In a sense, you may be correct, but who cares? The majority of people voted against xenophobia, some people are still super xenophobic and will continue to try to implement xenophobic policies, and the majority of people will keep voting against them.

Scary future, where we'll all end up increasingly dependent on AI models, but those models will hide knowledge and refuse to help with any manner of things that the people in power don't want the rest of humanity to access.

Salary of $150k in Austin requires $282k in San Francisco to be equivalent. Source: https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/austin-tx/san-fran...

To make sure that wasn't an anomaly or misrepresentative, I also checked https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator for Austin vs San Jose and got similar numbers: $150k in Austin requires $288k in San Jose.

You can argue that the Bay Area wins on weather, politics, startup ecosystem or whatever, but comparing taxes or cost of living is not where California wins.

Being in the first handful of non-founder startup employees at some seed stage company is probably not the most lucrative thing, but once companies are post Series A, as far as I can tell they tend to be comp competitive with bigger companies.

Obviously not many companies can compete with Meta or Jane Street for salaries, but that's true whether you're talking about a startup or the majority of the S&P 500 companies.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

Imagine you liked something, then realized that thing was bad and you didn't want to do it anymore. Then somebody offered you an alternative without the ethical problems.

I ate meat for like 30 years, then as I learned more about the realities of the meat industry in the US (suffering of animals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution of air and water, exploitation and harm to workers, etc) I decided I couldn't buy meat anymore. I like having burgers and sausages and such, and Beyond meat gives me something that tastes good, is easy to cook, fits into a healthy diet.

People born on reservations are US citizens, with full rights and privileges to live and work anywhere in the US they choose, as well as access to capital to start businesses within the reservation (subject to regulations from within the tribal government).

The dependency on federal funds is true in many cases, but some tribes operate such profitable casinos or other businesses that being born a descendant of the tribe is akin to being born a descendant of a Rockefeller or Kennedy.

Aren't we already?

The current administration has torched relationships with essentially every allied country except Israel. From Toronto to Taipei, and across NATO and BRICS, people see the US as a chaotic bully to be dealt with, not a friend or role model.

I don't think that "other countries won't like it" carries any significance at all to the people in power.

Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k

Airfare, hotel rooms, now even groceries will have their price adjusted based on ability to pay. Getting a raise will have no impact on one's life, as all prices will automatically increase to absorb the additional income.

I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.

They don't sound like AI. AI sounds like them, because this is exactly the type of content that the LLMs were trained on and tuned to replicate.

About 1 in 5 American households are millionaires.

"Millionaire" as a label is mostly describing mundane middle-aged, middle-class people who have spent a few decades paying down a mortgage and saving 5-10% of their salary into their 401k. As a group, they pay both the highest percent of their income in taxes and their taxes are the largest share of the federal budget. It shouldn't be used to mean "rich" the way it would have in the 1960s.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?

Hasn't means tested social welfare basically been proven to be bad in every way, regardless of political or economic belief system used to analyze it?

There are lots of positive things that can be done to improve affordable housing - removing impediments to housing density like allowing multiple units on a lot, increasing building height limits, removing parking spot requirements, removing requirements for extra staircases, lowering property taxes, and removing bureaucratic approvals that are full of secret bribery and favortism.

But just stealing money from one set of people to give someone else below-market rent doesn't fix the systemic issues at all, and creates perverse incentives where people are locked into semi-poverty to keep their means tested housing.

Society is not made better by someone refusing a higher-paying job because it would mean they no longer qualified for their apartment.

I suspect a whole lot of TV fails both parts of this test. The audience doesn't understand and there is only a little bit of truth and a lot of simplification.

If you want to incentive domestic reindustrialization, you do it with things like the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS act or the "Green New Deal" where congress lays out clear sets of rules in law with a mixture of tax incentives, loan programs and spending to give investors and corporations confidence to make decade-long commitments of capital to major projects.

The richest 1% own half the wealth in the world and the gap is getting wider. Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million. (Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-o...)

So yes, some of the wealth is going to your retirement account. But for every penny going to a middle-class professional workers retirement, there's about a thousand dollars going to some hedge fund manager or the trust fund of the grandson of some robber baron who got rich a hundred years ago.