Why rural Americans? The same amount of cash will go a lot further and likely be more effective in rural areas of other countries. The source of Atwood's wealth (Stack Overflow etc) is global, not American.
Deindustrialization has hollowed out most American cities outside of major cities, and the corresponding anti globalism tantrum contributed to the current political situation. Because of the apportionment of House and Senate seats, these people hold most Americans hostage with their disproportionate voting power, and paying a ransom seems better than the alternative we are living through.
Nope. Globalism has made America richer than pretty much any nation in the existence of human history.
The election of leaders who prioritize the distribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest rather than vice versa has hollowed out rural America.
And rural America disproportionately votes for such leaders.
Technically you're not wrong, but without globalization, deindustrialization wouldn't have happened and unions (and strike threats) would probably be strong enough to prevent the poor to rich redistribution.
So even if globalization made America richer on average, it also destroyed the fair redistribution mechanism.
Why not rural Americans? When helping someone in my community, I don't first stop and analyze whether my time/money could be better allocated to maximize some sort of utilitarian loss function, I help them because they're there, need my help, and I'm able to help.
I don't disagree with you, but there is value in considering how money could be best put to use for the common good.
One perspective overlooked here is the purchasing power of non-Americans (i.e., not U.S. citizens). Dollars in developing countries can be worth multiple times what they are in the United States. For example, you could help 5000 rural Vietnamese for every 1000 rural Americans. There is also a higher potential for rural Americans to obtain dollars vs. non-Americans. In utilitarian terms you have the potential to do more good by sending money to rural communities overseas.
There's a lot of value in helping out locally as well.
I don't have as much lived experience of someone in Vietnam as I do someone in my community. Nor do I understand the language or the culture. There's more overhead in making it happen and there will likely be a lot of things I'll never take into account or understand. On the other hand, I know what it's like living in a HCOL state where many jobs don't pay enough for a family to survive and have struggled in my own past. Could my money have more purchasing power elsewhere? Sure. And they're still people in my community struggling and I have the power to help them and a greater understanding of what they're facing. Community seems to get discounted a lot in the discussion around effective altruism and I think that's unfortunate.
What I know for sure is, if I could, I would invest my money into clean drinking water infrastructure for both communities. Helping families pay the water company to distribute jugs of filtered drinking water is great, but infrastructure that's not contaminated would be so much better for everyone.
We also have the reality that "American charity" has done horrible things to poorer nations - shiploads of free American clothing has decimated African textile industries, boatloads of free American food has destroyed entire nation's ability to feed themselves.
The further away you are from the recipient the harder it is to see the second and third order effects. Local and small means they can be noticed, and things modified to change the outcomes.
It gives me serious "steal from the poor and give to the rich" vibes. Rural Americans are richer than the majority of humans, and Stack Overflow was a fairly global website.
Rural America also has a government that is fully capable of taking proper care of it's underprivileged; most governments across the world are not.
I strongly recommend you check out the book "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America". People -- in this country, not in the third world -- are regularly selling their blood so they can afford to eat. https://www.google.com/search?q=%242+a+day%3A+living+on+almo...
What difference does it make if the government is "capable" when it's not happening in practice?
A lot of areas in this country resemble the third world more than the rest of America. Don't take it from me. Try the book reference I provided and its citations.
These statements paint with a rather broad brush. There are parts of the US that are so impoverished that it defies belief and more closely resemble pre-industrialization countries than they do what most associate with the United States.
They also ignore that even if other rural areas are technically speaking more rich than the rest of the world, still struggle with an extreme shortage of opportunity, upward mobility, and sense of purpose.
I speak from experience, having been raised in one such area. Had I not moved to a tech hub in search of greener pastures (which is not something everybody is capable of), my life would look so different now as to be unrecognizable. Instead of earning the upper end of the salary band for my line of work with numerous upward trajectories to pursue and a solid bit of retirement stuck away, I'd be working a job earning maybe ~20% as much that doesn't keep track with inflation with zero mobility and an even smaller fraction of retirement funds, and that's one of the best possible outcomes in that region and inaccessible to most.
I've not aligned with the area I hail from politically for a long time now, but clearly it needs help.
I would be too, but I can also see how someone in such a situation could feel depressed, hopeless, and neglected, particularly with the sheer amount of wealth other parts of their own country are producing.
A direct answer - because if you donate and work with people near you, you have to deal with the people. It doesn't sound like much, but it's the whole linchpin - you have to face the reality and often realize that what you want to do simply can't be done for any number of reasons, and then you have to back up and try a different tactic.
If you ship your money across the globe you can sit back and be content that it's working well based on the glossy reports you get; you don't have to actually deal with the people as people; just as statistics.
"Why rural Americans? The same amount of cash will go a lot further and likely be more effective in rural areas of other countries."
Again, the data goes into an open global repository that DOES help the entire world. We will all learn from it. When our house is currently on fire, I think we should deal with that first.
It's also "yes, and". Gates Foundation (among others) is working on other areas of the world and has vastly more money.
Not to mention one of his choices is a white-minority county in rural Mississippi. The idea that Jeff Atwood of all people is a raging racist is insanely laughable to anyone that has followed his work over the last 15+ years.
Because this is not about charity, but about politics. Specifically demonstration with the intention of advocacy. The advocacy falls down when the demonstration is less applicable.
I don't think that's clear. They're certainly burning money, but that's mostly R&D: salaries and training compute. Once you remove those, it's unclear whether the AI companies would be losing money on just inference.
You can't "remove" costs willy nilly to make a company look profitable. Running an independent ISP is an extremely lucrative business if you gloss over the capex requirements of installing and maintaining the infrastructure.
You don't remove them willy-nilly, but evaluating companies based on their operating costs is standard accounting practice. R&D is not part of operating costs.
Capex for inference is in, capex for training is out for that analysis.
That's a perfect example of the problem. It's overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness.
It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?
Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
How do you show that a certain food is quickly absorbing or slowly absorbing? Would you require that every food item is evaluated on each individual characteristic?
Yes, I've begun translating "ultra-processed foods" to "junk food". It's roughly the same meaning and roughly the same amount of scientific rigor. UPF sounds scientific and specific but it's neither.
OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.
Sorry, misread your original comment. But it seems to me that young people in the 50's and 60's (aka the golden age most Americans think of) where much more dissatisfied than older people -- the 60's were notorious for protests.
Answering my own question: in the past life satisfaction studies were traditionally U-shaped; satisfaction was lowest at "mid-life crisis" age, and higher for the young and old.
> doesn't seem likely to have many broader implications on its own
Considering how foundational energy is to our modern economy, energy several orders of magnitude cheaper seems quite likely to have massive implications.
Yes it might be intermittent, but I'm quite confident that somebody will figure out how to effectively convert intermittent energy costing millicents into useful products and services.
If nothing else, incredibly cheap intermittent energy can be cheaply converted to non-intermittent energy inefficiently, or to produce the enablers for that.
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