Comment by jmpman

Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us (while they will escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants).

The US is by leaps and bounds the world’s largest economy.

“Charity” is not foreign aide. Foreign aide keeps the refugees from the one chunk of wherever from overwhelming the government of their neighbour which has a knock-on effect on the price of Critical Defence Material or shipping and/or oil. That bones us, even if we hate everyone involved.

Then, afterwords, everyone has to do a ton of work re-corrupting and re-inserting their business interests into the upstart regimes. We want the Devils we know and have bribed handsomely, new bribes suck.

It has very little to do with ‘them’, per se, and everything to do with our wallets. Granted, normal business people like stability; disruption, famine, and war work very well for others. We prefer to choose when we topple regimes than having food shocks and epidemics thrust it upon us, better ROI and easier scheduling.

How you pull it back matters.

Why you were doing it in the first place matters, too.

It is not charity, these are to protect the US against these diseases. Do you think it will stay there and will not come to US shore?

Imagine if you fall seriously ill and a charity hospital comes to you and admits you in, giving you medical care and shelter, at no cost to you. You are in dire need of urgent care, so you accept. There are round the clock nurses and doctors and you're attached to a ventilator.

Then one day hospital management changes and the next morning, they fire everyone and turn off your ventilator, not even giving you time to find another hospital to move to. Many patients suffocate to death before noon.

Did the new manager do anything wrong?

Framing it as charity misses the point.

Power is always based on reciprocal obligations. Everywhere in the world, at every point in history. While modern societies try to formalize the obligations, there are plenty of informal expectations that are equally important.

Because infectious diseases do not respect international borders, someone must be in charge of international surveillance and response to outbreaks. When someone does what must be done for the common good, people tend to see them as a leader. If they stop doing their job as a leader, people interpret it as abandoning their responsibilities. And when someone fails to do what is expected from them, people will think poorly of them.

You're mixing up different "you"s. If the American legislature got together and passed a law saying the American people just don't want to do so much foreign aid anymore, that would be a hard call.

But that's not what happened. Elon Musk, a random rich guy who was not himself financing the charity, appointed himself dictator of all American spending programs. He promised his patron that he would make the government run more efficiently, but found himself unable to. Then he went around randomly breaking charitable programs in an attempt to prove that his failed government efficiency initiative was producing meaningful outcomes. That's why he is accountable (and will be held accountable) for the people his decisions have killed.

> It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content.

I get what you're saying and generally agree with the overall point, but this specific aspect makes it worth remarking that even the model trained to be pro-Elon concedes Elon is at fault.