The state keeps the billionaires afloat though. Tesla, SpaceX, all of Musk's companies wouldn't exist without government welfare. Other big monopolies benefit from government protection and subsidy.
Billionaires are not a fact of nature, they exist because the rules we have created allows them to exist. Different rules could make them not exist, and society would benefit hugely.
> Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
Weird to think of everything in the view of great power competition. Like, you can't have healthcare cause spaceX needs to beat China? There are many options.
I agree that people are taught we have meritocracy that is not real, but the problem is that the billions are able to buy power, not what people think of his intelligence, to be clear.
As long as they remain "public-private partnerships" the goal for the private part of that relationship will be to extract as much money as possible out of the public for as long as possible.
I would love for Canada to build more HSR, but these public-private partnerships are killing the projects. They turn into feasting opportunities for private companies to extract public funds. 4 Billion over 5 years without a shovel even going into the ground? Give me a break.
It's certainly true of the Republican party in the US. They proclaim to be defenders of freedom of speech, yet have passed the vast majority of bills censoring books in educational institutions.
But Greece was 175% in debt. That's not the fault of the banks who lent money to Greece. FWIW it's widely documented too that, from the start, Greece cheated to get in the EU / Eurozone, with the help of one of the big four accounting firm, by completely cooking its book to hide how bad the economical situation of Greece was.
So, yup, sure, "evil bankers". But somehow the greek government managed to reach a debt of 175% of its GDP. That's not the fault of capitalism / finance: that's the fault of government overspending.
Sure, there was this service to embellish the books provided by Goldman Sachs.
But moving on from moral arguments, the crux is that only some 5% of the bailout money actually stayed in Greece [1].
Furthermore, it takes two to tango: the banks did not diversify their debt portfolio [2], they lent because they wanted to, and, knew Greek debt implied higher risk. After all, that’s why these loans commanded a higher interest compared to other sovereign debt.
> So then how do humans generalize so well from so little language data? Is “pre-training” on visual data the secret to our success?
Aren't you assuming that humans are born with some kind of blank slate of a brain? What if they don't get it from their senses. What if language is an innate human ability that is genetically encoded, it isn't learned so much and uncovered, and grows with us like a heart or a lung does?
> Aren't you assuming that humans are born with some kind of blank slate of a brain?
No; FTA:
>> ... humans are born with extremely sophisticated programming, provided by evolution. That programming integrates information from all our ancestors, arguably going back to the origin of life on earth.
> What if they don't get it from their senses.
That's a core question; FTA:
>> Is “pre-training” on visual data the secret to our success?
>> No.
>> Because… blind people? What are we doing here?
>> Deaf people show that (non-verbal) sound isn’t critical either....
>> Or maybe all that other sensory data is irrelevant. I don’t know. But that’s kind of the point—...
Billionaires are not a fact of nature, they exist because the rules we have created allows them to exist. Different rules could make them not exist, and society would benefit hugely.
> Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
Weird to think of everything in the view of great power competition. Like, you can't have healthcare cause spaceX needs to beat China? There are many options.