It such obvious corruption. Trump ordered the pentagon to buy coal power specifically.

The crazy thing is coal mining is 40,000 jobs. I have never seen such a tiny industry given such preferential/oversized treatment.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001

Lyft is 10% of the size of big coal and Amazon is over 20x larger.

Meanwhile the areas where the coal jobs used to exist (or still do) just had their food stamps removed or reduced. It's such a charade.

There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.

And that is by design. There is a reason why people get food stamps and not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

I suppose you’re right. Now that you mention it, are food stamps similarly inflationary to having 1000 dollars deposited into their bank account?

I doubt they make any inflation in the sense "more dollars chasing fewer goods"

SNAP etc makes the base-load revenue of many rural grocery stores.

The food is going to be produced, and scale is better.

I work with disabled SNAP recipients and it's never been easy.

$1000 is um, high...

> not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.

Conditional cash transfer programs have been extremely successful in other countries. Brazil’s Bolsa Família is one I am more familiar with and it’s studied as a success reference.

The conditional part relies in part on universal healthcare, which might complicate things a bit in the US.

While they say it’s about the jobs, it is so very clearly about who is making how much money by propping up coal ( and other industries)

The UK fishing industry was cited a lot as a reason for Brexit, despite being just over 10k jobs ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an... ) and less economically significant than Warhammer.

(see the "everything is gender now" thesis: fishing and coal mining are "manly" industries, which is why they get this preferential treatment from the right-wing)

I have a theory that corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature.

Advanced governments only force corruption to distribute and obfuscate.

I think this is why there appears to be some correlation between unpopular behavior and financial success.

Government essentially erects artificial barriers to entry on behalf of the incumbent businesses that fund it.

I don’t know if it is “unstoppable” or a “force,” but nepotism is a natural behavior, selected for in humans by kin selection.

Likewise, I think public choice theory would probably argue that corruption is a predictable outcome in politics that has to be constantly guarded against.

That's why I see AI (with a clear set of provided objectives and guidelines, i.e., a constitution) as the future of government.

As dystopian as that sounds, it's the only way I see to truly rid ourselves of corruption.

I don't know how any AI system would not eventually determine that humans are the problem. Sci-fi uses this as a plot numerous times for a reason. What humans are doing is not logical, and better choices can be made if it weren't so damn profitable for some to keep going as is.

Why would AI at that scale not have the exact corruptible inclination humans have?

Because unlike natural life, which has evolved to be highly competitive and self-interested, we would explicitly set the AI's objectives to always benefit society.

And why would the people in power be willing to do that?

That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.

If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.

This is an incomplete thought.

A strong checks and balances without influence of bias, relationships, and politics can be implemented using a 2-way blind system where:

1. decision makers (of sound judgement) are not aware of any identifiable information related to any users on whom the decision will be made, nor of each other.

2. Users are not aware of the decision makers who will decide on them, nor of each other.

Possibly AI can play a role here, but a strong system of checks & balances would be a prerequisite for this.

The justice system would definitely benefit from this.

> corruption+nepotism are unstoppable forces of nature

History suggests it's the other way round. They're awfully prevalent - what is a hereditary monarchy but nepotism - but the value of meritocracy over nepotism enables such better governance that it tends to win handily in proxy or actual conflicts. Similarly, if your society is too corrupt when you go to war you discover that someone has sold the tyres off all your stored vehicles, or suchlike.

You also can't have a complex society without a complex government. This goes all the way back to Qin dynasty vs. "barbarians".