I think more than FIRE people should just focus on FI. You still have to do something with your day after becoming financially independent and a job is still one of many good ways to contribute to the community even if you don't technically need one. So retiring is an option but not the only one.
On the other hand it remains quite confusing that after centuries of capital achieving vastly better results than labour people still keep going for labouring as their primary strategy. Building up a strong income-generating capital base is just common sense and it is an extremely good idea to have enough that you could technically avoid working if it made sense.
The operation in Venezuela could be characterised as an enormous success in the sense that it didn't seem to do anything and therefore was a big improvement on most times the US activates its military. But it was still a misstep in the sense that it keeps US aggression top of mind without achieving very much.
> So I guess our national security is significantly at risk for the next six months?
That does seem to be what Hegseth is arguing, yes; and that is presumably his justification for doing something drastic here. Although I assume he is lying or wrong.
And as a cynic, let me just add that the image of someone going to the political overseers of the US military with arguments about being "effective" or "altruistic" is just hilarious given their history over the last ~40 years.
The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.
A realistic dynamic is the old people are comfortable with the general problems and have positioned themselves to benefit from them. Indeed, they solved the general problems that troubled them in their youth with political activism in their middle age. The young people have different political needs that require general problems to be solved.
Also young people have a terrible track record of actually identifying problems, they are pretty clueless in the main.
> So we don’t have professional legislatures with long-term electability incentives or leadership goals
Raises an interesting question of who is less popular, the Californian government or the US Senate. The experiments with long-term professional legislatures have generally not been very promising - rather than statesmen it tends to be people with a certain limpet-like staying power and a limpet-like ability to learn from their mistakes. In almost all cases people's political solution is just "well we didn't try my idea hard enough" and increasing their tenure in office doesn't really help the overall situation.
The interesting middle ground might be to prohibit anyone from serving more than two contiguous terms in the Senate or four in the House. Then if you've done your two terms in the Senate, you can run for a House seat, do three terms there and then your old Senate seat is back up for reelection. Except your old Senate seat now has a new incumbent who is only on their first term and you're running as the challenger. Meanwhile there are more seats in the House than the Senate, so if you hit your limit in the House you could go work for an administrative agency or run for a state-level office for two years and then come back, but then you're the challenger again.
The result is that you can stay as long as people keep voting you back in, but you lose the incumbency advantage and end up with a higher turnover rate without ending up with a 100% turnover rate. And you make them learn how other parts of the government work. It wouldn't hurt a bit to see long-term members of Congress do a two-year stint in an administrative agency once in a while.
Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.
I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.
The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
>The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
I’m not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but I’m going to challenge the notion that this etymological connection carries meaning. The word comes from Roman Senate, and in that context in Latin “senior” really meant people with higher status rather than age. Latin is full of these weird double meanings. Compare to seigneur in French or señor in Spanish. Also, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.
This is an interesting idea. Would be curious to hear from someone who thinks this is a bad idea (why).
edit: I see the "term limits are anti-democratic" takes elsewhere in the comments, so I guess let me narrow the above ask to "someone who isn't opposed to term limits, but thinks this idea is flawed."
Fill the arena with HR ladies and have them do a battle royal to produce a half decent set of interview questions.
Put the electables in isolation cells fromwhere they one by one end up on the Tee Vee, give voters an app with AYE, NEY and Uhh? The questions are red by the winning HR lady but also appear on the app.
The applicant writes the fizzbuzz etc etc
Then, after the job interview, we give the job to the most satisfying candidate!
It's not necessary but I would also add a series of certificates and diplomas for the voter to show they actually have some kind of idea what the job involves. The level 1 certificate should be supper simple and easy to create. It will grant you 0.1 extra vote power. There could be as many levels as we want but to grow beyond [say] 50 votes should require a mythical effort impossible to attain for 99% while we aim to reserve the right to cast 5000 votes for 1 to 5 people with supper human abilities.
The top 20 should have to explain their AYE's and their NAY's to the Tee Vee audience.
Fill the arena with all the HR ladies, and then feed the winner to a lion. After that you might actually find someone capable of interviewing an applicant.
The Senate is wildly unpopular, but individual Senators get re-elected overwhelmingly. The problem is always other people's Senators.
Everyone would like to term limit other people's politicians but they like experience for their own. The length of terms can't resolve that one way or the other.
With the Supreme Court we tried eliminating terms altogether, in the hopes that it would give people a chance to bond away from the necessity of appealing to the public. That just pushed the problem back to getting the most ideologically committed judges on the bench... through the Senators.
I haven't heard any structural solution to the problem of Americans just not liking each other.
Bold of you to assume any aspect of the California State legislature is visible enough to be more or less popular. People at least pay attention to what the US Senate does, and you know that no matter how the next election goes, the US Senate as one body is unlikely to go very far off the deep end in one direction or the other.
Deciding whether A is an X or a Y is a really basic part of why we're all communicating. Suspicion of em dashes is one thing, but once you start getting nervous on seeing "It’s not X. It’s Y." then you're just going to get paranoid.
The fundamentals of an LLM is to statistically match their output with the corpus. The tics they have are really common in natural human usage too.
I didn't reply to the comments talking about the AI tells. I replied to the comment that is making a bad argument. It doesn't matter to me whether the article is or isn't LLM assisted.
> Is the not X it's Y in large frequency not an AI tell?
I doubt it. The AIs are statistical models, if they've picked up a habit of saying "not X it's Y" then that is probably the most likely thing for humans to say when they are explaining something. The whole training process is about making what the AI says statistically indistinguishable from what humans do; the only way to pick up that it is an AI is either because the model is badly fitted (which, in fairness, many are, they're still working out the ideal weights) or because it isn't grounded in reality. It isn't reasonable to say "oh this looks like AI" based on small phrases like that, AIs use the same phrases humans tend to. It is where they should be doing the best job of fitting in with us.
"This uses really common phrasing ergo it is AI" is a bad case to be trying to make.
And Asia is mostly peaceful right now while war has returned to Europe on a scale not seen in 50 years. Those crazy Chinese, eh? Massive failure of their foreign policy establishment. Total inability to engage with Russia.
> and undermining EU institutions
If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.
> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...
Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.
And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Slavery was already being abolished in the West when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. But what was notable was that Adam Smith was really the first to make a strong case and prediction that it was not just the moral thing to do, but would lead to prosperity.
Adam Smith also differentiated between different levels of slavery - that Roman slavery was different than Serfdom was different from chattel slavery in the US.
It's worth noting that Adam Smith did not think total abolition was possible. One of his concerns about free markets was that people deeply desired control of other people, and slavery would increase as a byproduct of wealth.
And effectively it did: many people are kept in their place by the combined pressure points of debt and employment to stay (barely) afloat.
This is of course nothing compared to the cruelty of real slavery but the effect is much the same, a lot of people are working their asses of for an upper class that can ruin their lives at the drop of a hat. That there are no whips involved is nice but it also clearly delineated who was the exploiter and who were the exploited. That's a bit harder to see today.
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.
For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
True, but if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves, it's also worth remembering that most accounts of those regimes weren't written by the victors of a war that saw the other sides slavery practices as justification for said war.
> if your point is that most slavery regimes throughout history were less awful for the slaves
Not at all. The fact that we have practically zero first-hand accounts from the slaves of antiquity speaks volumes to their treatment. My point is on scale (and with that, the institution's effect on the societies that hosted it).
That’s partly true, but it’s also the case that medieval Europe didn’t have any convenient sources of slaves. Conquests had dried up, Europe was effectively surrounded by stronger neighbors, and instead of being able to take their neighbors as slaves many of their neighbors were taking Europeans as slaves.
That didn’t change until the Age of Sail opened up new frontiers and the wheel turned again.
> Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point,
Except that of course it wasn't.
> and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said.
And many smart people do.
> There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild.
Yes, such as the one that wealth is not very good as a context free metric for societal success.
> With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick.
You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
> And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.
Yes, they relied on the misery of others to drive their former wealth, but they are not the important people in that story. The important people are the ones that were no longer slaves.
And never mind that many of those former slave owners did just fine economically afterwards, after all, they already were fantastically wealthy so they just switched 'business models' and still made money hand over fist.
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast.
and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.
> You missed that bit about the war. If not for that who knows where we'd be today.
It's not just a war. The British Empire declared for moral reasons slavery illegal, and slavers could be hunted for bounty like pirates. The only place that remained in the Empire with slavery was India, because the British felt that the Indian culture could not be disentangled from slavery.
> There was a time when people wanted to dig tunnels with nukes
The article seems to be about mining rather than tunnelling.
And the issue with the idea being? We also dig using explosives, there isn't an in-principle problem. Reading the wiki article it looks like the yields were excessive, but at the end of the day mining involves the use of things that go boom. It is easy to imagine small nukes having a place in the industry.
See the 'rationale' section of the article. The point of it was to rebrand nuclear weapons as multi-use 'peaceful' tools and drive acceptance for nuclear weapons programs. Which was a pretty standard tactic of military projects during the cold war.
> ...was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist...
That covers everyone. Especially and including the rationalists. Part of being highly intelligent is being a bit weird because the habits and beliefs of ordinary people are those you'd expect of people with ordinary intelligence.
Anyone involved in small-time investing should be considering that they aren't rational when setting their strategy. Larger investment houses do what they can but even then every so often will suffer from group-think episodes.
On the other hand it remains quite confusing that after centuries of capital achieving vastly better results than labour people still keep going for labouring as their primary strategy. Building up a strong income-generating capital base is just common sense and it is an extremely good idea to have enough that you could technically avoid working if it made sense.
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