alyeska2
It turned out that those peoples, given opportunities and in a system with functioning institutions, actually weren't violent, stupid or culturally incompatible and in fact thrived, integrated, built communities, grew the economy and contributed to society.
Something for you to consider.
I can cross a dozen borders in the EU without so much as slowing down. I can sell my house in one US State and move to another without asking for permission.
It wasn't until World War 1 that passports for international travel became common in Europe.
Don't let the xenophobic posts on social media trick you. Immigrants in the US are factually less likely to commit crimes than born Americans, look it up. They've just repeated the lie so many times that people have accepted it.
Like, in a non-dystopian world, they'd not be hiding their activities and not be attacking people who observe them, but would instead be behaving legally and ethically and therefor not be concerned.
Eli Lilly might be the experienced horse carriage operator to Anthropic as the Ford motor company here instead. Or Blackberry when the iPhone was announced.
The biggest advantage Eli Lilly has is in navigating the FDA regulatory process, and at present, US Federal regulations & bureacracy can be pretty easily managed by putting one of Trump's sons or friends on the board or giving a 'donation'.
I don't see how.
Lots of well-established, provable facts are "political" because some religious group, industry or subset of the population doesn't like them. Evolution, climate change, the Earth being more than 6,000 years old, etc are simultaneously obviously true scientifically but disputed politically by significant sections of the American public.
Lots of research is going to get pulled into "politics". Publish a paper about autism or depression or obesity, or about algae blooms from fertilizer runoff or lower test scores in schools with more air pollution or anything to do with mRNA or guns or glaciers and on and on and you'll get pulled into some sort of political dispute.
At best, a publication can avoid directly naming politicians or political parties, but it's impossible to be apolitical when publishing the temperature measurements or showing a dinosaur fossil are considered political.
Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.
There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.
Because some people said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bad, and that our political leaders should support Ukraine?
Might be time to turn off your devices and go touch some grass. It doesn't seem like you're in a good head space to be worrying about global politics right now.
It's a perfectly fine system if the egg producers are using it genuinely, it's only a problem when they start submitting fraudulent bids to accomplish illegal market manipulation.
The US has benefited massively from having years of the best and brightest from all around the world come to the US to research medicine, engineering and science. It's not about the one guy who's CEO of some tech company, it's about the thousands of graduate students, post docs and researchers doing the actual work to move humanity forward one lab-rat or laser measurement or petri dish at a time.
The 20th century was full of authoritarians attacking the intelligencia. A nation of uneducated peasants is easier to control and exploit. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
The budget deficit is the largest in history, the federal government size has increased, taxes on imports (tariffs) have increased in politically manipulative ways and now the government is meddling with the market price of commodities.
Even if you don't care about Europe or democracy or pollution or foreign policy... this is still just bad capitalism and bad big-government manipulation preventing the free market from correctly solving problems and establishing an optimal price for goods.
For instance, "men can have babies" is a simple result of politeness and observable reality. Transgender people exist, and can become pregnant and have babies. The polite, sympathetic and decent thing to do when interacting with a transgender person is to use their preferred gender terms. This is true whether you're a small-government, live-and-let-live libertarian conservative (you live your life, I'll live mine) or a Christian values social conservative (Jesus spent his entire life around lepers, beggars and prostitutes and washed their feet as an act of love and compassion).
Combine those two facts 1) you've got a person who had a baby at one point in their life and 2) who should be referred to as a man today, and the result is you get a man who had a baby. Nothing left-wing or liberal about it, just basic civility and politeness to another person, which are values we should all embrace.
To find cures for diseases faster, find new ways to produce useful chemicals, find ways to make crops resilient against changing climate, etc
> Isn't this one area you'd want extreme human intervention?
No? There are an essentially infinite number of potentially useful experiments that could be run that have no risk or downside. It's not like they're doing this in a BSL-4 lab mutating smallpox.
Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.
Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.
It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.
The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.
That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.
It's like saying that a murderer and a jaywalker are both criminals, so they're basically the same.
The 2024 election was 49.8% Trump vs 48.3% Harris on a turnout of 64.3%.
So essentially, only 1 in 3 eligible voters preferred Trump (the other two were split between not voting and voting for Harris).
We (the collective "we" of all humanity) clearly lost massively when we let a handful of billionares get richer by saying they got to control all sharing, remixing, performing, using or expanding upon any music, art, or other media.
Not that it's any real justice for Swartz or the countless others who've had their lives ruined by copyright laws or for file-sharing, but it's a tiny step in the right direction if we drastically expand fair-use and rethink if we really want a society where the 0.01% control music, film and art.
There are hundreds of Standord dropouts running startups. And if they do fraud, people call it out, the media reports it as fraud, investors and customers leave, and that's the end.
But Holmes successfully marketed herself with gender as a central part of her story, so that people like you would defend her, promote her and dismiss criticism against the company or product because you're so sure that it's sexism and not legitimate criticism.
The only reason the Theranos fraud got as far as it did was because everyone calling it a fraud got silenced and cancelled as sexists. Now that it's finally over they're saying "See! We told you!" and yet you persist in "No, you're just a sexist".
A big part of the Theranos story is that gender was used as a shield - when people called it a fraud they were dismissed as sexists and Holmes got a lot of easy positive press coverage from media that was dying for stories of about a female visionary founder.
No women are going to have to "carry the baggage" of Elizabeth Holmes. At most, maybe they just won't have the magical protection against all criticism that she had for a number of years. But realistically, people have short memories so we'll probably have a new "The female Elon Musk" hype cycle start around someone new in a year or two.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco... shows houses have gone from 3.5x median income to 6x median income since 1985.
Or here's a source that makes the comparisons via number of hours worked, showing that people today need to work thousands of hours more than Boomers did to afford the same things: https://dailycaller.com/2026/08/29/life-mainstays-college-ho...
Or here: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bf5814b4262c498fb73303b... showing that college tuition has gone from 8% of household income in 1968 to 20% in 2020.
The 90s wasn't a utopia, but also, look at the media landscape of the time as a reflection on society - Fight Club, Office Space and American Beauty were reflections on the unfulfilling banality of life being too easy to find purpose. Married with Children (1987) and The Simpsons (1989) center on men who are supposed to be relatable-losers in low status, low paid dead end jobs (shoe salesman and power plant worker) and yet both have two story houses and are supporting multiple kids, because that was just normal and relatable to the blue collar average Americans watching the show at the time. Rocky (1976) has a protagonist who owns a house in Philadelphia despite being "poor", if it were filmed today they'd have to make him sleeping in his car for the character to represent the same level of desperation that audiences understood him to be in at the time.
I'm a people manager, and I wouldn't bat an eye at a candidate I was interviewing joining the zoom from their work laptop and I wouldn't care if someone on my team used their work laptop rather than their personal device if they were interviewing elsewhere.
People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.
That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.
It might be that the author used claude to generate or edit this. Or, they might just write like the bloggers and Redditors whose messages were trained on to create that style.
I can't wrap my head around the AI naysayers at this point.
We've had the equivalent of watching the tech go from the Wright Brothers plane to supersonic stealth fighter jets in the span of like 4 years, and yet people keep claiming it will never do things that it clearly will do in like... 6 months.
Or in the case of 100x programmer... it's literally already there. You should try it.
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
Whatever caused life to begin in the first place would maybe be the right place to look to recreate this naturally. If life began again from step 0, but with the opposite chirality, it could then progress forward towards mirrored bacteria.
Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.