> That doesn't make sense for America to care about this much, given that Iran has no way to deliver nuclear weapons to it.
A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could also threaten U.S. bases and warships in the area. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.
> Are we really back in "trust me they have WMDs" territory?
Irrespective of everything else going on, it’s well established that Iran has a nuclear program in the advanced stages of development. There was a whole UN program around inspecting it.
> A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.
Personally, I don't care about the profit margins of oil and gas companies, and I will vote against any politician that partakes in sending my fellow citizens to die for the profit margins of oil and gas companies.
I also don't particularly care about the plight of regional allies, particularly ones that have a bizarre tendency to constantly poke the bears around them.
“Represented in the training data” does not mean “represented as a whole in the training data”. If A and B are separately in the training data, the model can provide a result when A and B occur in the input because the model has made a connection between A and B in the latent space.
Yes. I’m saying that “it’s just in the training data” is a cognitive containment of these models which is incomplete. You can insist that’s what’s happening, but you’ll be left unable to explain what’s going on beyond truisms.
>"If A and B are separately in the training data, the model can provide a result when A and B occur in the input because the model has made a connection between A and B in the latent space."
This statement (The one I was replying to) is fundamentally unbounded. There's nothing that can't be explained as a combination of "A" and "B" in "training data" because practically speaking we can express anything as such where the combination only needs to be convex along some high-dimensional semantic surface. Add on to that my scare quotes around "training data" because very few people have any practical idea of what is or isn't in there, so we can just make claims strategically. Do we need to explain a success? It was in the training data. A failure, probably not in the training data. Will anyone call us on this transparent farce? Not usually, no.
If a statement can--at will--explain everything and nothing, what's it worth?
Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention this. Even just phasing out fossil fuels (if we're still serious about that) plus ordinary growth means today's demand is a fraction of what could potentially be fulfilled by additional solar buildout.
Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.
The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.
What point do you think you're making? That's not the question. You're just repeating the same obvious geopolitical comparison everyone regurgitates these days.
The question is about whether any of that can be meaningfully attributed to some lawyer vs engineer divide. Your question doesn't answer that in the slightest and thus I have no idea why you are asking it.
It's not about the specific degree the leaders hold. Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
The US, on the hand, is obsessed with individual rights, and any sort of collective action that threatens those rights is extensively litigated.
This is really what Wang's thesis boils down to, and which of course it's an oversimplification, there is a kernel of truth in there.
and the hidden implication is that there's a correct trade off to be made (because engineering is about trade offs).
So what happens to those people whose gotten the bad end of the deal? If china builds a damn, the villages downstream gets moved (with small compensation that is not commensurate with the value of the dam being made).
It's also why the high speed rail in california is costing so much in the US vs something similar in china.
That's better than a culture that sees every transaction solely in terms of corporate profit and doesn't consider the existence of trade offs at all.
The result is that far more people get far worse deals far more of the time. Healthcare, the jobs market, education, climate damage, grift in high places - it's all the same issue, and a lot of the problems are rooted in denial of reality on spurious "economic" grounds.
>Thanks to Communism, China (and the Soviet Union before it) had a profound belief that society can be engineered, and that people and nature are both raw material that can be shaped to fit the needs of society.
Look america's 1939+ expansion was subsided by the british empire trying to expand arms manufacture.
What america has been doing is subsiding engineering capacity in china. This was done because it created more profit for larger companies as they merged and eliminated costs. This higher profit drove a "roaring" economic expansion. But now china is capturing more of the value.
A solution is to use tax as a way to re-patriciate engineering capacity. This is kinda what trump is supposed to be doing, but carving out exceptions for friends, and using blunt instruments doesn't work all that well.
14th and 15th amendments were binding on government. The civil rights act was binding on private businesses, even those engaging in intrastate trade.
The civil rights act of 1875, which also tried to bind on private businesses, was found unconstitutional in doing so, despite coming after the 15th amendment. But by the 60s and 70s we were already in a post-constitutional society as FDRs threatening to pack the courts, the 'necessities' implemented during WWII, and the progressive era more or less ended up with SCOTUS deferring to everything as interstate commerce (most notable, in Wickard v Filburn). The 14th and 15th amendment did not change between the time the same things were found unconstitutional, then magically constitutional ~80+ years later.
The truth is, the civil rights act was seen as so important (that time around) that they bent the constitution to let it work. And now much of the most relied on pieces of legislation relied on a tortured interpretation of the constitution, making things incredibly difficult to fix, and setting the stage for people like Trump.
The corollary is that literally everything that the US government communicates should be assumed to be a lie. Even normal, boring announcements from the USDA and such are communicated in the voice of a terminally-online twitter troll.
Since many people are primed for this video to confirm their worldview, it doesn't even need to be that good. It will spread like wildfire, and its debunking won't. Technically, there is no reason why this can't be done today.
> I can tell you personally that the action which most seriously affected my performance at a workplace was being denied a bereavement day because the official policy was to only allow one.
One of the things I remember most from my career was a manager "rules lawyering" about bereavement leave when my aunt passed away. Ironically, HR was very sympathetic and accommodating, and it was a non-issue with them.
I've been treated "worse" by jackass execs and managers, but always in the context of work. Someone acting in the way this manager did about a personal situation sticks with me much more than those.
My ex didn’t go to her own father’s funeral because the company said she couldn’t have that much time off. Six months later when she talked about it at work they were horrified she hadn’t felt she could go, but how could you possibly make that up to someone? I think they might have actually worried she would sue them.
I told her to go and we’d sort out her work situation when she or we got back.
It kinda came out of the blue so we didn’t have time to hypothetically it out so we could just operate on autopilot.
Since then I’ve had bosses who heard of a death/critical illness in the family just say, “Go.” No discussion or details needed. Just go. Because being petty or precious about the whole thing just makes you public enemy. And when clever people work for you they don’t always come at you straight on. They come at you sideways and you don’t even know it’s revenge. They just passive aggressively let something slide that made your life miserable.
A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could also threaten U.S. bases and warships in the area. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.
> Are we really back in "trust me they have WMDs" territory?
Irrespective of everything else going on, it’s well established that Iran has a nuclear program in the advanced stages of development. There was a whole UN program around inspecting it.
reply