Parenting "pros" don't break the law. If everyone did this we'd have similar number of drownings and vehicular homicide as we did in the 60s about 4000->1000.
Argue the law all you want, just don't break it or try to rationalize it after breaking it. The title is misleading, she was sentenced for neglect, not for "allowing" her child to do something. She told him to go to the pond unsupervised putting him at substantial unnecessary unreasonable risk, that's intent.
Furthermore when officials informed her that she was going against local regulations she doubled down and didn't want to hear it. "Point to the exact statute that says I can't do this insane thing" Ma'am please, nobody here does that.
The point of advertising is to normalize the behavior that makes you money. Take cars for example, millions of people have been killed by cars and they are objectively poor for public transportation yet through a few good advertising campaigns and lobbying efforts American society redesigned every city cars.
About half the oil the US uses (for the last 50 years) goes to cars so you can put every middle east boondoggle onto the bill too. Don't think that just because it's the stupidest idea you've ever heard that people won't rejigger society to make is kinda work for 50 years.
I don't see any evidence of Facebook's growth in high value regions specifically, all we see is them burning through money on failed project after failed project and getting into legal trouble.
My house is a ~700 sqft. condominium, gov. subsidized for lower income individuals, and even my mortgage is more than 300k… maybe I’m just basing my info off of coastal city prices, but is it possible to buy a reasonably nice home located in a reasonably nice amerikkkan city… for $300k in 2026?
Can you ground the discussion by mentioning what you think these cities are? Taking Columbus, OH as the most average of American cities and a 20m isochrone map from city center, there are currently 0 parcels for sale with 3+ ("several") acres under $300k. There are a few within 30m drive, one of which even has a possibly habitable structure. The rest are bare agricultural land you'd need additional investment to actually live on.
I'm just looking at Kansas City as an example right now.
Tons in the $200s btw, and this is in the city less than 20 minutes from the Nelson-Atkins Museum, WW I museum, the river, farmers market, KC Chiefs / Royals / Sporting KC / KC Current teams, parks, schools, newly rebuilt international airport, etc.
I picked the convention center as city center (union station would also be a reasonable choice) and I was only able to find 2 improved lots under $300k. Notably, neither is quite 3+ acres or within 20 minutes of the things you listed, and both are on septic. And this is in a metro where home prices are 36% below national median.
First if you us the convention center, you place the housing center off of where most of the housing actually is. Maybe 40% is in Kansas, with another 60% in the metro being on the Missouri side, roughly. The population density of the metro drags further south though if you look at it on a heatmap.
First if you us the convention center, you place the housing center off of where most of the housing actually is.
Convention centers are usually downtown. Mean population centers reflect the surrounding geography and can drift pretty far from an "idealized" circular urban area. My area's is out on an island for example, nowhere near downtown. Jackson county's is east of Raytown. I'm not sure why you'd specifically want to live within 20 minutes of the mean population center, so it wasn't the obvious interpretation of your original statement.
Between $175k and $350k center on KCMO alone there are over 760 results.
No, there are 17 results once you filter for 2+ acres. Most of them are mislabeled or unimproved property. If you filter those out too (because this is a housing discussion), what remains within 20-30ish minutes are the two I linked.
I realize multiple acres of land is a bit of a silly requirement, but you're the one who suggested there are tons of houses with "several acres within 20 minute drive to a lot of US city downtown areas". That's why I was surprised.
> That would buy you thousands of square feet and often several acres within 20 minute drive to a lot of US city downtown areas.
This is my direct quote.
Let me break this down:
1. That would buy you thousands of square feet
True, clearly seen in the search results.
2. and often several acres
True, you just filtered down to several results currently on the market.
> I realize multiple acres of land is a bit of a silly requirement
Why? I live slightly further than 20min outside of town. There are massive, beautiful homes with tons of land out here, and tons have gigabit fiber from GFiber or several of the other providers in the area.
But that's not a requirement if you don't want it to be! There are clearly tons of homes available in the city with 3-4+ bedrooms and 2+ bathrooms in the $200 and $300ks is the point.
Desirable neighborhoods are by definition expensive. The trick is to find a neighborhood you like where your home can just be a home and not a top-heavy investment.
Acknowledging this isn’t always easy or possible, but just pointing out that this is a self reinforcing problem.
> is it possible to buy a reasonably nice home located in a reasonably nice amerikkkan city… for $300k in 2026?
What does "city" mean to you? For some, it's 500 people, or 5,000. For some, it's 5 million. Define that first. The US is a big place, and I know people that don't live within 50 miles of another human.
If the extra $200/month means you can’t afford it, you probably shouldn’t be buying a house…
Yeah that sounds cruel and messed up, because it is. I don’t like how expensive real estate is and I wish we could have another 2008 without a bailout. But the point stands. If you hafta pick between eating and paying your mortgage, you made a bad financial decision. Blame whoever you want, I am of the opinion that people still have agency and are responsible for their decisions, as unpopular as that seems to be these days.
This reasoning is largely centered around the runway being finite. You obviously can't have costs so high you are making a huge loss, but also there's little value in improving margins past profitability until you actually have a stable segment of the market.
To me it's sounds 1000x more likely than AI that can write complex software. I guess it's not shocking that people fall for all the narrow scoped demos. They fell for the trap that believing software is easy when it's the hardest thing an intelligence can do.
Show me syntax I'm impressed, show me how you manage your state and invariants and I'm horrified.
Not really, compression doesn't require a world model, it's mathematically pure. Any AGI system must periodically reset it's prediction since the world is inherently stochastic. When we look at prediction markets they only seem to work in the long term because human language is abstracted away from the real world, again it's mathematically pure. That's why we get bugs in code and disputes with prediction outcomes.
A better title, you can improve your compression if you make an accurate prediction. Much like how a branch predictor can make a CPU do the same work in less time. Or when your symbols are true uncompressable rules of reality (which is probably meaningless both semantically and physically again due to inherent randomness)
The main difference between minimalist and maximalists are how much that set of uncompressable rules gives you. I suspect the search space is too large. What we see in practice is that lossy rules let you cover more ground but eventually you hit a wall and have to move to a lower level of abstraction to make progress. There are 10^360 paths in a go tree, but something like 10^300,000 for molecular chemistry and that's not even all the way up (or down, say 10^3000 for the standard model of physics that's 10^900,000,000 if you want to do chemistry without chemistry abstractions.). Just semiconductor fab is 10^(10^11) so 10^(10^16) with molecular chemistry (think finding an implementation for some sort of desired self assembly outcome). AI can be way way way smarter than humans and there just not be enough energy in the universe to find these needles. So we definitely need abstractions, but those are at odds with predictions and the choice of symbols often introduces abstractions that the designer didn't consider.
The American Dream is that all Americans have freedom to attain a better life, that was replaced with freedom to choose products, most of which will take your time, energy and money and leave you the same or worse off than before.
That some people still have the opportunity to improve their life isn't a signal that the American Dream is alive it's the exact opposite signal. It's that society has chosen a model for winners and if you don't play that game well then it doesn't need you. Is it at all surprising that a Yale -> Cambridge PhD -> Best selling author has a better quality of life than a similar immigrant whose son didn't go to Yale? Is your personal success built on the backs and graves of those that didn't make it?
There is lots left out of the story, I'm sure the drug addiction is true, but many drug addicts aren't so driven to move to America. The story could have easily ended with and my plane was shot down. Or I went to work at Amazon, where hard work is exploited and the turnover rate is 150%, Or I came back with trauma, Or I was part of a group that the military didn't want, Yale has a limited number of seats, Cambridge has a limited number of PhDs etc. Often times hard work is rewarded with a medical emergency, usually energy drink/substance abuse induced paranoid schizophrenia, and a bill. Look at any major industry and there are at least 10 million abusing substances to "get ahead"
The surveys are less about people losing faith in themselves and more telling you and the government that these pathways are not open to them. If what it takes to be a winner in the 00s is put your life at risk to get into the top school in the country, and people still believed in the American Dream back then, I can only imagine how bad it is now. The simple fact is that contrary to the article most Americans aren't wealthy, they are in massive debt, precisely because they failed and couldn't socialize their college costs. There is no luxury gap, the average parent just believes the average kid will make between 60k-100k [1]. If you're a median in that top 10% that owns 70% of American assets then you are making over $300k, currently those people making $100k are below average despite having a higher than average salary, because labor has never been the main driver of wealth. It's worth noting that throughout the authors entire life the only value he produced was his teenage jobs, subsidized foster homes, military, GI bill for education, if he didn't become a national best seller at the end of all that would he even have paid it all back through taxes? Certainly not if he made an average salary of $65k.
Yes people should work hard, all people, including the wealthy but they shouldn't be required to take needless risk because 10% like sitting on their cushy chairs counting their money, or 40% with their paper pushing office job and slightly less money counting. People should make their own damn sandwiches. It lessens the externalized burdens workers are subject to.
[1] Lets look at PPP in some categories
Since the 2000s headline CPI has increased by 100%. This means, at a broad level, ignoring objections to CPI methodology, and taxes, you need make $200,000 this year to have the same purchasing power as someone who made $100,000 in 2000. If we look at asset and essential service categories the difference grows
Housing -> $255,000 - $265,000
Education -> $280,000 - $300,0000
Healthcare -> $410,000 - $440,000
Of course it's hard to control for increases in frivolous Home/Education/Health expenditure, but I suspect it's a wash since tech purchases are often considered frivolous yet prices have collapsed. The American Dream largely relies on the fact that prices come down, eventually that will happen, but currently there is no end in sight to price hikes.
That's certainly the goal, to drive more users to AI by making the other option worse. The real question is when do you put a stop to it. When brain implants are 2x as productive are you going to say nah? It's times like these were you are supposed to take a step back and consider what you are actually producing and why.
Argue the law all you want, just don't break it or try to rationalize it after breaking it. The title is misleading, she was sentenced for neglect, not for "allowing" her child to do something. She told him to go to the pond unsupervised putting him at substantial unnecessary unreasonable risk, that's intent.
Furthermore when officials informed her that she was going against local regulations she doubled down and didn't want to hear it. "Point to the exact statute that says I can't do this insane thing" Ma'am please, nobody here does that.
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