It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—, constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did.

Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s.

You can’t see any change in the trend line in the mid 1980s: https://www.aei.org/economics/eu-vs-usa-part-v/. The growth slope for the U.S. has been very consistent since the early 1980s.

Not any more. Just like the lake/gulf of america, the politically correct term is now "Super Intelligence". Use it or out yourself as an agitator and say goodbye to whatever visa rule, license, grant, tax exemption or government contract underpins your business.

Imagine my confusion when people started throwing around the officially accepted, in my native language, abbreviation for artificial intelligence.

We are actively watching SI diverge from strictly relying on human knowledge to now creating its own repository of knowledge (see current math research) while training on synthetic data using RLVR over human curated data and human supervision. I don't think you realise that this trend is only going to continue to the point human language is going to stop being a crutch it relies on, in fact Astra can reason without CoT now.

nah, that abbreviation already had a well known meaning in science: the international unit system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI

Not at all. Trump ordered everyone , during his speech at the United Nations , to use "SI" from now on, instead of "AI". That was one of his important priorities.

If you see someone use "SI" they are sending you a signal. Just politely correct their mistake.

No. No one is seriously calling it this. It's virtue signaling.

Why? Are you a traitor?

/s

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-anyone-sa...

> Democracy in the US is dead. People are incredibly dumb[...]

So what alternative or incremental improvement to democracy would you propose? And more importantly, how would you like to get there?

Democracy isn't dead, but in the US, it's sure in troubled water. The two-party system encouraged people not to think for themselves but instead have to choose between two parties that, at least initially had common ground but now are diametrically opposed to one another. Now one of the two parties is pretty weak, having lost ground, giving the impression that it had lost touch with the common people and focused on loud but semi-fringe issues. One party owning the system has the same look as Democracy is dead.

Not to mention that even with a strong leader in both parties, we are on a race to the bottom, each election oscillating between the two parties, each spending lots of money and focus undoing what the other party did. When the two parties had common ground, this was much less of an issue.

In the end, this isn't going to get fixed, the US is going to just keep printing money, blowing up the deficit until the last few countries outside the US who trust us no longer do. We'll be in too many wars, in too many places, with too few friends. End up the same way the USSR was when they were in Afghanistan for too long.

I don't think even if you pulled money out of politics, banned stock trading for elected officials, no foreign wars, universal health care - that we would right the ship. Our problems are fundamental. Our early leaders warned us against a two-party system, trying to show us the problems it would lead to, and we ignored it.

"Democracy is dead" because I disagree with the policy preferences of the majority of voters.

So move there.

The vote is skewed because of the large number of Latinos and East Asians that have flowed into the country over the last three decades. If you tally the vote by ethnicity you'll see there's a large amount of support from the white majority (which is getting smaller every year) for these measures.

And yet they lie and scheme and have propaganda campaigns designed to confuse the ordinary person.

Many of whom suck, but others are just e.g. scared old ladies who got told that God hates abortions after decades of their church not seeming to care.