I don’t think that the Gilded age was “stopped”… The oligarchs just learned better marketing and how to better appease the masses. Their fear of the spread of socialism led to concessions that they’ve been vindictive about ever since.

You guys get to choose your pets? All of mine just invite themselves in the house and then decide they live there now. I’m not complaining about the situation, but I don’t exactly remember having much choice in the matter.

Yeah, but it’s not something you would ever see in operation. The V150 trial had special modified and powered cars running on the most favorable railway conditions possible. Plus, running over 200mph on steel starts to create enough friction to damage the wheels and rail.

In the end the maintenance cost for maglev vs bullet trains are about the same. Bullet trains focus more on mechanical maintenance of the track and wheels. While the maintenance of maglev is typically more technical, it requires constant recalibration of the electronics and constant monitoring for alignment.

Maglev is definitely more expensive to build and probably to run, but it seems like it’d be far more reliable? And also a much smoother experience for those on-board?

Traditional steel on rail is actually more reliable in practice. Theoretically the basic mechanics of maglev are more reliable, but in practice they tend to suffer from longer delays when they do fail. This is mostly because the repairs/maintenance for traditional rail can be done by just about anyone, where maglevs tend to be locked in by a single vendor contract.

Maglev has much greater theoretical speed limits than typical contact tracks, as, well, we basically remove the friction between the wheel and the track?

They are theoretically faster, but in practice the speed of trains are most often governed not by the limitations of the trains themselves, but instead are limited by the surrounding infrastructure and terrain.

The cruising speed of railed bullet trains are around 200mph, while the cruising speeds of maglev is around 265mph. Maglevs have gone significantly faster around 375mph, but thats not really a realistic expectation for daily operations.

Imo both are extremely cool, but traditional rail is just a lot more practical for a plethora of reasons. The most important being that the installation and operational cost are just a lot more realistic than maglev. There’s a reason there’s only a total of 37 miles of maglev in operation today compared to over 30k miles of high-speed rail.

I have read blingsight, I haven’t yet picked up the sequel yet. I have a buddy that teaches cognitive science and philosophy of the mind at a university, so I get to hear him drunkenly rant about the topic pretty frequently.

LLMs and AI are real

I would say that the “AI” we currently have aren’t really AI as most people imagine or how they are thought depicted in science fiction.

Intellect usually requires a capacity to think, understand, and at least mimic the way the mind learns. The current machine learning we currently call AI is more a kin to the classic Chinese Room thought experiment.

He would be really upset about you saying that if he could read.

What? Who taught you that? How did the merchant class develop in the 11th century by buying and selling things unless they at one point owned them?

Are you conflating wealth with nobility?

Every single one of these executives are so infatuated with their own product that they truly believe they are the fathers of skynet, instead of just being the fundraising team behind a janky Chinese Room powered by a shitty version of Google translate.

I personally think the claims that AI is so powerful that it’s akin to cracking open the lid of Pandora’s box is just a cheap marketing ploy. Its something a fraudulent martial arts instructor from the 80s would try to sell. “Why can’t I show you my skills? Well they’re just too powerful, no human being could possibly survive a simple demonstration. It’s simply too dangerous.”

In reality they’ve over invested in a product that has no reasonable way to make a return. They’re running short on their funding runway and are trying desperately to extend the time before the market realizes that the most valuable aspect of the field is that most people are ignorant on the topic enough to validate dumping more cash into an over speculated IP.

There are different opinions when it comes to what truly defines liberalism, but you would be hard pressed to find one that does not include the advocacy of a market economy and the right for an individual to own the means of production.

This is because liberalism arose as an alternative to mercantilism, where the state has more control over the economy. Under mercantilism the state had the means to control trade and the production of a large amount of goods meant to control the balance of import and export.

When you combine a market economy with the right of individual ownership over the means of production you end up with capitalism. When the founding fathers of America spoke about the right over personal property, they weren’t only talking about land ownership. That had already been an established right for men of their class in England since the late 17th century. They were speaking about property rights that were currently affecting their own lives, mainly the right to own and operate their businesses without the permit of the government.

I know tankies like to see that and append “private” in front

Private property is meant to include personal ownership of things other than land.

prior to liberalism, property was handed out by the king, and owning property meant you were a noble.

You’re talking about land… In most systems of feudalism the king granted land to the landed gentry who would then rent out that land for income.

Individuals still owned personal property like homes, businesses, and horses. They just didn’t own the land that property occupied.

The idea that non-nobility can own anything, including personal property, is a liberal idea.

That’s just wildly inaccurate… People have been owning different types of property since before recorded history. The only places this isn’t the cultural norm for humans in general is a select sect of small communal societies who share everything.

There are people who will claim that the property isn’t truly owned because it’s on someone else’s land. But that would be like saying you don’t truly own your home if you have to pay property taxes.

Oh oh oh, and that one time George Bush collectively cock teased us all by almost choking to death on that pretzel.

We also had to deal with Obama giving us an iota of hope for a short period and then ends up all he wanted to do all day was drone strike poor people.