Fireworks are a traumatic and disruptive intrusion on their environment akin to a temporary war. We (humans) already do enough traumatic and disruptive intrusions on the lives of wild animals, that doing this wholly unnecessary “just for funsies” thing is particularly cruel.
It’s rich how you’ve decided to call out “city people” as being responsible for the situation rather than the trash individuals who set off illegal fireworks.
So do I. As I understand it, those bills involved incentives that any company could access provided that they met the conditions (manufacture in US, etc). The IRA also provided direct incentives to consumers to spend their money as they saw fit (EVs, solar, heat pumps, etc).
Direct investment by the executive branch is something else entirely. For example, Intel is now blessed and too big to fail. Why would anyone start a competitor to it? If you did start a competitor, your first call would be to Commerce, right? Seems like a heaping dose of moral hazard.
I can understand direct investment in very narrow circumstances, such as rare earth minerals and possibly something like nuclear power generation.
An alternative is a truly-independent sovereign wealth fund, or independently-governed pension investment arm such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. But I doubt, in light of the Humphrey's Executor decision, that it's possible for the United States to create such an entity now.
I am not the original commenter, but I interpret it to mean that large corporations can almost always arrange it so that they don't pay tax or don't pay their fair share of tax. 88 companies paid $0 tax on $105B in profit in 2025[0]
In your own codebase you can at least run a "you simulator" to arrive at the answer fairly reliably. "Where would I have put this bit? Oh yes, of course ..."
> Asking Claude to think about “good ways to structure this” or asking how similar problems get solved in industry or high profile projects has really helped me design better solutions
I think this highlights the difference between the “how do I make a ham sandwich?” approach of chat vs the “sudo make me a ham sandwich” of agentic coding.
Is there a cleaner, more consistent technology for baseload?
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
Musk explicitly centered his DOGE effort on rooting out “woke” programs. This included pulling funding from independent research under the auspices of various government departments.
The Trump administration spent considerable effort strong arming colleges on account of speech that they did not like. Even if you subscribe to FIRE’s “Chicago Statement”, you should find the government interfering with colleges like this a break-glass scenario. “Individual Rights in Education” surely include the right to hold beliefs and teach in a way that the current administration is uncomfortable with.
So yes, these are fascist activities wholly consistent with the other fascist activities that MAGA movement is engaged in.
Fascists do claim to support free speech while wielding the apparatus of state to ensure that any speech that they disagree with is suppressed, eg on college campuses.
Alive is always relevant. Our moral consideration must place beings that are alive or processes that support the life on this planet above things which are not alive.
In a just world, it must be adapted to us. It’s merely a file sitting on disk with numbers in it. And to put a fine point on it: the ambitions of the wealthy people who make it must be adapted to us.
A wonderful service known as the web has connected people who choose A with others who choose A and of course with a great many who don’t need to make a choice and benefit from the work of others.
I mourn a world in which few will choose A, because for many to choose B seems to lock us all, tragedy of the commons style, into a worse world.
> These can be tools to destroy the oppression that governs our lives
So far it seems that the clearest use for these tools is to enhance, rather than destroy, oppression.
1. Suppression / elimination of white collar jobs
2. Negative cognitive effects, especially for young people
3. Accelerated decline in social media / information ecosystems. Increasing polarization, hard to tell fact from fiction.
4. Environmental impacts: increased energy usage means more carbon in the atmosphere, climate change accelerates.
5. Software security incidents increasing. Hard for individuals and small organizations to defend themselves.
6. “Power to think” vested in a very small group of organizations/labs. Doing work which should only require a computer and freely-available software will now be gated by expensive subscriptions. Once you “vibe code” a significant portion of your software you’re locked in and cannot go back to maintaining it without frontier-model level assistance.
And to close the loop - there is no architectural thinking without experience in execution. The highly productive people who are all-in on agentic coding today are powered by their previous experience doing implementation. As time goes on their powers will wane unless they make a point to keep them sharp by doing enough hands-on implementation.
It’s the same as a “non-coding architect” role (remember those). Most of them are absolutely full of shit architecture astronauts.