Fake psyop slop.
Guy worked there for 6 weeks, almost no X followers when he posted his “I quit” thread, WSJ then posted their story around this post 18 mins later.
I'm pretty skeptical as well. As soon as I saw his interview on NBC News last night I texted a friend that this guy is about to get a $500 million seed round for an AI alignment startup.
The entire interview he's just grinning like he has the "answer" to all these companies he alleges don't take safety seriously.
Which makes you question if this was the plan all along or he was totally naive not to think this though. Imagine if he did this with Aylo (formerly known as MindGeek) :)
Why “republican” man?
Editorials like this piss me off. Just say “Man from Florida”. Why bring party politics into an article that isn’t about party lines?
I was gonna try to pull up the data to prove you wrong, but then the data disagreed with me, what the heck! what do I do now! ad hominem, I guess: uhhh your penis looks dry!
If there was regular prejudice between 76 vs 77 yr olds, then yes. It’s similar to saying “white/black man”. It adds no value beyond sparking a prejudicial emotional response.
It’s CNN/Fox news style sensationalist entertainment writing rather than news/journalism.
The developments of political parties’ positions are themselves newsworthy, as well as the ways in which writers attempt to frame them. You’re right to notice it.
Most of the people very against Flock are more left wing and I feel like another left wing protest about it isn't particularly engaging. I'm sure putting Republican there gets way more interest as Republicans turning against them is necessary to have anything actually happen.
If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.
Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.
So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.
Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should.
We're a backsliding democracy, and risk backsliding into fully consolidated autocracy, unless we mount effective resistance.
But this isn’t new. Government overreach has been a long recurring pattern throughout US history literally since we were born as a country. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, et al, exercised powers and authoritarian tactics that shocked their contemporaries just as much as Trump is doing today. Not using history as an excuse, just to point out that this is a feature of US politics not a bug. We have managed to remain a free society for 250 years despite all the horrible, anti democratic sometimes barbaric things our leaders did, because 1) every generation got organized to defend civil liberties and 2) our “system” was cynically and explicitly engineered with competing centers of power, among other things, under the assumption that every single leader would eventually try to grab power.
Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine".
I don't think things are working as intended, even if they've sort of worked by accident so far.
I think it's better to look at more contemporary backsliding democracies and fascist regimes from the 20th century onward to really understand our trajectory. Russia (Putin), Hungary (Orban), India (Modi), Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco), etc.
The American Right has trying to Orbanify the country by explicitly copying his model. Hungary was able to eventually oust him, dealing a blow to that whole project, but time will tell whether they will be able to keep him and his allies out for good. Our wanna-be Orbans are still there.
The corruption we're seeing in the Trump admin has no precedent in American history, and is the kind of large scale open corruption only seen in autocratic regimes or failed states.
The founders envisioned that branches would jealously guard their power, but congress right now is essentially a duma. The judiciary is still mostly standing, but the Trump admin is defying court orders at an alarming rate, and the longer these guys hold power, the more they will be able to work on the courts.
It ends up being the path of least resistance. In many places, there are wildlife fencing around motorways, but it always ends up with holes and animals crossing via the holes, mostly because the animals want to get to the other side and don't find another way. I've never seen those kind of "hanging jungle bridges" like the article talks about, but "wildlife bridges" which literally are bridges with just earth/tress/vegetation on top I've encountered a bunch of times. When those exists, the animals who want to cross can then find a path to get to the other side, without resorting to making a hole in the fence and crossing the roads.
They probably see it as an easier crossing than coming down out of the trees to cross the road at ground level. They might feel it's safer too, as being on the open ground is more exposure to predators, which they would instinctively avoid.
They actually learn it, what's more crazy in Australia is that we have videos of some birds (bush turkeys/swans) using zebra crossings to cross because they know it's safe.
I'm not saying that the war didn't go on for 10 years, it did. Baathist government fell and the US led Coalition Provisional Authority took over running the country. You have US troops in the whole country and US control of all civil institutions. The only way that's not "occupying" the country is if you redefine what the word mean. With your definition France, Norway, Denmark, Poland, and many more were not occupied during ww2.
Outside of the small probability that this may assist us in the future, has looking beyond our moon ever benefitted or even affected humanity in any way?
1. Answering where humans come from is probably one of the the oldest question we have had. All religions try to answer this in one way or the other. I say, trying to come up with scientific answers is extremely valuable.
2. We feel awe at the wonders of nature, not much different from the awe that we feel when we see great human art. Tax dollars as well as charity are used to subsidize art often. This is similar, though there is more money involved here.
3. The problems one sees in different domains are always different. Funding agencies give money to the "directly economically useless domains" because the workforce that is trained and technology that is developed can then be applied to the "directly economically useful domains". The support money to the former is much smaller than the support money to the latter, but just enough to inject fresh ideas and creativity to the latter.
Digital cameras for humanity as a whole, and satellite based telescopes for maintaining US dominance for the last 50 years and the long peace. Knowledge is power.
Before the late 70s satellites used film that was dropped back from orbit to the ground and developed to identify Cold War troop movements.
Monitoring "space weather" (paying attention to the sun/solar flares/CMEs etc) is important to keeping our earth orbiting satellites functioning. (That's without getting into what a modern "carrington event" would look like.)
No, but let's keep pouring billions into confirming that the laws of physics apply outside of our solar system - smaller objects orbiting larger ones? Who could have guessed?
I'm sympathetic to space colonization, which seems like the most optimistic long term future for humanity, but the focus on exoplanets, -moons, even signs of exo-civilizations feels like making up theories about the bottom of the ocean centuries before the invention of submarines.
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”.
You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container.
For those who don't know, I'd recommend the Freakonomics The Economics of Everyday Things episode on dental insurance. IIRC, dental "insurance" has little in common with insurance in general. As a financial product, it's more like an invested savings account.
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