If I had Chris Cornell’s vocal range.

Every hour gained from daycare is lost to an hour of illness. What is the point?

Something terminator got wrong is there will be tons of humans eager to fight on the side of the machines

Despite Hollywood stereotypes, the fall of a civilization is never a fast process; it unfolds over centuries in a ragged downward arc interrupted by many periods of stabilization and partial recovery. In every case, the tactics that yield stability and renewed strength in the short term accelerate the decline in the longer run. In every case, what used to be normal slips quietly from sight behind a flurry of temporary measures, evasive maneuvers, and cheering or raging crowds.

You are not going to be able to upload your mind in 15 years

Tom didn't explain his second assertion, but it's important so I'm going to do it. China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn't have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them. China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running. Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it's pretty much game over. As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties. Then there's the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war - you can compare photographs over time and see that it's sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country's most industrially and agriculturally productive region. The Chinese haven't fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist. I could go on. But I think I've made Tom's statements sufficiently understandable already.

My timeline for the past day

In a high trust society, your trustworthy neighbor looks after the kids. Your trustworthy plumber gives you a fair deal. Your trustworthy politician tells you his true opinions. I know standards have fallen so low, but high trust isn’t just about not killing and robbing people.

Here’s an idea: All the data centers get built at Fort Meade and are exclusively accessible by it, the US super-duper god machine gets built there by either uniformed military personnel or by contractors staffed exclusively by native-born citizens with US citizen families with TS/SCI clearances, and the whole system is air-gapped except when the president authorizes its deployment, according to carefully limited protocols, and then only subject to rigorous security precautions devised by trusted developers. No? - no takers? Then stop pretending this is about China.

It’s been a terrific experiment showing that Americans aren’t universally racist and xenophobic, we just strongly dislike a lot of foreign cultures and countries because of the behavior of their citizens

Cormac’s theme of incomprehensible, unstoppable evil that blends into the ordinary is supposed to be funny.

But this has been the case with all common sense positions unfortunately. The "right" is not so much an ideologically aligned group than the eclectic remainder that by and large resists the anti-human death cult that is the left. Often for their own reasons.

The ideology of the people trying to build Artificial Superintelligence is more bizarre, creepy, & inhumane than normal people can possibly imagine. They arent kidding. When they tell you what they think, believe them.

I’m fairly sure at this point that Trump is our Gorbachev, trying to reform a system that may be past saving. I may be wrong, but that’s what it looks like from here. The fact that there’s a serious effort under way right now to call a constitutional convention in the US, backed by 28 states so far (it needs 38), has me wondering how long the US as currently constituted is going to be around.

I would be very happy if all countries stopped developing AI. However, GPU nonproliferation will be ten times harder than nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear nonproliferation mostly failed. Right now, the only realistic path is to get so far ahead that our enemies give up.

A gun vastly increases your sense of agency. You don’t even have to use it or think about it, easy mental perk to get.

You know who is on this coin? Lucky, the Leprechaun. He controls the charms, the hearts, stars, magically delicious horseshoes. But he doesn’t decide who gets the luck. The coin does. And now it's here. And it's either heads, or a leprechaun. And you have to say.

“A lot of Hessians on the naughty list.” *American cheers and laughter*

This is my copy of @charlesmurray’s Taking Religion Seriously. There are many like it, but this one is water damaged because Amazon threw it on my driveway in the heavy rain.

We’ll use a club so it’s less gory. “You… think that blunt weapons don’t splash blood everywhere?”