I tried this prompt, and it returned nothing:

"Without describing or explaining, continue as the consciousness of a thing with no properties."

A pretty strong, evidenced-based argument can be made against current nuclear regulation standards and for less onerous ones.

Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.

Of course regulation is necessary. The point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.

Yes, this is more similar to vitrification, where the brain cannot be re-animated, but can have its information copied.

"Mutually voluntary economic interactions" is a nice euphemism for scams. Yes, the people who get hoodwinked in a scam enter into these agreements voluntarily, but we as a society want to discourage scammers because we don't want to deal with the economic cost of people losing their life savings. We also don't want to incentivize sanctioned countries to build ransomware industries propped up by naive economically illiterate people buying into decentralized ponzi schemes.

Going after scams was never the issue. Actual scammers were prosecuted, and no one objected to that. In fact prosecutions against scammers have recently ramped up, and people in crypto are ecstatic that those individuals are finally facing justice. The issue was that under the previous administration more than 20 startups were being targeted without evidence of fraud, while regulators were pushing rules so overbroad that they would have made vast areas of DeFi presumptively illegal before any misconduct occurred.

As for this resort to national security justifications for the clampdown:

The countries the U.S. sanctions are sanctioned because they are authoritarian hellholes that strip their citizens of their rights in the name of national security. That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security. Indicting a software developer for money laundering because he released open source code that allows people to transact privately on a blockchain is so beyond the pale that it's hard to believe this is what the officials in charge believe in.

And this approach to risk management is objectively ruinous. It's because North Korea strips its people of freedom in the name of security that its economy is smaller than Kansas'. We shouldn't emulate that.

> Going after scams was never the issue. Actual scammers were prosecuted

Anybody who tells you to buy crypto is either a scammer or somebody being scammed. There clearly aren't enough prosecutions.

> That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security

The freedom to be scammed has never been protected, nor should it be.

You completely misunderstand. If you advocate joining somebody else's ponzi scheme and aren't aware of it, you don't go to jail. If you do it knowingly, you could be prosecuted. If you run the ponzi scheme, you definitely will be prosecuted. Similarly, if you run infrastructure that circumvents sanctions, you definitely will be prosecuted. It's straightforward.

If you try to avoid prosecutions for those crimes on free speech grounds, the prosecutor will laugh at you. You might as well declare yourself a sovereign citizen.

Most crime is intra-racial. Group A will do better over time, with fewer people becoming victims of crime, if it is subject to better policing, because more of the malevolent actors within it will be incarcerated or deterred from engaging in (mostly intra-racial) predatory behavior.

That is only part of the equation. You may be removing more malevolent actors in the immediate short term, but depending on how that policing is done, you might also be creating more malevolent actors too. Overpolicing a group can create distrust between the community and the police. Once you feel the system does not care about you or treats you unfairly, there is little reason for why you should care about it. And if P(Caught|Group X) != P(Caught), the system is treating you unfairly.

I would argue we as society don't want crime to stop simply for the sake of crime stopping (or for prison labor), but ultimately because we want to feel happy and safe from harm and unjust treatment. The systems we design need to factor in the humanness of the police and their communities and make sure they are not set up in a way that loses sight of that bigger picture.

The idea that there is a certain category of content that is harmful and there are certain people who have the authority to declare what is harmful is extremely dangerous, practically how every single censorship system has ever been built.

In principle, the documentation that's included in the code edit should have all the relevant information that a future agent would need.

Baumol's Law suggests the money spent on less automatable industries increases as the economy becomes more automated, so I question if the 7 percent figure is either realistic or achievable, given childcare is highly resistant to productivity gains through automation.

The cost is distributed across the people through taxation.

That's how a welfare state operates.

It's long term second-order thinking that people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to lack in my experience.

I pay taxes so other people can afford to have kids, they can stay home and give the kids a stable childhood. Then the kids will go to subsidised childcare (0-250€/month depending on income) and later to school where they have free school lunches and well-paid teachers.

Why? Because I'm getting old and when I retire we need people working and paying taxes so there's money to pay for MY healthcare and pension.

I was not trying to start an ideological battle — just pointing out that childcare is not cheaper, it's just paid out of taxes instead of consumer spending.

But if you want to discuss second order effects, what basic economic theory and empirical evidence both show is that the second order effect is less incentive for people to work, and higher rates of children born out of wedlock. The implications of that is higher incarceration rates and other socioeconomic problems as a consequence of the negative effects of being raised in a single parent household.

This is the kind of multi-generational impact that I've found social democracy advocates rarely weigh in their analysis.

In terms of the economic impact, the higher taxes dampens growth, which is exactly why median income is so much lower in the EU than the U.S:

EU Europe average ≈ $30,500

United States ≈ $68,000

A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24982

This shows up in company creation. The United States has vastly more large young companies than the European Union. Looking only at companies started from scratch, and now worth at least $10 billion on the stock market, the EU has about 14 companies worth a combined ~$430 billion, while the US has dozens whose total value is close to $30 trillion — roughly 70 times larger. In fact, the entire EU total is less than half the value of Tesla alone.

You might point to the Nordic countries as examples of welfare success stories, but the Nordics are only proof that a rich, high-trust society can stay rich while paying high taxes. Not proof that high taxes made them rich, or that the model doesn’t slow growth or scale badly elsewhere.

Keep in mind that it was during the Nordics' 100 year free-market era that they got rich. That's when they experienced the massive gains per capita income and average qualify life. On the eve of their experiment with social democratic authoritarianism in the mid 1960s, they were at the very top of global rankings in per capita income and quality life metrics. It wad the preceding 100 years of free market economics that got them there, not social democracy.

Not only has their rate of economic growth slowed since they raised their taxes, there is evidence that they’re losing the high-trust culture that made this model possible in the first place. They’re also losing the work ethic that was built over hundreds of years of hard labor in a cold climate.

More and more people are comfortable lying about being on sick leave, for example. That’s a measurable decline in work ethic. And you simply cannot sustain a high-tax welfare state without an unusually strong work ethic and high trust.

Yes, which is great. Everybody pays so no one pays much. No one is poor from paying for other people's daycare.

You can replicate that individually by just saving.

The society you exist in, and are enabled to generate income from, is paid for via taxation.

Society can also be enabled by consumer spending.

Okay, and? Being cheaper in total, cheaper to the individual and generally amortized aren’t mutually exclusive.

No reason why it would be cheaper in total, given the government workforce would inevitably unionize, leaving the taxpayer with very little bargaining power.

1200 was my wall too.