Another use for rent money is to build new homes.

There’s no particular reason to assume rent money specifically is what will pay for new homes. Literally any (investment) money can be invested into new homes.

The people who own their own homes after the landlords sell. Fixing a leak in the roof doesn’t need to be profitable if you’re the one stepping in the puddle all the time.

“Property management” is what a landlord does in a functioning housing market (I.e. one where the price of housing is holding steady, so a landlord can’t make money just renting while the land value goes up on its own). It’s what makes renting preferable to owning in a functional market - you pay extra for convenience and flexibility.

What you’re saying is that most landlords don’t do their job. Which is correct, and also why everyone hates them.

When adjusted for their size (and thus how long they can go without eating), cats wait longer than dogs before eating your face.

It could be East Poland, West Alaska, or even North Fiji.

The founders … wanted Presidents to be appointed by Congress.

So, like a… prime congressman? All the ministers congressmen vote in a Prime Minister Congressman to form the executive?

I agree with them entirely. The US is currently paralysed by a system where you need both a president and congress to agree before you can do anything, so if you have one opposed to the other then the entire government is basically useless and unable to reform anything until the president/balance of congress changes.

A parliamentary system avoids that problem by design - if the PM can’t get enough votes from the parliament, then he doesn’t have enough to “form a government” (I.e. become PM) in the first place. And if he ever loses majority support in parliament and thus can’t pass any bills, then parliament can kick him out via a No Confidence vote with simple majority support, so that someone who does have majority support (or gains it via negotiating support from independents/minor parties) can become PM themselves and the government is able to function.

Switching to a parliamentary system would be the quickest and easiest method of preventing another situation like Obama’s uselessness for most of his presidency because of a Republican-controlled senate.

Yes.

See also: 1984 out of 10, which is essentially a videogame wrapper around George Orwell’s In Defence Of The Novel essay.

But we aren’t on a path that leads there, currently. Not with LLM.

To be clear: Yes, 100%, anyone talking about AGI in the current context is just as deranged as that guy talking about building a dyson sphere within the next 80 years. It’s just not going to happen.

I just don’t want people throwing the baby out with the bathwater and assuming that AGI is impossible just because the current grifters correctly state that AGI is possible.

Superhuman AI is obviously possible - humans are possible, but obviously aren’t remotely optimal. We e.g. can’t at all visualize/intuit 4D space, despite handling 3D space just fine. There are so, so many things that computers already beat the best humans at, even just creating a digital analogue to the human brain design and essentially refactoring it so it’s not hardwired around human physical limits (the wattage, in particular) would make it better than every human. Or, figuring out what was so special about Einstein and reproducing it. Or just being able to run a physicist’s brain on a GPU, then getting 1 000 000 GPUs and creating the world’s largest para-university of physics.

If we needed 10x the concrete, we wouldn’t have built so many cheap ugly concrete buildings.