https://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ayn-rand-collected-...

One of her wonderful worldviews was to rejects altruism as a moral imperative, arguing that individuals should live for their own rational self-interest. Social security, based on the idea of supporting others, contradicts this principle.

Which means anyone whose wisdom matches their self-interest is going to understand that different things have very different efficiencies at different scales.

And some things happen to be dramatically more efficient/person and more effective, the larger the scale they can be coordinated at.

This exactly. All of these people who profess to believe in objectivism could easily move to a failed state and do anything they want to with zero government intervention. But they don't do that. They want all of the benefits of a working government with none of the things required to actually create a working government.

This position was already pointed out by Plato (in the Gorgias IIRC) as being inconsistent. Political systems are made up by people - if a society, in particular a democratic one, has certain systems in place, then this is probably because it was (at least believed to be) in the people's self interest.

The DOGE crew are incompetent. Witness their firing of all the people who look after the nuclear stockpile and Ebola research.

[0] https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355895/doge-musk-nlrb-...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-14/doge-staf...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderkind_(disambiguation)

“Wunderkind” mispronounced as “Wonder Kid” is a running joke in that show.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TedLasso/comments/132rw9v/what_the_...

Other example includes: Endgegner (final boss) or Endlösung (final solution)

I would suggest to avoid such terms.

I did not know about this, thanks for die Vorwarnung. In context, I'd assume "ultimate enemy" (Gegner=opponent) as "final boss" sounds videogame.

Either the philosophers or the mathematicians/physicists likely coined them.

The parallels to Nazi Germany's striking but impractical weapons seemed intended every time I heard or read Wunderwaffe in English.

Endgegner originates from Endlösung and while it indeed often is used without thought, the question if it should be used lightly.

Unfortunately “capitalism” has two quite different meanings. Which are rarely clarified in use.

Capitalism with a big C, a too common overarching ideology, gets bent to mean whatever the greedy, unethical and rich want it to mean so they can get more money.

But small c capitalism, evolving from both practical and ethical foundations, is a system so useful it has multiplied the benefits of civilization. But it is just one such system.

It can’t do everything, it needs other independent systems (justice, dispute resolution, rules of clarity, risk & trust limiting systems, for starters) to work, and extending it to places it doesn’t work causes great harm.

(Like when perversely applied to those enabling systems, in big C form, as is happening now.)

Indeed.

It's almost as if no economic, social, or political system known to mankind will stand up for long under a determined onslaught of corruption.

If I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt (which I hate), it's a shotgun approach; cut things relentlessly and see what falls apart. Chaos engineering applied to a country and / or the world.

Perceived, not actual, because spreading lies and misinformation is what makes the most money for the ad sellers that make up 90% of our industry.