My head is spinning from how fast we pivot from jokes about American “freedom” invasions to full throated support of Chinese freedom invasions

It’s not uncommon for a donor to support both candidates because whoever wins will have a debt. Like you said this is peanuts to them.

The other factor is non-monetary support. A $1 billion check to a candidate’s campaign fund has a lot of red tape. It isn’t as effecient as a $100 million donation and $900 million spent blasting propaganda across your personal media empire.

This is bad because it means if you want to run for office, your campaign is mostly floated by this tiny group of people. $5.5 billion sounds small until you realize that breaks out into millions of dollars for any individual campaign. Unless you’re rich enough to ante up (and repeat that every election cycle), you’ll never play the game.

More isn’t spent because it doesn’t need to be, not because it isn’t effective. The policy goals of the 0.01% are basically in lock step, why would they bid against each other? Regardless of the raw number, the average politician has to equally weigh their representation between the needs of the 0.01% and the 99.99%.

That’s the secret with a starve the beast tactic. Either your funding cuts don’t impact performance so you can claim there was bloat or your cuts ruin the program so you can say it needs to be dismantled.

Waiting for the handful of weird Maga trolls on here to comment. It’s always funny to see them argue “Commander in Chief” means unlimited authority to do anything with the military.

Pretty obvious you have no fucking clue how the American political system works or any idea what daily life is like.

Half of Americans have less than $500 in savings and something like 30-40% have insecure housing. There’s no social safety net if you lose your job; political activism can easily spiral you (and any dependants) to an early grave. Transportation is incredibly expensive in both time and money, just getting to an urban area for a critical mass movement is quite literally more than people can do.

So that’s how you end up with one of the top 2-3 largest protests in US history being on a weekend and distributed over thousands of cities. And you’re right, concentrating that in Washington DC would be much more impactful. But is it reasonable to expect people to give up their livelihood and stop supporting their family to do that? To throw away everything they have in their lives just by trying?

If you think the answer is yes, that’s perfectly valid. But consider this: if you live in a major city in Central America or western Europe or Canada you could get to DC easier and faster (and possibly cheaper) than the majority of people in the US. Why aren’t you on a plane right now? Oh right, because you’re exactly like your American strawman: you don’t give a shit about stopping fascism.

20k attended? Damn, they could have just given everybody $2000 and skipped the $40m parade. I’m sure people would have enjoyed it more.

How many trillions of neuron firings and chemical reactions are taking place for my machine to produce an output? Where are these taking place and how do these regions interact? What are the rules for storing and reshaping memory in response to stimulus? How many bytes of information would it take to describe and simulate all of these systems together?

The human brain alone has the capacity for about 2.5PB of data. Our sensory systems feed data at a rate of about 10⁹ bits/s. The entire English language, compressed, is about 30MB. I can download and run an LLM with just a few GB. Even the largest context windows are still well under 1GB of data.

Just because two things both find and reproduce patterns does not mean they are equivalent. Saying language and biological organisms both use “bytes” is just about as useful as saying the entire universe is “bytes”; it doesn’t really mean anything.

You are either vastly overestimating the Language part of an LLM or simplifying human physiology back to the Greek’s Four Humours theory.

If you want to boil down human reasoning to pattern recognition, the sheer amount of stimuli and associations built off of that input absolutely dwarfs anything an LLM will ever be able to handle. It’s like comparing PhD reasoning to a dog’s reasoning.

While a dog can learn some interesting tricks and the smartest dogs can solve simple novel problems, there are hard limits. They simply lack a strong metacognition and the ability to make simple logical inferences (eg: why they fail at the shell game).

Now we make that chasm even larger by cutting the stimuli to a fixed token limit. An LLM can do some clever tricks within that limit, but it’s designed to do exactly those tricks and nothing more. To get anything resembling human ability you would have to design something to match human complexity, and we don’t have the tech to make a synthetic human.

On the plus side, that shows that even when CNN is feeding people the most anodyne, milquetoast, sane-washed headlines it’s not hitting 50 🤷

Forgive my ignorance, who even answers that hotline? What can they do?

I have examined the goat entrails quarterly metrics and determined that gods markets require more human sacrifices corporate tax breaks

I assume it’s supposed to mean magically find the raw materials and production somewhere else? These people have no rational thought, they can’t even put 2 and 2 together and see why solar is cheaper.

Why do these people have such frothing opposition to nuclear? You’d think a meltdown killed their whole family, but somehow only at 2% coverage.

They bought the oil lobby’s ancient anti-nuclear propoganda hook-line-and-sinker and don’t care about any of the actual data. But I’m the shill 🙄

Lmfao holy shit you’re dense. You know you can’t just drop wind turbines in any location? That insolation and geography can limit effective solar usage? That nuclear has way more flexibility?

Do you know how to read that chart? Did you notice that the majority of emissions happen upfront during construction of those sources, unlike nuclear which is amortized over its whole life span?

Did you realize that might matter quite a bit when we need to halt/reverse emissions NOW to stop spiraling?

Ignoring all that and you even admit I’m right in the end. Someone here is coping and it definitely isn’t me.

Are you agreeing with me or did you just not read your source?

The best solar technology in the sunniest location has a footprint of 3gCO2/kWh, some seven times lower than the worst solar technology in the worst location (21gCO2/kWh).

Solar averages at 6gCO2/kWh compared to nuclear’s 4gCO2/kWh

Here’s another breakdown of the same data to make it more clear.

I believe it was this article. The main point was on how incredibly shitty coal is but I thought it was interesting how the others stacked up as well

By all means, enlighten me. Show me your sources. Everything I’ve looked at shows current gen solar having a larger construction impact and higher lifetime greenhouse gas emissions per unit electricity.

Or is this just your “common sense”? Surely if you have such a strong opinion it’s not based on sound bites and headlines?

It’s very telling that you think I should be more concerned about my backyard and neighbors rather than the billions of people who will suffer while we try to dig our way out of this pit with more palatable tech that can’t do the whole job.

Also funny that you think having a radioactive hole in the ground that loses the majority of its potency in less than 100 years is too high a price to keep our planet habitable. I’d rather be relocated out of my neighborhood than deal with billions of climate refugees moving in. Your NIMBY-ass logic is why our planet is fucked.

Did I miss something or are we moving the goalposts from dirty to hazardous?

The average operating age of nuclear plants in Germany was 30+ years old. Yes they’re not built to modern safety standards. Yes, operating with radioactive materials is more dangerous than not doing that. But they still ended with a minimal impact to climate change over their lifetime.

If you want sensational claims about energy saftey you can write a whole expose about working conditions in Xinjiang, which produces 45% of all of solar grade polysilicone. Are those deaths less important because they didn’t happen in your neighborhood?

So yes, it’s political because a handful of human deaths override an energy technology that is, mathematically, one of the best tools to save our planet. Throwing away nuclear energy because people can get preventable cancer is like throwing away wind energy because an aluminum blade can drop on your head.