Netizen: 28: AI

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

28: AI

The Convergence Age: Ten Forces Reshaping Humanity’s Future
Kalkiism: The Economic And Spiritual Blueprint For An Age Of Abundance
The Last Age: Lord Kalki, Prophecy, and the Final War for Peace
The Protocol of Greatness (novel)
A Reorganized UN: Built From Ground Up
The Drum Report: Markets, Tariffs, and the Man in the Basement (novel)
World War III Is Unnecessary
Grounded Greatness: The Case For Smart Surface Transit In Future Cities
The Garden Of Last Debates (novel)
Deported (novel)
Empty Country (novel)
Trump’s Default: The Mist Of Empire (novel)

Is Elon Worth It? Is he a net positive for humanity or a net negative? ........ Tesla’s profit fell 37 percent in the third quarter. Yet Elon Musk is demanding a pay package of $1 trillion. ....... A trillion dollars is hard to envision. It’s a thousand billion. It’s a million million. It’s almost the entire GDP of Indonesia, a country of 284 million people. It’s the annual output of North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia put together. It’s close to Tesla’s entire current market value............ Musk is moving the national goal posts for CEO pay all the way to Mars, at a time when American CEOs are already getting paid far more than they’re worth by any reasonable accounting of their contributions to the U.S. economy. ........ But he’s already Tesla’s largest shareholder. He’s raking in billions. He’s the richest person on the planet. If he’s not already adequately motivated to stay focused on Tesla, why the hell does his board believe a trillion dollars will do the trick? ........... his makeover of X into a cesspool of right-wing bigotry. ......... Or Musk could be distracted by his SpaceX business, which is so behind on its moon landing contract that Trump is reopening bidding on it, causing Musk to go on an epithet-laden social media tirade. .......... I naively assumed that once he stopped running Trump’s DOGE and went back to the private sector, Musk would pose less of a hazard to humanity. I was wrong.

The Hunger Games Begin 40 million Americans are about to lose food stamps .......... unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday. ........ Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? The Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, also has the ability to maintain funding for a while by shifting other funds around. But Donald Trump has — quite possibly illegally — told the department not to tap those funds. ........ passing legislation to keep food aid flowing would require that Mike Johnson, the speaker, call the House back into session – something which he refuses to do. While we don’t know for sure the reason behind Johnson’s refusal, there is widespread speculation that it’s to avoid swearing in the newly elected Arizona congresswoman Adelina Grijalva, who would supply the crucial vote needed to force an overall vote on releasing the Epstein files. It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation. ........

many Republicans simply assumed that SNAP beneficiaries are disproportionately Democrats.

........... the program is most important to overwhelmingly white rural counties that strongly supported Trump. ........ Owsley County in Kentucky. The county is 96 percent white, and last year it cast 88 percent of its votes for Trump. Also, 37 percent of residents are on SNAP. ......... savage cuts to SNAP are a key feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed earlier this year – cuts that were scheduled to happen after the midterm elections, not a few days from now. ........... the great majority of SNAP recipients can’t work: 40 percent are children; 18 percent are elderly; 11 percent are disabled. Furthermore, a majority of recipients who are capable of working do work. They are the working poor: their jobs just don’t pay enough, or offer sufficiently stable employment, to make ends meet without aid. .............. We have overwhelming empirical, statistical evidence that SNAP, by improving the lives of young children, is an extraordinarily effective way of investing in the future. ............ A pilot version of the modern food stamp program began in 1961, when an unemployed coal miner and his wife used food stamps to buy a can of pork and beans. The program was rolled out in earnest in 1964, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the program didn’t immediately go into effect nationwide. Instead, it was gradually rolled out geographically over the course of a decade. ............ Children whose families received SNAP benefits grew up to become healthier, more productive adults than children whose families didn’t receive benefits. Spending money to help families with children is an extremely high-return investment in the nation’s future. ........... In fact, the evidence for large economic benefits from food stamps is far stronger than the evidence for payoffs from investment in physical infrastructure like roads, bridges and the power grid, although I favor those investments too. ..........
the evidence that helping families with children is good for economic growth is infinitely better than the evidence for the efficacy of tax cuts for the rich, a central plank of conservative dogma — because there is no evidence that tax cuts boost growth.