While I agree with your overall point, I'm reminded of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" here. The US is a huge economy with a massive military infrastructure. I don't think it's fading to fallen empire status that quickly.
1910 The UK is the biggest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen.
1950 The UK is not that or anything like it.
Today. Does anyone really care much about what the UK says or does on the world stage? Ordinary British are better off now than 1910 and it isn't close.
So what you say is obviously true as long you define "quickly."
Plus the Japanese beating the British so badly all over Southeast Asia. This gave a lot of momentum to independence in Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and eventually India.
Hopefully. With that said, when a country makes too many poor decisions, independently or relative to other countries, it'll eventually bite them in the butt.
It’s going to be a multi-polar world. The US will continue to be among the top powers for decades to come. We’re simply exiting an unusual period where China isn’t leading/among the leading pack of countries.
The rate of US relative decline will be set by our policy decisions and cohesion. As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable
I think what you will see is what happens in the body when it becomes starved - it will start eating itself.
We have already begun to see this. The middle class is no longer expanding, nor is the poor (by meaningful terms). Worse, the poorest class - largely made up from immigrants - legal or otherwise - are being driven away.
Life in the US has been relatively comfortable for a few generations now. So current healthy (age-speaking, not fitness) generations have no idea how to revolt. Ironically, we may see change come from the southerners with guns who eventually decided they had been deceived by the people they voted for. After all, both sides cowered on Jan 6. Just imagine if "representing your constituents" was a do or die scenario. The US is mostly far from that scenario if a supreme leader is not directing the masses.
Unfortunately, as with many other fallen empires, I think it will take a LONG time for things to recover. The idealistic principles which the US claimed to be founded upon are largely not present now - the freedom from oppression, the freedom of/from religion, and the concept of fair representation.
> As we are apparently electing malicious narcissists with dementia to our highest office, a more precipitous decline seems reasonable
To be fair, the current political dysfunction can probably largely be reduced by switching the electoral system from 'first past the post' + electoral college to something like ranked choice or proportional representation.
> In political science, Duverger's law holds that in political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, as in, for example, the United States and United Kingdom, only two powerful political parties tend to control power.
> By contrast, in countries with proportional representation or two-round elections, such as France, Sweden, New Zealand or Spain, there is no two-party duopoly on power. There are usually more than two significant political parties.
and that way the presidential election does reflect "either the will of the Democratic Party elite or the will of the Republican Party elite" (ie, the extremes of the two main parties), but something closer to the will of the people.
I may be misinterpreting your comment, so forgive me if I am.
When Trump began the trade wars (tariffs), it caused many countries to reconsider their alliances and operations. What you can see is a great shift away from the USD in many areas. This is not temporary, or at least not short-term.
Once trade alliances are formed between parties that exclude the US, those groups seek financial paths which are more stable and unrelated to the volatile path they previously took.
As for the EU, they have an insane task: trying to provide fairly equal voice to a large number of stakeholders. EU was a very idealistic concept, and I'm surprised it made it this far. But they should not be discounted. They may be slower to react to situations by virtue of their necessary processes, but they will eventually get it.
Europe is wisely waking up and starting to loosen its military dependence on the US. Hopefully they are/will do the same when it comes to medical research since the US has been taken over by anti-vaxxers.
I’m saying this as a non European. I’m an American who is making plans to split my time between the US and Costa Rica (here now) and maybe Panama and would love to see them become close to Europe politically.
> Hopefully they are/will do the same when it comes to medical research since the US has been taken over by anti-vaxxers.
Aren't European companies already very competitive in drug development and Medical devices? Philips practically owns the ultrasound markets globally -- Novo Nordisk, GSK, Bayer, Merck, seem competitive too.
In the same way that good AI coding requires testing, project management and architecture, good AI writing requires you to fill the editor role. Be ruthless. Read line by line. By all means tell the agent to fix stuff. If you don't do this, your blog posts sound generic and lazy.
This seems like an excellent thread to plug the TUI I've been working on that makes using bubblewrap relatively easy and somewhat pleasant. I have a recipe in the README for using it with Claude. Granted that Claude has --sandbox, but probably better that sandboxing be done by something outside of the Anthropic ecosystem.
I've been doing a lot of AI writing for a site - to do it well takes effort. I have a research agent, a fact check agent, a logical flow agent, a narrative arc analyzing agent, etc etc. Once I beat the article roughly into the shape I want it to be, I then read through end to end, either making edits myself or instructing an editor agent to do it. You can create some high quality writing with it, and it is still quicker than doing it the human-only way. One thing I like (which is not reason enough by itself) is that it gives you a little distance from the writing, making it easier to be ruthless about editing...it's much harder to cut a few paragraphs of precious prose that you spent an hour perfecting by hand. Another bonus is that you have fewer typos and grammatical issues.
But of course, like producing code with AI, it's very easy to produce cheap slop with it if you don't put in the time. And, unlike code, the recipient of your work will be reading it word by word and line by line, so you can't just write tests and make sure "it works" - it has to pass the meaningfulness test.
Sorry, but we're talking about models as content now? There's almost always a better word than "content" if you're describing something that's in tech or online.
What is the traffic flow rate in an intersection with a 4 way stop? For single lane, since only one vehicle can be in the intersection at once, and probably takes _at least_ 5 seconds to start from stopped and cross the intersection, I'm guessing in the 10-12 region per minute best case, so maybe 600 an hour?
Now if you convert it to a mini roundabout, you can have at least two vehicles in the intersection at all times. I fail to see how it wouldn't be an improvement.
I think you are making lots of assumptions here, like when I say space, I guess you assume it is still perfectly flat and the roads are perfectly aligned? The particular four way I'm thinking about, which really should be a traffic circle if they could blow away some houses, is 65th NW and 3rd in Seattle:
So notice we already have problems in a bad alignment of 3rd, and 65th is basically a steep grade, even coming up form the west. I think you could put a circle in if it were flat, even with the bad alignment (or maybe because of the bad alignment), but this hills make a non-starter. It also gets enough traffic that I'm pretty sure they are just going to put a stop light up eventually.
The skin is definitely much better, but a higher than "recommended" dose is definitely (anecdata) effective at bringing up and maintaining the measureable Vitamin D3 level in your blood if you are under the recommended range. It's an important metric to track in your regular blood tests.
To my understanding Vitamin D is regularly underdosed. Several points:
1) There are lots of studies that correlate Vitamin D production with sunlight exposure. For example, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20398766/ this one lands on 1/4 of a MED = 1000 IU. Of course now we have a MED definition problem, but we're roughly talking single digit numbers for a white person in midday sun in NYC to reach 1/4 of a MED.
2) If you also supplement with Magnesium, a lot of your side effects go away. Vitamin D3 depletes Magnesium absorption.
While I agree with your overall point, I'm reminded of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" here. The US is a huge economy with a massive military infrastructure. I don't think it's fading to fallen empire status that quickly.
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