that US would still retain security architecture in region, i.e. TW doesn't host much US hardware anyway - taking tw does not meaningfully shift security balance. The only way to ensure relative geopolitical sanctuary is to boot US forward basing out of East Asia, and to be blunt that is not something done peacefully from PRC side, i.e. unless US voluntarily abdicate from theatre and I don't see that happening. Now maybe PRC can establish overwhelmingly advantageous regional force balance that it's obvious to all US posture no longer security dilemma for PRC, but I wouldn't discount PRC simply wanting to remove US forces from regional equation just to be sure.
TSMC is building US fabs though (or so they claim) so it's not solely a question of denial.
I guess more generally PRC can play a much longer game than the US, which seems intent on destroying its standing with the rest of the world by electing absolute buffoons every 4 years. How many years of this can allies tolerate?
Shutting down the strait of Hormuz for example is extremely damaging to US allies in Asia and we can expect more incompetence over time.
There are many sole source fab suppliers in TW, Arizona fabs will run out of inputs and shut down. There maybe effort to fully indigenize TW semi supply chain outside TW, but I've not heard any credible policy/efforts.
There is scenario where US incompetence will negate security dilemma, but see how hard JP is hedging. I would not put money on it. The additional layer to this is US security architecture of of East Asia is not just US basing, but US hardware in general... forcing region to no longer operate US platforms that gathers intel for US MIC / break region interoperability (including data sharing) with US. PRC unlikely to convince JP/SKR/SG etc to abandon F35s politically (because alternative worse vs PRC), at least within lifespan of platforms. That requires glassing hardware and coercing alternate procurement.
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
> lives much closer to family (intentional choice)
Living close to family is surely the single thing most could do to immediately improve their happiness.
(while not all of us are lucky to have welcoming family, the way people in the US are willing to uproot themselves and move across the country where they know nobody is extremely harmful to their senses of community)
It's also something that has nothing to do with religion. I am always surprised to see how religion people sometimes think you can't care about other people or your family if you don't believe in a bearded guy in the sky.
The difference is, like Jesus taught, religious people will care for others expecting nothing in return (reward is from God), but secular people will, even if it's as small as the narcissistic satisfaction of "look at me I'm such a good person." As soon as the cost-benefit of caring for family goes deeply negative, there's no reason to keep doing so.
So your desire to believe in a God must also be a calculation you made selfishly. You do expect "something" in return for your religious devotion, and it seems to be based around your desire to not go to Hell, not some greater moral duty to your fellow man or a desire to do Good for the sake of it.
Otherwise, why does Religion need a punishment like Hell at all?
> Can you provide a reason to care for someone that has nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with a personal/societal gain?
Sure: because I want to. That's it. I don't need a justification. I don't need a god up in heaven threatening me with eternal punishment if I'm not good to other people.
I just think caring for other is a good thing, and not caring about others is bad. I didn't need religion to help me draw that conclusion, and personal or societal gain has nothing to do with it. I think it's the right thing to do, so I do it.
You can dive down into the depths of it and think about whether any supposedly-selfless act is truly selfless. "Well, sure, you helped out your friend, but that made you feel good, right? Selfish!" But I don't buy that line of reasoning. Even if helping someone does make you feel good, so what? That's good too! But maybe sometimes it doesn't feel good. Maybe sometimes helping someone is difficult, and causes hardship. But people do it anyway. People who aren't looking to a religion to guide them.
But is there really a difference? You can can argue that any apparently selfless act is driven by a desire for self-satisfaction, but from an external view the outcome is the same in either case.
You claim that, because for religious believers this desire to help people is driven by faith rather than what you would term self-interest, it's somehow more resolute. But I'm unconvinced that that is the case, nor that people consciously or not, weigh up decisions to care for others in such a calculating manner.
If the divine impetus made you infallibly caring, I would perhaps concede the point, but I haven't see much evidence of that so far.
Right, the desire of religious believers to help others is also self-interest. But the difference is that the expected reward comes from God, not from others. That makes it more resolute, because for the secular person if the cost of the care greatly outweighs the benefit of "common decency", then there is no reason to continue. Whereas, for a religious believer, the benefit of carrying out God's will is immeasurable.
As for your last point - we're all sinners and we're not perfect. The calculation is there, but the individual's faith and/or abilities might be lacking.
> That makes it more resolute, because for the secular person if the cost of the care greatly outweighs the benefit of "common decency", then there is no reason to continue.
You seem to be latching onto "common decency" as the only reason atheists do nice things. If that's truly what you believe, I think maybe you should get out more, and talk to actual atheists about how they live their lives.
When I decide whether or not I'm going to help someone, I don't sit down with a calculator and determine the benefit to myself, vs. the burden, and only do it if the balance is in my favor. I do what feels right, or at least I strive to, even if doing so might be a net negative to me.
Why? Because I think that's the best way to live. The best way to be happy. The best way to build a community. The best way to enrich the world, one situation and one person at a time.
Religion isn't required for a moral code. If you believe otherwise, you're sorely mistaken. And this idea that religious people are more likely to do the right thing because of "faith" is just garbage. Orders of magnitude more bad things have been done in the name of religion than in the name of atheism.
You're missing the point. I "latched onto" common decency because that is what the user before you brought up as a valid reason. It was only typed for demonstrative purposes.
So the other reasons you've given are similar - it's in your best interest, and in your community's, and in the world's. Notice that that is exactly what was argued in my comment before: "Can you provide a reason to care for someone that has nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with a personal/societal gain?"
> But the difference is that the expected reward comes from God
Is there an effective difference outside of that person's own mind? It's still a reward-based system where people only do Good because there is some reward waiting for them, be it from other people or a God.
The effective difference is that the reward is immeasurably desirable. Whereas the reward of "common decency", for example, is low in comparison, and so the cost of taking care of someone can easily outweigh it - in which case there is no rational reason to continue taking care.
> The difference is, like Jesus taught, religious people will care for others expecting nothing in return (reward is from God)
But you admit that's not true. They expect something in return from God. I don't understand why this distinction even matters if the only thing that makes the reward worth it is just how 'immeasurably desirable' it is.
If atheists could get some similar reward (maybe their consciousness uploaded to a "heaven" simulation by a kindness-promoting nonprofit that feels effectively endless) depending on how kind they were to others during their lives, would they then be rational to be kind? Or would it still be chasing some sort of "reward" for their kindness?
Yeah, I think we're in agreement, just "speaking" past each other a bit. That the reward originates from God doesn't matter for the purpose of the argument, only that it is immeasurably desirable. If we lived in a science fiction fantasy where such a non-profit organization as you described existed then it would effectively be the same.
I want to clarify about "chasing a reward": people don't do serious things "just because". People expect a return. Jesus taught that those who do good expecting a tangible earthly return "have already received their reward". In this context, that's whether that is because you expect the person you're taking care of to repay you in the future, or you just enjoy his company, or it makes you feel like a good person, or it maintains your social status, or whatever it is. Jesus taught that those who do good not expecting a tangible worldly return will receive a reward in Heaven. In the Gospels He makes this same argument repeatedly using different words. Another one that comes to mind: "sinners are also kind to those who are kind to them, but if you will be kind to those who hate you then your reward in Heaven will be great."
So I deliberately added that note in parenthesis to make the distinction that religious people (should) expect nothing in return from others, they should expect a reward from God only.
Wow, that's a load of garbage. Clearly you have some bigotry against people who don't follow your religion. Hard to take any of your opinions on this topic seriously.
> Agreed, Gemini-cli is terrible compared to CC and even Codex.
Using it with opencode I don't find the actual model to cause worse results with tool calling versus Opus/GPT. This could be a harness problem more than a model problem?
I do prefer the overall results with GPT 5.4, which seems to catch more bugs in reviews that Gemini misses and produce cleaner code overall.
(And no, I can't quantify any of that, just "vibes" based)
It's got to be Dunning-Kruger, and I'm convinced chatbots have made it way worse.
A lot of tech bros seem to be of the opinion that, given their superior intellect (as evidenced by their successful careers), they can master any domain. As great as semaglutide is, surely more is possible for people willing to move fast and break things, right?
All they need to do is apply their superior methodology to "biohacking!"
Of course they run it all by SuperGrok to be sure, and when it tells them yes, they are indeed absolutely right, it's off to the races - to discover that fountain of youth by injecting some sketchy grey market snake oil.
I agree. Shorts aren't inherently bad but the way they're sort of half as integrated in the UI just feels clunky and weird.
They should allow you to treat shorts like normal videos and have them ranked directly against them in e.g. search results. Or, they should let you completely separate them so you have essentially a totally different app.
Somewhere in the range of 25%-30% of Android devices (1-1.3 billion) don't rely on Google services. Mostly Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo devices in China, but also in Russia, Indonesia, and Thailand. And all Huawei devices.
As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.
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