https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL153166006Q - consumer credit indeed rises from 1984 to present, but from ~17% to a peak of ~25% to the present ~22%. This seems to be more than adequately compensated by real household income growth over the same period. Even if we take the peak value of ~25% that leaves real household income after subtracting consumer credit higher than in 1984. But note that this series isn't debt service payments, it's credit stock. It doesn't make much sense to subtract. Unfortunately we don't have consumer credit payments going back this far.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=TDSP%2CMDSP%2CCDSP%2CF... - it is difficult to find debt service payments going back to 1980. Interestingly the measures relating to debt service payments appear to be basically flat or even slightly negative over this time period, though the consumer debt service series only goes back to 2005.

So to my eyes it is difficult to support the notion that income-minus-debt-service has deflated over the past fifty years. I also find it difficult to take this data and state the stronger conclusion that half the population requires consumer debt to afford basic necessities but some fraction did not 50 years ago. The median appears to be better off.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

- I'm open to seeing information from an AI (I'm fine with an LLM "teaching me") so long as it is high quality. That does require human inspection.

- I've seen a related bit about AI-written emails where the commenter would rather see the prompt. I agree. As a software engineer, I like reproducibility. If an AI outputs an interesting result, show me the "source" (i.e. the model, effort, prompt, etc.). I wouldn't say no to an added one-liner summarizing a long response.

- In the end this will be a difficult attitude to prosecute as it boils down to a Chinese-room-style preference. You want to hear from some being on the other end of a labyrinth of transmission lines and logic gates. As language models continue to develop, what goes on inside the room will be difficult to verify.

- The day may come where, rather than people passing AI off as their own thought, they will pass off their own thought as AI. "If I wanted a human to teach me (thank you, no), I would ask a human." The coming generations may value AI's opinion much more highly, whether that's right or not. And people may want to usurp that credibility for themselves.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

https://old.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1qcy40d/growth_in_u...

It's nice to be wealthy, but growth is happening for everyone. But as an overarching point, you appear to be arguing against a strawman. No one as far as I can tell in this thread is arguing for the status quo, especially regarding climate policy. They're just arguing against the notion that humanity's lot can be improved by nuking the economy in order to save the climate.

I understand that it is a lot more boring to discuss measured market interventions than eating the rich (incidentally, how will eating the rich solve the environmental problems of urbanization?). But it will be a lot more productive assuming one's starting goal is truly the environment rather than eating the rich.

But the commitment does not exist at present. No one wanted this apart from a few hawks and the Israeli security establishment.

While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.

You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.

So you don't know what it should do, you may not even know what you would do, you don't necessarily know what's happening, and can't predict what will happen. How do you align that?

Seems like these overly sensitive filters are responding to this difficulty.