Several framers of the constitution expressed deep concerns about the potential for coordinated non-governmental "factions" taking over government via elections.
Unfortunately, despite going to great efforts to limit power centralization internally, concerns of external centralization were not heeded and there are no limits on the coordination of the US government via non-governmental organizations such as parties.
This might have been a prophesy:
> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.
> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
> [Omitted here, but at this point he worries that even a foreign country could weaponize a party to take control of the country, via elections.]
> There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true, and in Governments of a Monarchical cast Patriotism may look with endulgence, if not with layout, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.
-- George Washington [0]
States used to operate independently enough that the same party in different counties and states might have varied views. But today, both parties have become highly centralized and homogenous from local to federal levels. Now intensely centralized themselves, they are well prepared to each compete to centralize government as an extension of a single party.
And given it has become relatively easy to do so, the incentives are now there for parties to treat elections as war, and party control of government as the highest priority policy at all times. Incentives don't mean it has to happen, but ... well we know how that goes.
The winner take all elements, where a party that gains a power edge over the other is in a better position to entrench themselves further, if not permanently, are also in play.
When competition for power devolves into a dichotomy of complete wins or losses, the most powerful decision makers spend their time continually competing, with little attention left for concerns about competent governance or the public's well being.
The current state of the unchecked US party system is the number one problem for the country. As all other problems migrate downstream from it.
The biggest problem isn't "which" party gains control. The problem is that any party could ever obtain majority control in all three branches.
The number of PowerPoint and slide presentations I sat through with sans serif white and yellow text on a dark purple background still gives me nightmares. For my presentation I went black over medium-light grey. The audience sighed with relief.
Not everyone understands normal form, much less 3rd normal form. I’ve seen people do worse with excel files where they ran out of columns and had to link across spreadsheets.
That is never going to happen until we are building more of a consistent design. I think every LWR is use today is a custom bespoke piece of equipment.
Yes, standardizing on a handful of designs will help immensely, as well as building two or more reactors on one site to share the overhead costs between units.
For example, building out more AP-1000s is really a no brainer. The first-of-a-kind is always expensive and the AP-1000 was especially so due to many factors. We bore that cost and now we should reap the benefits of Nth of a kind builds.
Targeted delivery of anti cancer methods is hard. Weather it is multiple radiation beams or anti-body cross linked chemo agents it’s never easy. Chemotherapy poisons the entire body but the cancer cells die faster. A generally administered compound that only affects cancer would be huge.
This is kind of true but misses the bigger picture. We have developed many drug options more targeted than traditional chemotherapy, famously Gleevec for example. The question isn't whether we've found one that could work at all, but how well does it work, what types of cancer it works for, and what the side effects are.
You have to give Apple credit where credit is due. They have managed to make first iTunes and now Music worse with every release. Which is truly amazing.
It’s the V-chip and Clipper chip madness all over again. While they are at it can they start requiring the rich, famous, and powerful to get age verification before interacting with people to prevent another Epstein?
Companies use to hoard talent. Now they are hoarding compute, RAM, and GPUs.
Deepseek showed that there are possibly less expensive ways to train, meaning the future eye watering expenses may not happen.
Bigger models may not scale. The future may be federations of smaller expert models. Chat GPTX doesn’t need to know everything about mental health, it just needs to recognize the the Sigmund von Shrink mental health model needs to answer some of my questions.
Echoing the other comment they showed another big thing which is that the output if an AI model is the AI model. If you mass prompt scrape their AI you can recreate it almost exactly.
Very dangerous if you think about it that the product itself is the raw building block for itself.
Openai spends 1B$ on their model, releases it and instantly it gets scrapped by a million bots to build some country or company their own model.
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