It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, are total garbage.
One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
Not sure I buy this. In my mind, dissolving this state relationship would be renouncing your citizenship as an individual.
Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.
Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.
I think that the point of your post, which is that our morals and ethics are often illogical and don't stand up to scrutiny, is getting lost in the debate over your example.
What are you even talking about? The right to self-determination is literally Article 1 of the UN charter. Nations are governed by power relationships, not philosophical ones, so they ignore the charter, but you aren't proposing anything novel or groundbreaking in any way. It is, in fact, the very first sacred right enshrined in international law, and has been for over 70 years.
In practice, Americans supported their own independence, and they support independence for eg. Taiwan, but they don't support independence for the Confederacy because that would entail weakening their own nation. To the extent that anyone will try to rationalise the American Civil War, they might reach for slavery, but a philosophical belief that political union is absolute and nobody can declare independence is not it; at most that's just a flimsy post-facto justification for the already-decided fact that states must not allowed to secede for power reasons, and this is evident from the fact they don't condemn their own revolution and advocate for return to British governance.
Very self-serving that you believe superintelligent AI is going to tell people your ideas are the best ones, incidentally.
> What possible use could there be for doing this?
The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.
There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.
If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.
The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.
True, but only when you consider value as a combination of risk, reward, status, etc which is weighted by an individual’s preferences.
One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk. So if you have any risk tolerance you’re probably better off using that effort elsewhere.
>One reason why doctor is more popular is the process for becoming one is high effort but low risk.
Disagree completely that becoming a doctor is low risk. The amount of residency spots is capped and is smaller than the number of people graduating from medical school. Every year thousands of MDs are prevented from going to residency and thus prevented from practicing medicine, even though they graduated from medical school.
>In 2025, 9,541 applicants went unmatched, including 2,409 soon-to-be graduates of United States schools awarding Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.
Compared to what? Every other high status high paying career has less defined criteria for success. Where else can I sign up for a program to make 500k?
You just have to do well in medical school (an artificial program with stated requirements) and you’ll make it.
Are the career outcomes for those with medical degrees bad? Don’t they have a ton to options? What’s the risk?
The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town.
Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.
> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn
I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).
The $175T number is unfair because it treats Social Security and Medicare/aid as a liability instead of the service that they are. You might as well say the US is in infinite debt, because we'll always be paying something for our military every year, so infinity years * any dollars = infinite debt.
Also: All of those numbers you use to scare people are way, way off.
The NATO treaty says that we have to maintain our ability to resist armed attack, so there is some minimum. And we’ve made public commitments to spend at least 2% of GDP (though that isn’t part of the treaty).
SS and Medicare aren’t debts either in that sense. Congress can reduce benefits if they please.
In Flemming v. Nestor SCOTUS ruled that SS benefits are not guaranteed contractual rights but are instead statutory entitlements that Congress may modify or revoke.
Surely NATO has enough competent people to know that the biggest and only threat remains the USA and pretty much any othed conflict is a direct result of provocation or invasion by the US, right? Or do we all watch Jarhead 2-5 on repeat until all we can say is OORAH
Germany is in the middle of a massive military build up because the primary threat they’re concerned with is Russia and they’re worried that the US won’t back them up anymore.
This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.
The U.S. Treasury publishes a daily total of the national debt, which as of May 2026 was $39 trillion.
a little less than half of the total national debt is owed to the "Federal Reserve and intragovernmental holdings"
In December 2020, foreigners held 33% ($7 trillion out of $21.6 trillion) of publicly held U.S. debt
39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring in, that's what is meant by "unfunded liabilities".
That's not debt, though. Congress can just declare SS/Medicare null and void, or change the amounts, etc. They can't do that with actual Treasury debt.
If you signed up for some expensive monthly subscription, you don't need to do the math about how much it would cost if you keep paying it every month until you die 60 years from now and then freak out about how big that number is. You can just...cancel the subscription.
It goes beyond that. $175 trillion includes all future entitlement spending not debt, it’s crazy to call all future entitlement spending for every living person debt. By that metric there’s essentially no such thing as a solvent government anywhere in the world and there never has been in modern history.
Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want. Federal debt is not like credit card debt. Debt is a product that the US Government sells. Me, being a big corporation or human, go to the USG and say "I need somewhere to park my money that is safeish from inflation". The USG sells me debt at X.Y% interest. The money now generates safe interest, which means its safeish from inflation. A world where the USG "repays the debt" is a world where this essential product is no longer available.
High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is super-counterintuitive, but the debt has little to do with the deficit. We could run a surplus and still be in the same level of debt (in fact, this would be a tremendous place to be). We could run a deficit and have no debt (just print money, duh). The decisions that go into column A generally do not impact the decisions our leaders have to make in column B, though there are of course convenient relationships between the two.
> Repayment isn't a goal that anyone in the system should reasonably want.
Repayment to $0 isn't a reasonable goal but there are a lot of problems with your argument.
The biggest question is about sustainability. Is the debt-to-GDP ratio stable/manageable and is the interest rate on the debt below the economy's growth rate? If the answer is no, you have a problem.
> High levels of debt only signals high demand for this product.
This is backwards. The amount of debt is set mostly by government supply, which is driven by deficits. The demand signal is the price, which in this case is the yield. If the demand was high, yields would drop as the amount of debt grew. Instead, we have rising debt and rising yields, which means supply outstrips demand.
The US no longer has a AAA sovereign credit rating for a reason. When Moody's (the last agency to downgrade the US) stripped the US of its AAA rating, it cited "rising debt and interest costs 'that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns.'"
The biggest issue at this point isn't the principal, it's the interest. Interest is the fastest-growing line item in the federal budget. It's almost at $1 trillion/year now and expected to nearly double by 2035. You either have to cut from other spending or borrow more to pay the interest.
Your comment implies that this doesn't have a real cost, which is silly.
Government debt isn't like personal debt or business debt. The treasury can choose to not honur it, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Of course they're not going to find a market to sell more debt to after that, but wouldn't you say they already have enough?
No sympathy for people and institutions who make deals with the devil and expect the government to forever enslave taxpayers to honour those deals and pay back with interest.
As mentioned defaults do shockingly little to change future funding. Its been years since i looked but its something like a few years of “cool down” on issuance and a few points of coupon premium. The economist has done some great, very accessible, articles on this over the years.
Second, its critical that treasury bonds are denominated in USD. The us gov controls the monetary policy and can choose to inflate away the debt over time. This is in contrast to EM debt where they get trapped with foreign denominated bonds. See also the tensions around EU debt, greece, etc.
The way I understand my money market settlement account at vanguard, is that it's all, or nearly all, treasuries. Treasury not honoring government debt would be the worst bank failure in the history of the world.
It would be bad for you, but you also deserve that because you have made a deal with the government to enslave young people to pay taxes on their labour in order to pay interest to you. Loosing all your investments in a bond default would be a very fitting consequence for what you have done so wickedly.
I am one of those young people laboring and paying taxes. It's not clear to me what I should do with the surplus of my labor that is available to me, that would be acceptable to a worldview like you seem to be espousing.
Western debt is one of those problems you look at and say “this looks extremely alarming, why is no one panicking?” And then you assume that the elite know better and it must be manageable.
And then one day the consequences finally hit and you’re left reading the news “oh, so it turned out I was right and it was just common sense. Huh.”
US economy is screwed. UK economy is screwed. Neoliberalism killed it.
The reason everyone in politics is so elated by AI is the hope that a huge boost in productivity shrinks the debt as a portion of GDP. Talk about a wing and a prayer.
It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.
The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are:
1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as a money manager: they allow you to make an investment that will hopefully appreciate more quickly than the interest rate. There are many other investments that have this property (e.g. the stock market), but banks won't loan to you to invest in them!
2) A mortgage acts as a forced savings rate: you pay the bank every month, and when you're done after 30 years, you have a large asset. So a large mortgage is (for some people) a good psychological commitment mechanism that imposes financial discipline.
Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, they are mere political artifacts like rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so.
OK, but there are some logistical issues here- let's say Alberta votes to secede and this is somehow legally viable. All of the Albertan voters who didn't want to secede- including the native tribes- could then by your rules vote to secede from Alberta and join back to Canada. It'd be a mess. Towns and counties would split themselves in half, and so on.
What would happen if a landlocked town within Alberta wants to rejoin Canada- how would you handle that?
It's like having to belong to a higher imposed authority (either the original country or the seceded territory) is bad for the individual that doesn't want any of that. If only there was a solution to that problem...
Russia is currently placing Russian citizens in the occupied parts of Ukraine exactly for this reason. If there will ever be a vote whether the Donbas Oblast or the Luhansk Oblast want to rejoin Ukraine, you can bet the vote will be pro Russia.
The huge problem is that geographical borders don't nicely line up with cultural/ethnic/attitude borders. Let's say you let a province (or US state) secede over political/cultural issues. What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride? They're now at a huge risk. Those dissenters might even be persecuted or, at worst, cleansed, depending on the laws of the new seceded country.
So then you say, ok let's do it by county (or whatever the Canadian equivalent is) instead. Same problem. Even within a county-sized area, you're going to have dissenters who are at risk in the new country. Even within a single town. You can't draw geographic borders around and write laws for swiss-cheese-shaped clumpings of individual people.
I live in a pretty "red" area in a "blue" US state. If Team Red decided that half of my state (including my home) was going to secede into their own Red Utopia, my family would legitimately be in fear for our lives. I don't think secession is ever going to be a viable option in the real, polarized world where political beliefs are peanut butter spread across the geography.
> Let's say you let a province (or US state) secede over political/cultural issues. What happens to all of the people who don't want to go along for the ride?
Well, thats politics? The people proposing this are supposed to be considering that. And the people in that position are supposed to be considering that.
Every day there are votes with outcomes people dont want to go along with the ride for. But they do, or they resist, or otherwise.
Politics? Is it? Or is politics a grand word for whining and adults in a perpetual small world? Law, history are at least more grounded as a basis to argue for or against.
Let's not let politics' meaning become so diffuse it's just free speech by another name. Herein "politics" seems to be too inconsequential for a far more consequential result than cycling out party A for B for a few years would have.
I've half joked before that brexit was the only solution Cameron et al saw left because they didnt have a way to hold Brussel's paper pushers to account. Taking your ball and going home is not bold leadership: it's an admission one's argument and solution is weak.
In this case though it's a conflicting view. Let's say 40% of the province don't want to be separated, so they vote to rejoin canada (or form their own thing). Does the now independent Alberta allow it? If not, then why are they allowed to split from Canada? If they do, now this opens up the door for a infinite amount of splits.
Well, it would depend on how the new Alberta is structured. It would be its own country with its own rules. Practically speaking, it would highly depend on whether those 40% are geographically separated from the rest enough to geographically split the new Alberta.
> Well, thats politics? The people proposing this are supposed to be considering that. And the people in that position are supposed to be considering that.
People are very bad at considering stuff like this. Both voters and politicians.
When I left the UK, a former acquaintance was very confused that their support of something they thought was "just politics" led to me having no interest in continuing to talk to them.
I very much doubt that David Cameron or Theresa May expected a newspaper to have a front-page headline calling judges "Enemies of the People"[0], similarly for a half the politicians who have been milkshaked[1].
The area of England that I'm in voted remain, as well as all the other districts around us. It might fracture England (which may not be a bad thing) but I would be fine with southern England joining Scotland.
Yes, also the right to self-determination is an unalienable human right.
I find it sort of fascinating because people really do have a fanaticism about this that they don't have for other political artifacts. Nationalism is a powerful force. And people will special-plead themselves silly arguing why one group should be given self-determinism and others shouldn't, including invoking federal laws, untestable predictions about future events, etc. But when it comes to other politics, they revert back to a globalist position.
On the flip side, separatists are often driven by nationalistic interests as well - look at Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries as fantastic examples of this.
No, not tyranny necessarily. If it's malign morphing into hate speech, racial or genetic seregation, imposing religion, esp. backed up by state power that's a problem. For example, the US has a senate to balance out the house while at the same time California's take on something cannot be rejected out of hand reflexively as tyranny
Yes, and here "Canadians want" is used to say "the people within 100km of the St. Lawrence want". (That's actually part of the problem.)
Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.
AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.
Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.
> AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development.
Not only that, but the Feds typically use their outsized tax revenue from Alberta to “invest” in Quebec to buy votes via propping up unviable businesses, subsidies, outsized proportion of public sector jobs, and federal spending in general.
Hey, the little old lie that Québec, which does get an outsized proportion of the political attention, gets an outsized proportion of the federal money, which it doesn’t.
You can find many examples of specific programs where Québec gets the federal government’s money in incredible amounts. But you add all these programs together and you still come up short per person compared to Ontario. Why?
The only possible way to come to a conclusion as wrong as yours is by looking at gross instead of net federal spending by province.
When you consider the tiny detail of actually contributing to federal finances, in the past 20 years alone Quebec has received ~360 billion more than it contributed, whereas Ontario has received ~232 billion LESS than it contributed.
Nearly half a trillion difference between the two, and nothing to do with the auto industry whatsoever.
Before you rag Quebec too much, note that they are at least practicing being independent. They maintain a police force, they have foreign services. They collect their own taxes. See what Alberta thinks when they have to pay their own way rather than letting Canada handle things. While they rent the ramp I doubt they’re handling their pensions. QC runs its own pension.
And all the First Nations treaties are with the Crown and predate Alberta.
Where do we draw the line of “people want to change them”?
I’m 100% with the political philosopher Bertrand Russel on this topic: borders are arbitrary, and a benevolent world government/federation of cultures would not restrict your movement or sense of belonging.
But! But how many people must vote yes? What percentage of abstention? If 60% vote to leave, but half the people didn’t vote, only 30% of the yes is valid.
I don’t think this should be taken lightly by populist movements. To me, Brexit has shown us exactly what the dangers are of a non- or weirdly-qualified majority.
That's fine and all, but leave all by yourself. A territory isn't owned by the people that happen to be there. It's bound up in the systems and institutions they found and accepted, ingrained into a much bigger machinery. Alberta's own referendum already shows this: a court halted the petition because First Nations weren't consulted, because their claims predate any popular vote.
Unless you get everyone with a stake on board, which is hard, and accept it will take a long while to unwind, it's irresponsible. And if you aren't willing to do that work, just pack your bags and leave.
Sure, and history deals the cards we're given and so on and so forth. Why don't we have referendums on keeping the US Constitution every year? That would be democratic as hell.
>If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so
Not so fast. They are in a union with other provinces ergo they have a say.
If nonetheless in some asinine way they secede, will they take their portion of Canada's debt, and other liabilities?
Won't all other provinces require them to negotiate a border, security, and trade policy? Surely they can't expect to be separate yet equal to BC or even the NWT?
Cool. I suppose we'll see the U.S. support referenda in the Basque territory in Spain, Northern Ireland, the West Bank, Gaza, and Texas soon. Maybe in Guam and Hawaii, too.
Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.
Follow this reasoning to its conclusion: once humans are no longer part of the most efficient military-industrial "meta build", states that keep them alive will be outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that do not.
I don't think that's a very mainstream view amongst historians. I can only name two popsci authors, Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, that espouse that thought.
Ok, but try the same argument with sedentary societies. Those seem "superior" despite all the negative side effects, right? But here comes one of a number of steppe nomad tribes to show up and decimate their "superior" neighbors.
The vast diversity of human societies refuses any kind of rigid hierarchy of development. There are many branching paths, and no paradigm wins for long.
America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solution is to end regulation at the federal level, and allow the states to determine what regulations they may deem appropriate. As a New Hampshire libertarian, I do not want Californian progressives telling me how our state must manage health care spending, and I am sure they feel the same way about me.
I think the vast majority of people agree on the generalities and care enough about solving the issue to be able to come to an agreement on the particulars. The problem is that the people who get rich off the current system won't agree to any solution that reduces their profits, and have thus far managed to fillibuster attempts at such a solution through a combination of buying politicians and propagandizing certain segments of the population into rejecting solutions that would benefit them.
Slavery was estimated at ~12% and "hey, you need to lose a few % of your margin and actually pay those people" started a war.
Now, there's an argument to be made about ideology, geographic concentration of industry, etc. doing a fair bit of lifting kicking that off (their own neighbors telling them to stop surely would have gone over better than a bunch of smarmy northerners in their ivory towers telling them the same thing). But the fact remains that you cannot make a large fraction of the country take a haircut without causing strife.
The only way to fix this "nicely" at this point is to boil the frog over decades.
I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corruption and bribery. It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford. Centralized, unaccountable power in DC means that when big rich corrupt companies bribe the right people, they can force the entire country to followed their preferred policies. A good example is how Purdue Pharma bribed the head of the FDA to approve OxyContin, leading directly to the opioid crisis.
> It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford.
State politicians are much cheaper, and no one from the New York Times pokes around when you buy off the state representative of East Bumfuck, Montana.
so, your answer is OMG, they are making money!11!
It's not a money probelm, it's a resources problem. We simply don't have enought hospital resources to serve everyone in the us. it's not making money, it's not having enough beds and skilled people to do the work.
Get an MD and help out, then you'll discover how you really DONT want the government to tell you which patients to serve.
Honestly, after stories like these, I don't want a corporation telling me which patients to serve even more. At least government is theoretically accountable for their decisions.
This is one of those things that, if it weren't already a public service, could never be implemented as one today. Add to that list public schools and public libraries.
The fact that the hospital doesn't know what a procedure costs (they make it up based on deals with medicare, medicaid, and individual insurance companies) should give you a hint.
Yes, the patient needs skin in the game. People need to take care of their own health. Most procedures are given to grossly unhealthy people.
Yes, completely privatize it. Make people pay for their care so their daily decisions are weighed against what affect it will have on their overall health.
“ The fact that the hospital doesn't know what a procedure costs (they make it up based on deals with medicare, medicaid, and individual insurance companies) should give you a hint.”
The hint here is that the random pricing needs to stop. Same procedure for the same price. No market can work if participants don’t know the actual price. Insurance and hospitals probably have a very good idea but patients are being kept totally in the dark. You are expected to just accept what this opaque machinery comes up with.
So what if someone gets cancer or some other potentially fatal disease despite eating healthy, exercising, not smoking, etc, and they can't afford to pay for treatment?
Ah yes, more fragmentation. Surely that will lower the complexity and administrative burden, thereby leading to reduced costs!
The reason healthcare in the US is expensive is very simple: too many cooks in the kitchen. Private insurance simply should not exist. The undeniable reality is that the only way to achieve maximum efficiency is top-down administration.
I understand that that makes libertarians uncomfortable. But what we all have to acknowledge is what we have is not working. Other countries have worked it out. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel here.
One obvious example is: we have a bizarre and anomalous belief that political union has a special moral status unlike other relationships (marital, financial, social, etc). In all other cases, relationships require consent from both parties, and it is monstrous to use force to compel a relationship. If we applied this logic to political relationships, we would immediately conclude that unilateral secession is a sacred right. But no one is ready to bite that bullet.
https://unifixion.substack.com/p/the-anomalous-ethics-of-pol...
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