upboundspiral

I think the problem is much deeper, but the Republicans didn't help with No Child Left Behind.

I think as economic circumstances changed (post 1970s era deregulation, post 1990s offshoring, etc), the oligarchy waged a war on the American working class, and just as industrial research was offloaded to universities (except for the big 3 of pharma, cars, some tech), companies also offloaded learning and credentials to the school system.

So the solution became "go to college to stand out", but that means getting good grades, so grades matter even more.

Recognizing this, the Republicans passed "No Child Left Behind". They elected to not improve teacher pay, not restructure the system, just lower standards that were already under pressure to be lowered to the least common denominator.

There was a recent congressional hearing, and one of the speakers was saying that post Covid / post internet students were struggling more than ever, and in response the SAT was redrafted to be easier to solve with people with low attention spans and low critical reasoning skills.

School districts are in on it too. Teachers try their best, but the district wants federal and state funding, and the easiest way is to make school easy, pass all the kids with a pulse, ensure their attendance is good, etc etc. And most principals enforce this policy, pressuring teachers to relax their grades.

Electricity is regulated. Not perfectly, but regulated much more than datacenters. Supposedly they have a cap on earnings to keep costs "low". As a society we recognize that essential services, as you say datacenters are becoming, need checks and balances.

Also, electricity being publicly owned (as in: everyone within a town is a shareholder with 1 share of the public utility company with the ability to get information about its running, fire the board with enough votes, etc) would be great.

The common narrative is state-owned vs privately owned, but what about community owned? What if the people the utility directly affects were shareholders? They might be incentivized to actually upkeep it well and keep costs low.

And into this scheme when investment in new technology is needed, you then could have open meetings and plans on how the state / gov money is to be used, instead of going into the black hole of utility companies that are dramatically inefficient and corrupt.

"In the pharmaceutical sector, at first I thought researchers and doctors were admirable; then there were the executives, who sometimes did bad things. The worst, I thought, were the sales reps: they drank and even slept with doctors to get them to do the wrong thing. In the end, I completely reversed that moral hierarchy.

Almost all industry whistleblowers were sales reps. They earn less and have the least education, but the greatest moral fibre."

Supposedly is pulling extreme weight. Can't remember the source but I remember reading a case where the city council thought there was one data agreement and Flock implementing broad sharing across all government agencies.

Austerity is not the answer.

Austerity is what got France in this mess in the first place + the Euro.

This movie has already happened in Greece.

Greece's former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on the European economic policy during the Euro crisis:

"When I met Christine Lagarde for the first time — she was the managing director of the International Monetary Fund at the time, before she moved over to the presidency of the European Central Bank — she astounded me, because she was extremely sympathetic to my analysis of what had gone wrong and why the austerity programs could not work.

She said, “Of course, Yanis, they cannot work — you’re right.” She actually criticized me from a position to the left of my own thinking because she said that I was being too modest and too moderate in what I was demanding on behalf of my people.

However, she then added immediately, “But Yanis, you have to understand that we have put a lot of political capital into this program, and your career and mine both depend on going along with it.” "

On the Euro: “Look, we created the euro in a terrible way. The architecture was as if we had designed it in order to fail. It was clear from the very beginning. Think about it. We created a central bank for twenty countries. The central bank didn’t have a treasury, and there were twenty treasuries that didn’t have a central bank.”

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/07/12/jacobins-on-the-le...

Ah, so this one of the reasons why in 2026 every single app / software suite / et al takes 2+ seconds to load, is slow and buggy, and overall a pain to use.

Since software is in some ways information + machine a near infinite amount can be created. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.

Laws are laughable in the face of capital. The only reason we have electric cars in the first place is because persons and countries with capital massively invested in new technology.

Laws are the end of the political process, not the beginning.

Case in point, gas taxes just make people grumble and not necessarily switch to electric cars.

You know what doesn't make people grumble? Cheap solar panels / cheap cars that are the result of planned investment on a continent scale, funded by the government through both research and investment grants.

Money is power, and power is political. Passing laws without changing economic policies is how a country goes to irrelevance.

In the modern age one needs a long term investment plan. Without it, the entrenched powers (big oil, etc) exert their enormous influence to keep a country backwards. You need to fight capital power with capital power.

You need a planned economy. It is ironic that in the West we no longer have any competition, just monopolies, thanks to the free hand of the market.

You need a government willing to invest and spend trillions on their policy agendas (clean energy, etc). You need a government that recognizes the enormous power that capital and finance have, and moves to curtail them.

FDR did this, and Wall Street hated him. Post WW2, during Bretton Woods, the conference that would decide the economic fate of the world for 2-3 decades, no banker was allowed to attend.

People have forgotten but Bretton Woods was a planned economy. Fixed exchange rates, fatories told what not to and what to produce. The government intervening to keep the costs of goods to a certain level.

The post war boom was a highly controlled experiment by New Dealers that had lived through the Great Depression and wanted to avoid such a scenario at all costs.

the DNC sabotaged Bernie in 2016 with all their might.

Even if Biden's strategy was serve the super rich, while minimally "throwing the dog a bone" (the average person), not much changed. Sure, he appointed Lina Kahn, but per usual she was also sabotaged within the FTC and outside of it had no support.

The comparison to FDR, who was supremely hated by Wall street, who banned any bankers from attending Bretton Woods, who oversaw the New Deal, etc, etc is laughable.

Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.

Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.

Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.

Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.

And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.

Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.

Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.

There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.

The nation state has never been weaker because it has been defeated by financialization (except in China).

Economics has always played a massive role in our politics.

How did we escape kings and feudalism? International markets opening through technological innovation enabled capital to generate enormous sums of wealth that challenged the old older.

What enabled postwar democracy? The ruling empire, the American, was "democratic", coupled with the destruction of all the wealth of Europe, meaning all the old oligarchs lost a substantial amount of power. Turns out royalists have less power when they don't have the finances to enforce their views.

Political power has also always depended on economic power. And later on, post 1970s, financial power (the private bank's ability to print money for free, something that used to belong solely to the state).

Financial and economic power has totally taken over government power, in many cases in an unholy marriage (as in America). The DMCA, the US forcing its laws down other nation's throats through treaties, etc, were the economic ruling class using the American government to enact their policy decisions for their own benefit.

And now with the internet we are regressing towards feudalism. Apple and Google extract 30% rents from every single mobile software purchase. The lords of old can only dream of such wealth generation through no productive effort of their own. Amazon likewise extracts insane rents from its sellers. Sure, in small pockets, there is resistance, but on a societal scale the commons, the average person, has absolutely been beaten back.

Ignoring all the slop out there, we are seeing AI being sent to reverse engineer, accelerate projects, etc.

According to Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, an open source AI strategy is one way a capitalist economy can avoid the rent trap (platforms being created, monopolizing resources, and extracting ever higher rents from everyone else).

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2026/08/31/ai-is-reviving-chi...

You simply engineer your services to not need contractors... Would it take a ton of capital, intellectual, and cultural investment over the long term? Sure.

But that's the price you pay for security.

I quite like the idea to include quantitative risk.

I think a useful addendum is that I think the government should be in charge of testing very common combinations (ie the bread example).

It would get expensive real quick for everyone otherwise.

It's unfortunate that its a bit fragmented but there are Android / iOS complements as well - respectively keepassDX and keepassium.

Is not a natural language (NL) proof a demonstration of mastery and understanding?

If you understand the Lean, then you can create a NL proof. The LLM clearly doesn't understand the Lean code it produced.

Search is super valuable.

Google managed to monetize the everyday person's searches, but at the detriment of everyone that wanted to get nontrivial work done that needs in depth search.

Lots of institutions want quality search. They could index high value things, and sell them directly to businesses, universities, etc.

Adam Smith was writing in the 1770s. At the time, only ~5% of the economy was capitalist. The rest was feudal, where lords owned the land and extracted rents.

Going from a feudal system to a capitalist system was great. All of a sudden people got payed wages, the creation of capital (productive goods) was incentivized. It created a much more dynamic economy.

What we are seeing now is a transition from capitalism to technofeudalism. You no longer buy things, you rent them from corporations that have much more power than you.

Additionally, the giant platforms (youtube, facebook, et al), are like a feudal lord's lands: people post / create content mostly for free, the lord extracts rents from the society (ads, etc). The many have no power, the lords get to organize their platforms however they want, prices rise because of the advertising spend, so even if you don't use facebook you bear the burden.

The entire point of anti-trust is to ensure a capitalist system doesn't transition back into a feudal one.

I do think that MoEs change the dynamics a bit.

No one is running cpu-only inference anymore. Deepseek flash / Qwen flash next et al only need ~12-24 gb of VRAM for the active experts, so anyone with a decent gpu + lots of RAM + server cpu can run them at okay speeds.

Or one can also run Strix Halo / DGX spark / Apple. They handle MoEs well and use normal (not HBM) ram.

some benchmarks from locallama:

Deepseek V4: "~25t/s decode at full quant, no speculative decoding, 2x3090 (only one being used for this model) + 9684x w/ 12 channel ddr5 4800, latest llama.cpp"

"Getting about 300 tk/sec pp and 23 tk/sec decode on Mac M3 Ultra 256 GB. Using original full precision model weights."

Qwen-Flash-Next: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wom3fe/qwen_38...

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vcaztx/what_sp...

In the age of nix + LLMs, other distros through distrobox, brew on Linux, and virtual machines as a last resort its pretty hard to not be able to get the software you need.

not all atomic distros allow an easy nix install.

[Book] was written by humans, perhaps many that didn't get credit.

As such, why do you care if book is written by machine?

??????????

Are the two scenarios not completely different?

"[An LLM] can fill out the details from a high-level schematic, which is probably, at best, what the author was doing with other team members."

If this is what you think writing is then why ever read a book at all? Just read the summary.

There is a concerted attack on the teaching profession, that's why education is terrible.

Teachers at the middle / high school level are not allowed to fail kids anymore. Parents are extremely litigious in America, suing schools over every little thing. Admins don't want to deal with that + their school's funding is tied to attendance / outcomes, so together they pressure the teachers to lower their standards.

Add into this the tech ologopoly trying to get kids hooked on their products young, pushing for chromebooks and google classroom when there have been numerous studies showing handwriting is important for retaining information.

The quality of student (on average) has also decreased thanks to tech. On average, kids are watching brainrot while their parents are trying to make ends meet, instead of reading or educating themselves.

Teaching is a thankless job. You have lots of unpaid hours (teachers need to prep lessons outside of school time, need to grade papers outside of school time, etc). I think a lot of people also severely underestimate the effort needed to keep 30 rambunctious kids on track. It truly drains you.

Given all this, there is no surprise at the outcomes.

Define cheaply.

Sub 200 is immediately off the table but a refurbished pixel last time I checked was about $400 post tax. They have long (7 years now) support windows now which is also a bonus.

Description:

"The desktop interface has remained fundamentally unchanged for over two decades, relying on legacy paradigms that haven't scaled to meet new modern needs.

Industry leaders like Apple and Microsoft are too deeply entrenched in their established ecosystems to risk radical shifts. While the Linux community has shown some appetite for experimentation, much of it has nibbled at the edges such as focusing on tweaking window management.

This talk reflects my lifetime experience as a UX designer at Apple and Google and how the deepest innovations happen at the most mundane level: richer input, better data flows, and breaking out of our 2d windowing prisons. Ironically, the open source nature of Linux and specifically KDE provides a unique opportunity to break free from these legacy constraints." - Scott Jenson

every GPU since the 20 series (2018) ships with Risc-V.

It's what enables their "open" kernel modules. All the talking to the hardware stuff is now done by the Risc-v core.

The government could pass laws that prevent advertising becoming mass surveillance and stalking.

Ideally we get some international cooperation and get an international clearing currency, and don't end up with the reserve currency being tied to a specific nation again.

The different blocs could already start experimenting with this: the Euro could be used for currency exchange within partner nations while bringing back national currencies, BRICS could setup their own currency for trade between themselves, etc.

These problems are not new, they were the same questions we had post WW2, and some good ideas from that era may have been squashed by the ruling power of the time (namely the US), but their merit remains.

http://www.sofer.com/blog/keynes-on-the-balance-of-trade.htm...

https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/yanis-varouf...