The horrors have burnt out synapses I didn't know I had.

Yeah I got blocked too. It's always disappointing when people who should ostensibly know better double down on uncharitable takes but it's one way of cleansing your timeline.

That projection in that kind of whataboutism is really telling. "I think about morality in entirely transactional terms"

I'd argue that it's the same thing. Fossil fuels makes local production unprofitable/expensive comparatively because the externalities (environment, true cost) are not factored in.

Yeah, it's not an either or. Taken charitably the original quote makes a lot of sense.

It's a little more complicated than that. Cheap fossil fuel transport makes local production expensive compared to big factory farms elsewhere and local agriculture declines and arable land becomes things like strip malls and data centers. It's the nestle baby formula writ large in the food supply.

There's a slightly different implicit vibe. Palestinians are Palestinian regardless of religion. Lebanese become "good" when they are Druuze or Christian.

Yup, the point of apprenticeships is not productivity it's long term transfer of knowledge! The average quarterly timescale means that executives can take the money and run while destroying organizations long term.

Having all the internal impunity you want doesn't matter if your state losing external legitimacy and becomes a pariah. If evangelicals see something similar before the next bulldozer purchase it puts significantly more pressure on the external enablers.

The technology enables ignorant people to sound smart the same way an MBA does. It will (and already does) have the same effects.

This is the perfect example. AI is not going to be used (nor is it capable of being used as) the Jacquard loom 2.0. It's going to be Lamport Sears and Welch GE everywhere.

This isn’t stopping companies from eating their seed corn and firing all of their institutional memory, but AI makes the rich richer and poor poorer in knowledge work.

It’s the opposite. AI automates the tedious grunt work that entry level positions used to do but lacks the deep institutional memory to not make the big messups putting a junior in a senior or staff level job.

Latent nuclear powers who threaten with their fissile material are very peaceful.

It's FOMO. If line goes up without you you get fired. There will be a collapse and bag holders, but nobody wants to quit the musical chairs too early.

They're not trading it away! They're saying "we control it now and we deign to let ships through." It's a coercive knob they are flexing.

Uk prisons are already at capacity. California style 3 strikes could potentially add 40-70% more people incarcerated for petty crimes to that number.

Oddly enough the best investment according to criminology literature is free meals and preschool. Proper nutrition and early education build the self control and trust in society that reduces crime.

Three strikes laws don't really work. Petty criminals don't really have the long term thinking to be deterred and imprisoning petty criminals requires US level investments in prisons.

FWIW the us and the ussr were gearing up for a longer term conflict even before the war ended. A lot of the jockeying around Japan's surrender and the us postwar goals for Germany and Japan were aiming for the next stage of the conflict.

Do you have any situational awareness re: the current facts on the ground? I'm getting lots of contradictory information.

Yeah, sorry, I genuinely hate the program.

They ended up at foreign offices. For the kind of work they were good at, you really wanted to have a lot of time at a whiteboard to work with them. Post COVID that's less common, but for a lot of collaboration you really want in person.

As someone that has practical experience with the program, it's terrible! It's meant to be a conduit for highly talented people and it's used for indentured servitude instead.

The sheer humiliation that happens when the US asserts the power relationship is interesting. They're not yet aware of how badly they're going to be scapegoated.

In an ideal world it would be an open-ended 5 year work visa with a points system, but that will not happen in the current political climate.

I hate the H1B program so much. I've seen situations where you need genuine researchers that are the only ones that have a particular skillset *in the world* and you can't bring them in because some body shop has sniped the entire H1B quota.

Good enough!

I'm hoping it was because a good lawyer contacted him and got him to delete it in preparation for the case.

Sure but there's a lot to unpack here. There are --as you mentioned-- earlier and current analogs, but when people talk about the American liberal arts college as a model they're often making a lot of assumptions about what you get from the education and credential.