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If President Donald Trump is re-elected in November, or somehow manages to retain power without the benefit of election, Cotton’s hysterics will be completely forgotten. No harm, no foul. But if Trump is defeated, the battle for the 2024 nomination will begin immediately, and Cotton will have a message that resonates across the plains and valleys of racial and cultural resentment that define the Republican base: “Who lost Washington?”
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They found the repetition of a single word caused a significant shift in subjects’ brain activity, even more so than when they were in a resting state but uttered no mantra. Notably, the researchers found that the area of the brain most impacted by the activity of repeating a mantra is the Default Mode Network, which is associated with predicting and planning, internal evaluation, mind wandering, and rumination. Basically, repetitive utterances induce a state of psychological calm because they seem to chill out the part of your mind that’s especially self-involved.
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It’s not your house that will be your life’s biggest-ever investment, but yourself. The amount of money and value of time you spend on maintaining your body and educating yourself is by far the single biggest expense you will have in life, bar none. Are you treating yourself as the (multi) million dollar asset that you are? If you prefer, see yourself as a wet computer that would cost millions to construct from scratch.
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So the population problem in the U.S. is highly location-specific. Instead of keeping immigrants out of the country, the government should focus on sending them to places where the population is stagnant or declining and the economy needs shoring up. The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank, suggests using place-based visas to send skilled immigrants to declining regions. But even low-skilled laborers can bring new life to declining  towns across rural America.
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The tradition lives on. Many contemporary AI systems do not so much mimic human thinking as they do the less imaginative minds of bureaucratic institutions; our machine-learning techniques are often programmed to achieve superhuman scale, speed and accuracy at the expense of human-level originality, ambition or morals.
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A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.
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The main factors undermining the prospects for US prosperity are mostly the result of its own political decisions. Unsustainable fiscal deficits, questionable trade policy, a high level of inequality, crumbling infrastructure, underperforming schools, and unaffordable health care are the result of domestic choices. Whether or not Americans come to grips with those issues has little to do with China or India.
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Supercomputer Thinking...
End of the line -