I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.

In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.

Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.

It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.

Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.

Catholics are a minority denomination in America, and an especially small minority in the relevant states.

Russian Orthodoxy, on the other hand, encompasses ~95% of Russian Christians, and there is no organized alternative to it.

... Also, Trump 2024 won Catholics by 12 points (While 2020 and 2016 was a 50/50 split.)

Whatever the church's views are, unlike the evangelicals, it's not dictating to its members how they should vote.

It flagged me saying UBI by giving money to the rich was a form of negative transfers as "negativity" and said it was polarizing. I don't think it's ready for prime time.

The filter is implicitly tuned on American culture. It's very easy to trigger the negativity one by merely pointing facts if you don't give opposite but unequal arguments and it deeply dislikes lightly oppositions which would perfectly acceptable in my own culture. It reminded me a bit of the Copilot email coach and it's unceasing invitation to add sentences devoid of meaning to "improve the tone" your email. The overall score is mostly opaque too.

I think there is a confusion between engaging and culturally palatable to the average American and of quality.

If I add to go through this, one, I would be deeply annoyed, two, I would just pass all my comments through another LLM if I really had to interact.

The main thing Google is screwing up is that if my API key somehow leaks and I end up with extremely out of line billing at Microsoft, I will be on the phone with a customer representative as soon as we or they notice something weird happening and a solution will be found.

Google will probably have me go through five bots and if, by some kind of miracle, I manage to have a human on the phone, they will probably explain to me that I should have read the third paragraph of the fourth page of the self service doc and it's obviously my fault.

That's not how this works. Unregulated markets are not a free for all. Law still apply in the absence of a regulator.

Also, unrelated minor pet peeve, but what's the deal with the "not ai emdash"? You can just use dash or comma, you know.

I personally like the emdash -- I've been using for years -- I'm not an AI -- And I will continue to use it in the future with the "(not ai)" annotation. I will fight for the freedom -- for me and for others -- to use the emdash however I please.

I thought "Code is Law". So now crypto bros want to fight this out in TradLaw just like the TradFi institutions do?

Keeping track of which of your citizens are outside of the country. Ensuring the state knows you are a citizen and should be treated as such.

France had a weird issue recently about the media talking for ages about someone who committed a crime while the state had asked for him to be deported months before on the basis of his foreign passport and it took weeks for someone to finally notice that the guy was actually French. It made the police looks clownish.

That's your guess. The UK authorities have never given this reason.

You were asking for legitimate purposes. That's some of them.

I asked for the purpose. You guessed at the purpose. those are different.

RAM production is highly inelastic and controlled by an oligopoly. They have little desire to increase production considering the lead time and the risk that the AI demand might be transient.

They actively prefer keeping confortable margins than competing between each other. They have already been condemned for active collusion in the past.

New actors from China could shake things up a bit but the geopolitical situation makes that complicated. The market can stay broken for a long time.

They are increasing production as fast as they can (which is not fast at all, it's more like slowly steering a huge ship towards the correct direction) because current prices are too high even when accounting for the historical oligopoly dynamics. They can easily increase their collective profits by making more.

RAM manufacturers don't increase production as fast as possible, because they've been through enough boom and bust.

Rapid increase in capacity leads to oversupply which leads to negative margins. They've been there before, and they don't want to go there again.

RAM manufacturers do routinely setup new fabs and decommision old fabs. Maybe they're trying to hurry up new fab construction in times like these, and they would likely defer shutting down old fabs or restart them where possible. But they're less likely to build new fabs that weren't already part of their long term plans.

They've actually not seen such prices before. DRAM now costs as much per Gb as it did around 2006-2007 - despite around 20 years of real technical progress since then! That's genuinely unprecedented.

As far as I know, they are merely shifting capacities from the customer market towards the data center market with minimal retooling. I am unaware of any of the three actively investing in new capacity. Some modest increase are planned but nowhere near what you would expect given current demand.

I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.

It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.

I don't think it explains everything.

I think social norms have a lot to do with it. It's like the actual social costs of being the one who broke the social trust is so high it dissuades people.

It worked for me on a lower level. Everyone cut queues and will grab an empty seat if it looks available at a packed restaurant here so I do it too but I never did that when I lived in Singapore because I knew that's not how things work there and people would genuinely be mad at me for doing it.

It's like a self-fulfilling, self-improving environment. Same with Japan and cleanliness.

State provided housing for most and a booming economy with low unemployment must help too.