All those loan companies [should eat shit and die].

I 100 % agree with this.

Getting richer just from being rich is such a sickening thought.

This too.

Whoever thought of the concept of making borrowing money profitable has pure capitalism flowing through their veins and they need to suffer.

I think that depends on your definition of “profitable”. If “profitable” means making people filthy rich, then I agree 100 %. However if “profitable” means making enough for a decent living, I think it can be more nuanced.

In a well functioning system, a bank takes care of your savings, paying you interest on it, and then loans it out to people that need cash, and receives interest on the loans. In a well functioning system, the difference between the savings interest and the loan interest is enough to offset the risk of people being unable to pay their loans back, and also pay the people managing all this a living wage. In a well functioning system, everyone benefits from this.

It does not appear that we have a well functioning system.

(I’m aware of the whole “the system is working as intended and must be dismantled” argument, I’m just adding my two cents of nuance to the idea that loans/banks themselves do not inherently need to be predatory)

Today, I am gay. Today, I am a migrant worker. Today, I am Nobel.

I think that besides the academic aspect, there’s the far more important aspect that school is the place where kids interact with their peers and learn to grow up and be people. I honestly don’t think any level of academic education can compensate for the loss that individual kid will experience if they end up missing out on growing up with their peers.

This is the kind of thing that honestly makes me a bit shocked that homeschooling is something anyone would expose their child to (bar extreme circumstances). I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a kid to lose the by far most important arena for socialisation during extended parts of their childhood. Like, that’s tantamount to abuse. There’s no other situation where we would allow someone to more or less completely prevent their child from having any interaction with their peers.

Of course, as with anything, there can be circumstances where otherwise extreme or unacceptable things can be justified, I’m not considering those situations here.

I have such a hangup on this. Currently, a “tech journalist” in one of the big newspapers in my country is doing a series of articles about how he’s vibe coded an app that, apparently, has been green-lighted by the IT department and is very useful for his fellow journalists.

He admits to not being able to read or write a single line of code, and describes what he does as “leading a team” where he makes decisions about what kind of features to implement, when things are too slow and need speed improvements, etc. Apparently, this web-app is now 66 000 lines of code, and used in production (unclear what it’s actually used for). The LLM agents take care of everything from writing the code to setting up PR’s, reviewing, testing, and deploying.

I can’t help but see so painfully clearly that he’s created 66 000 lines of liability, that he has exactly zero concept of potential bugs in, and which no human in the world is likely to fix quickly if production goes down. He has no idea whether database rollbacks are safe or even possible if something is corrupted… there’s just so many foot canons waiting to go off. And this is just 66k lines. That’s not even a small web-app, it’s tiny (this guy can’t see the difference between generated files and written files, so I’m assuming 66k includes everything), and my personal experience is that LLM agents just get worse as complexity increases.

The biggest problem is that it’s painfully clear that this guy is oblivious to all the above. He’s happily chugging along as long as this looks like it’s working. I can only assume that other people with his level of experience (that is, none) see it the same way.

I honestly don’t see what you mean? It’s true that people in power have waged war on each other more or less throughout all of known history, no?

Whether or not said people had to actually take part in hostilities doesn’t seem to have much impact on whether they choose to wage war. Or do you have a counter example (a society that has changed whether it waged a bunch of wars based on whether its leaders had to fight in them)?

In that case, sorry I guess? Since I myself pointed out that that’s how it worked over 100 years ago I thought it was pretty obvious I was aware it didn’t work that way anymore, so I interpreted your comment as refuting my primary point (the one stated explicitly above). If that’s not what you meant to do then I don’t think we really have any disagreement.

With respect to strategic leaders I was more referring to officers than political leaders. Historically, the path from military power to political power was also shorter: A common way to get political power was to first establish yourself as a high ranking officer.

This whole pipeline of “protecting officers, because it makes militarily sense” via “high ranking officers often end up with political power” to todays situation seems a rather natural development to me.

To be fair it probably came from the fact that armies that protected strategic leaders at the expense of common soldiers were, over time, more effective. Military doctrine has a tendency to shift towards whatever works best, because the armies that don’t adopt it lose wars and don’t get to keep fighting.

The point is that history has shown us that people will wage war for profit even if it means putting themselves and their children at risk by being directly involved in hostilities.

The whole “we wouldn’t have wars if rich people and their kids had to fight in them” idea just doesn’t hold up to historical precedent. People with power are likely to start wars regardless, because they see it as a means of increasing their power.

While I agree with the sentiment, you don’t have to go much more than 100 years back before it was common that the upper class led armies more or less from the front. For long stretches of history, leading from the front and in general being in the army has been one of the ways the upper class has held on to its power.