I think we are having a gross conceptual failure when it comes to the brain altogether. The model that has been used to understand the brain has typically been that of a computer processing information somehow. The analogy is that the synapses are like logic gates, memories are like storage, and there's some kind of programming instructions in there somewhere. But we are still very far from understanding how the brain might perform that computation. Everyone just assumes we just need to learn more about how the brain computes, and then we'll figure it out. But what if it's a dead end; what if the brain doesn't compute at all?

Imagine you were an uncontacted tribe that had an AM radio dropped into your village one day. You turn the radio on and you can hear human sounds coming from the radio, those human sounds are clearly speaking language, and when you can understand the language, it seems to be intelligent conversation, complex thought, and even emotion, and real people. You are a primitive tribe, and not very smart, so you think there must be some kind of tiny people inside the radio, but when you disassemble the radio, you find a capacitor, a coil, and a diode. Then you spend the next few centuries advancing and you finally learn how capacitors, coils, and diodes work. If you are smart, once you know a bit of electronics, you should figure out at some point that there's nothing in the box that could possibly generate human speech, much less language, much less intelligence. It's just a coil and a diode. Understanding more about electromagnetics should bring you CLOSER to the truth which is hey, this thing isn't intelligent at all, and you should eventually conclude that the box doesn't generate speech, language, or intelligence at all, and that it must be just a conduit that channels actual human speech, language, and intelligence that exists elsewhere. You might have no fucking clue WHERE the language or intelligence comes from, but that shouldn't stop you from concluding it's not coming from a box with a coil and a diode. Understanding more should bring you closer to the truth.

If you are stupid, you continue wasting centuries thinking that if you can just understand enough about how that particular radio or how radio in general works, then you will finally unlock the secret of consciousness, and keep thinking that radio waves somehow generate intelligence and consciousness. Understanding more doesn't bring you closer to the truth because you are not willing to look at the situation correctly.

I feel like that's where we are with the brain. We still have a bunch of people trying to figure out how a blob of fat that consumes a few watts "generates intelligence". Nobody is brave enough to say "well, we've figured out that it's just a blob of fat with some chemical switches in it, and while we don't have a fucking clue where the intelligence is coming from, but it's pretty clear the brain isn't generating it".

UBI funded by conventional taxes on production won't work; it will take down the economy. Georgism will work though.

Maybe you are right. And maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to work everywhere to be viable.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. The only way I can maintain my weight is to eat frighteningly small amounts of food. I mean, amounts of food that just seem unbelievably small. It's really hard to eat such small amounts while still eating 3 times per day or even eating every day, so I'm forced to skip meals and entire days. I never eat breakfast, I cut out all sugar and junk food and high calorie foods, and I still gain weight, so I have to fast 1 or 2 full days per week besides that if I want to maintain. Several times per year I go on even more extended fasts of 3-5 day stretches, just to keep myself in the BMI "healthy weight" band. Exercise makes no difference; I do active things like commuting by bike but I gain weight during active seasons and during inactive seasons. It's really fine, it's just what I have to do, but I don't have any trouble understanding why some people don't or can't cut their intake that much, because our society is based around consumption, social eating and drinking, food is plentiful, and there's no real messaging in the system that you might have to deny yourself...certainly the food industry is never going to tell you to buy less of their product. Especially for children. The narrative for children and schools seems to be that they all have food insecurity and are at risk of starving any day, and they must not be allowed to experience hunger so they need snacks all the time. And we have like 60-80% rates of childhood obesity.

I talk to people who claim they "just can't lose weight" and they are still eating 3 meals per day. I would absolutely gain weight if I did the same. Hell, I'd gain weight if the only thing I ate is what I see them eat at lunch at work every day. Expectations of how much it's normal to eat have just got way out of whack. People think switching to "light" salad dressing is going to make a difference, it's more like cut what you eat in half, then cut it again in half and repeat as needed.

I have an old early 20th century medical book that's full of some amount of whack shit, but also some stuff that's probably timeless. They have a small section on childhood obesity. I mean VERY small section. It basically says "reduce food intake by 60% for 1 month and revisit". Done. That's the section on childhood obesity. Reduce food my 60% right off the bat, and then if you aren't losing weight a month later, reduce it even more.

This is 100% correct but is just restating the problem. Simply re-stating the problem doesn't solve the problem. Why do people always insist on doing this in discussions on obesity? It's like having a discussion on income inequality and just saying over and over "if poor people made more money there wouldn't be such income inequality", no shit sherlock that's what we are all talking about, how we can do that and why it's not happening well enough now.

But that makes economic sense after all. Tariffs don't just hurt one country. Because economies are linked and intertwined, one country deciding to enact dumbshit pointless and flawed economic policies really does harm the whole world, because the whole world takes some level of hit. What you are seeing is what economists call "deadweight loss". Loss by all parties, not loss by one party that shows up as gain for another party, just loss. You can shift some of the loss around, but in the final analysis there will be an increment of loss that everyone feels. Dump the whole burden on the US, and demand from the US consumer market does down and the vendors still lose sales from the US then. When you do dumb shit that causes economic destruction you can't just magic away the destruction. Wealth really can be destroyed.

We already have nearly full employment, too. Unemployment in the US is low by global standards, typically 4% or less. We don't have a systematic problem in America with people not being able to find jobs. In fact, ESPECIALLY in manufacturing, we have more jobs than people to fill them, and the manufacturing goes undone--high labor costs being a key reason the jobs left the country in the first place. The whole idea that the current America even need these manufacturing jobs is false. Americans have enough higher-value jobs that the manufacturing jobs go unfilled, then they move overseas where there are people to do them.

So even if lots of manufacturing jobs "came back" somehow, the only way they would be filled would be

1) import the workers with them. This is actually a very "American" model. Bring on the factories, and bring on the immigrants to work them. Everyone would benefit, including current Americans. But that would require letting go of scarcity mentality and acknowledging that immigration is a good thing. This is effectively what happened for existing manufacturing on-shoring projects, by the way, although it's not widely advertised because it doesn't mesh with the optics of the administration: a large fraction of workers at TSMC in Arizona are actually Taiwanese. And that shouldn't be a scandal; why should it? Build a factory, and import a skilled workforce at the same time. Assimilate those immigrants as citizens, and you fortify both your capital stock AND your human capital stock. This is what made America great; what could be more natural? But following this movement en masse and for lower-value manufacturing would also require America to let go of other scarcity mentalities and redevelop ability to build infrastructure like transportation and housing, which America has completely lost...we can't even build housing or transportation for our own children. No wonder people don't support more immigrants, when their own children are facing spending 4X more for an old shack shared with others, with a crushing commute to work...and remember we are talking about low-value manufacturing jobs, like assembling iPhones, so most of that work must be done at the factory and not remotely. This is why my company's main factory in Japan has its own train station. But in America, we don't even have the train, and we can't even build one. Look what happened to the housing market in Canada for an example of what happens when you allow even modest immigration, but allow zero housing construction. America, without something like a major Georgist prosperity revival movement, cannot grow. And this administration is NOT a Georgist prosperity revival movement; it's peak scarcity scrambling-for-pieces-of-the-pie-and-trying-to-negotiate-more-at-the-expense-of-others.

The other way to fill the proposed low-value manufacturing jobs like iPhone assembly, demonstrably the one that's being pursued, is 2) requires the manufacturing jobs to pay more, AND be better jobs, than the current jobs available in America. And you can ask anyone who works in manufacturing, even when manufacturing jobs pay well, they aren't what modern Americans consider "good jobs", which is why the manufacturing in America is higher-value capital-intensive manufacturing done with machines. Even if you could make as much sitting on an assembly line assembling iPhone screens as you could with your hybrid-schedule laptop-job, you would still not take that job because it's worse. This is basically the status quo that caused the low-value manufacturing jobs to leave in the first place...we basically don't need them because we have other, better jobs that drive up wages. Which is supposed to be a GOOD THING that means your economy is strong and prosperous.

This administration is constantly trying to square impossible circles: Bring manufacturing back, but do it with policies (tariffs) that make manufacturing in the US EVEN MORE expensive than it was before, which is the whole reason the jobs left in the first place. Reduce our trade deficits, but do it without weakening American hegemony, when American hegemony is the whole reason for the trade deficits in the first place. It is all 0-braincell tilting at windmills. There are paths to bringing manufacturing back to America, because we know why manufacturing left America, but you can't actually bring manufacturing back to America but not... actually bring manufacturing back to America.

The correct phrase is "bonne chance", not "bon chance".

  "Chance" is a type-F noun.

A better idea is to tax urban land just enough so that it's impossible for investors to make money off of real estate speculation. Then, the only people who buy housing are the people who actually need to use it the housing. Once it's no longer profitable, the investors quietly move on to something else. And because land rent is perfectly inelastic, taxing it doesn't increase housing costs, in fact it can reduce housing costs by eliminating the middlemen speculators.

In other words, just do Georgism.

It's also symbiotic with urban parking lots. For very little additional cost vs. installing the panels alone, you can install them as a roof over parking lots. Shaded parking is a perk, it's not like a solar parking lot is uglier that a parking lot already is, and there's a colossal amount of big parking lots all over in the US.... something like the whole state of Rhode Island. All of it nearby power grid infrastructure, too. I never understand when people say solar takes up a lot of land. Just use the parking lots.

Maybe you are right. You probably are. But it also doesn't matter. Because there is a utility in, and a market for, vehicles that work in typical cities and weather conditions NOW.

Of course the technology will be ready for typical cities and weather conditions, before it will be ready to drive in Kuala Lumpur in a snowstorm. What's your point? That technology is worthless until it's perfect? That nobody should use a technology until everyone can use it? That there are no possible use-cases unless EVERY possible use case is fulfilled? When has there EVER been a technology that was developed or adopted instantly and fully and perfectly?

Kamala 2024: the conservative choice.

It's not even ironic; the Democratic party is undisputably the conservative party right now, as the Republican party is aggressively doing a march through our institutions, reshaping "independent" government entities, reinterpreting the constitution, and implementing a new economic world order. Democrats threaten to do none of those things.

It's particularly stupid argument when you realize there are many corridors in the US that have higher population absolute, higher population DENSITY, higher GDP per capita, and higher existing travel demand, PLUS sometimes more favorable geography, than entire European countries that DO have good public transit systems including high speed rail.

For example, the state of Pennsylvania has about half the number of people as Spain, while being about 1/4 the size. So why isn't Pennsylvania crisscrossed with high-speed rail like Spain is?

The Gulf Coast megaregion from Pensacola to McAllen TX looks exactly like the South coast of Japan. It contains 16 million people, nearly 1/4 of the US population. A high-speed rail running along the Gulf of Mexico would hit 15 cities, including Houston and Baton Rouge, and it would look exactly like the Tokaido Shinkansen. So where is it?

The Front Range Corridor in Colorado and Wyoming encompasses 5 million people in only 200 miles, with a GDP of over 400 billion dollars. Nice little 200 mile corridor...where's the passenger rail?

The Great Lakes region (Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Windsor, Toronto, Cleveland, Indianapolis) is a cluster of large cities only a couple hundred miles apart, with over 60 million people. That's an entire civilization...so why isn't there any passenger rail?

The "firetrucking hugeness" of the US means we shouldn't just have passenger rail...we should have more passenger rail than any other country, by a large margin. Even small slices of our country are beyond big enough to have HSR.

That would be essentially Georgism, and thus based as hell.

This is the modern version of the old reason for declining economic output and increasing wealth inequality, as it was always understood in classical economics: the advancement of rent within the economy. As economies mature, it becomes more profitable to extract rent from existing production, than it does to make profit by expanding production.

Increasing profit through innovation and production requires hard work, investment, actually building things, and has natural limits. But extracting rent from existing products is always more attractive because rent can advance with no limits. This is sort of a natural equilibrium, and ideally the rent will be driven down by competition, so it doesn't rise to problematic levels. But if the competition doesn't materialize (such as due to protectionism), or if competition is fundamentally not possible (such as for land), then rent will advance until it drives out capital formation and investment in production.

The optimal solution for non-monopoly rents is to aggressively eliminate whatever causes monopoly and monopsony power, so that competition can come in and drive down the excess rent. Wherever that's not structurally possible, especially for things that can't be produced like land, is to make rent-seeking less remunerative by taxing it, potentially taxing income from rents up to 100%, so it's impossible to make money off of rent alone, and the only way to make money is actually produce something of value.

If you haven't noticed, we do nearly the opposite. We allow mergers and monopolies to the point where a few mega companies dominate whole sectors of the economy, and we tax labor and capital heavily, and either don't tax rents at all, or tax them at a preferred rate.

American conglomerates don't have to innovate because they lack effective competition. The instant a competitor appears (like Chinese EVs), they just lobby the government to block it.