We would be, if not for Devo

According to this wikipedia page - Median wealth per adult globally is estimated at $8,654 for a total population figure of 5.5 million, quite a bit less than the global population estimated at 8.1 billion. I’m guessing because this is “per adult” rather than per person. The children of the world are all on the low end of the wealth spectrum and probably would be a large share of the 3.6 billion.

Also questions can be asked about how they value wealth, do we consider debts, etc…in which case there’s a lot of people with zero wealth or less, as well as a lot of people who don’t have bank accounts and whose wealth is hard to measure is any ordinary sense. Point being, this particular comparison is kind of meaningless without more context. There’s probably ways you can do it to get an even larger number than 3.6 billion.

But a more useful and perhaps more surprising metric is that 8 people have as much wealth as 158 million median people. Which is still ridiculous, like those 8 people are worth a Russia’s entire population’s worth of people. And not just of poor people, but your average adult person who likely has a job and may even be considered on the well-to-do side within some poorer countries.

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Now imagine this happens in a remote area with no cell coverage. In Arizona those are a thing too.

“Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events,” the report says.

First administration: “We must do something about the asteroid. I’ve started a plan to divert it, but it’ll take several years.”

Second administration: “The asteroid is a corrupt globalist conspiracy. We never needed to divert asteroids in the past, why do we supposedly need to spend all your hard-earned tax dollars on this all of a sudden? I will prove my anti-elitist attitudes by cancelling the asteroid program as soon as I take office.”

Third administration: “Yes we recognize that the asteroid is a threat, but as we saw last time there’s just too much political resistance to solving it. Let’s focus on other priorities that we can solve.”

I guess I’m an ingredient purist, preparation rebel. If your house is surrounded by tea plants, and the tea leaves fall in the gutter, how is that different from brewing tea the normal way?

He deserves to lose every dollar, it’s the most arrogant business move in history and he disrupted thousands of lives of workers with good jobs in the process. Unfortunately it’s only like 10% of his net worth, he’s the one who will suffer the least relatively speaking.

Well that’s an even older decision:

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that established the principle of judicial review, meaning that American courts have the power to strike down laws and statutes they find to violate the Constitution of the United States. Decided in 1803, Marbury is regarded as the single most important decision in American constitutional law.

The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution contains a right to habeas corpus in Boumedine v. Bush. The Lincoln thing was never fully litigated and was probably unconstitutional.

The point isn’t to have it be a lie detector but a factual claim detector. So you have an neural network that reads statements and says “this thing is saying something factual” or “this is just an opinion/obvious joke/whatever” and a person grades the responses to train it. So then the AI just says “hey this thing is making some sort of fact-related claim” and then the warning applies no matter what.

Let he who has to deal with that friend who constantly sends blatantly false Xits to them throw the first stone. Honestly I feel like every social media post that makes a factual representation should come with a big flashing warning “THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE, LOOK IT UP BEFORE YOU REPEAT IT YOU DUMMY!”

And I’m only like 10% joking. Given the success of language models it should be moderately trivial to train one to recognize when a factual statement is made and apply the above warning. It’s not even the children and teens I’m worried about. The people who seem to have the most trouble handling this are the adults.

I’m not the biggest fan of smoked herring myself, but thanks.

The problem with this argument is this very article, which is also backed up by interviews with John Kelly, Bill Barr, and others. Everyone verifies that that Trump wanted to do all the crazy stuff from prosecuting Hillary to executing former members of his administration for speaking out against him, but they’d just delay until he’d get distracted and move on to something else. Again, these are people who eagerly signed up to work for Trump, and changed their mind based on their experience with him.

This next time around though, Trump will try to hire people who are more likely to be yes-men. What happens then?

This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.

A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.

Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:

1. He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
2. He first contacted Glenn Greenwald, who now spends his days showing up on Tucker’s show to spout straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda

One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.

X requires login to view tweets, and can only get away with this because they tricked users into believing they’d allow free access while they were growing as a platform. Let’s not do anything to help them.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBdGTX3vZc

The illusion of electoral choice is choking the life out of any actual democracy in this country.

Ok so what’s your plan to fix it? Because I have one: vote for people that want to improve the electoral system and against those that want to prevent it from improving. As much as Democrats are “part of the problem”, they’ve also been open to runoff voting, switching to a national popular vote, easier voting mechanisms, and other changes that would allow for third parties and better representation. Republicans, meanwhile, have been trying to prevent those changes, as they’ve done in 5 states now where they banned ranked choice voting.

To be fair though, Trump is more open to changing the electoral process. The only problem is, he wants to get rid of voting entirely and remove any option we have to prevent rule by wealthy oligarchs like himself.

Humans would not be able to annihilate all the animals, given how many live underground/in deep oceans etc., and how integrated they are into our own lives leading to an unacceptable risk of collateral damage. However, the animals would be completely ineffective due to a lack of cohesion and ability to coordinate attacks. So basically humans would kill some of the animals and then it would devolve into a stalemate.