Here is an idea: the only way to win is a large and extremely costly invasion, actual troops on the ground for probably a decade.

Nobody wants to pay that price. It was insane to start this war, and everybody knew it but Netanyahu and Trump. I can't believe Rubio was stupid enough to go along with it.

What every admin in this century has done is to avoid declaring what construes "winning" -- which is rather convenient to them as far as how they are to be judged on waging that war.

American exceptionalism is a poison to the mind. Elect people who are "true believers", and this is the expected outcome.

For the most part they come out of emotions that evolution found useful for procreation (love, fear, anger), then extrapolated to people living in small groups, then to larger societies after the invention of agriculture via the "iterated prisoners dilemma".

Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.

seconded

I typically see it labeled "uncured."

That's just the usual US marketing bollocks. Whether it is cured with nitrates or with celery extract, bacon is definitely cured. If it is not cured, it is not bacon.

I am more sympathetic to the term "turkey bacon" than "uncured bacon".

Because they formed partnerships when they were young and didn't know any better. And then once things get going, it seems better to "go along to get along" than face the difficulty of change.

In the US, we also have ideologies that say that one partner is supposed to be subservient to the other based on gender roles, and that makes things even more insane.

It is a trade-off. The benefits seems to outweigh the downsides, but it can still be painful. But we can try to alleviate the problems by using our rational mind.

I am not sure about either of these things. The typical HN person doesn't seem to be someone who partnered young or was raised in anything like a "traditional US ideology"...

It mainly seems like their parents failed to pass on any cultural wisdom. Go along to get along is fine, very different than your "partner" severely transgressing upon you.

Why is that disappointing? Everything he said there seems perfectly reasonable.

A large part of that goes via arguing about consciousness.

Starts of with a quite defensible:

  First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.

But the moment he hits that (parenthetical) paragraph about consciousness, he blends human capabilities with human-like consciousness.

If human-like capabilities required human-like consciousness, early models (like GPT-4) passing all those exams would suggest those models being "as conscious as" a university student. (My inner Douglas Adams wants to invert this, but the best I can do is "The Xarloxians did not consider university students to be conscious beings; their reasoning being…", which you may recognise as a riff on Babel fish and the non-existence of God).

Normal people take way more than that prescribed dose.

Can we blame Rubio for this?

No, it was a plant by the radical-left communist antifa Soros-funded... ah, what's the rest of the formula? It keeps changing.

They aren't MY adversary. The government of the US has been acting pretty adversarial lately. Should I avoid US manufactured goods too?

Yes we all know we need more housing supply.