https://mnhousing.gov/homeownership/firstgen.html
Its an up to $35,000 conditional handout. They present it as a deferred, interest-free forgivable loan, only repaid for a percentage of the years less than 20 you spend in the house and fully forgiven after 20. If an illegal alien lives in an MN house for 10 years before returning overseas and selling it off, the state could theoretically try to bill them for the $17.5k remaining which wasn't scaled by interest, but they can just simply not repay it.

There are a lot of families up north where the children can't afford to live in the local area anymore. So these programs always drive me bonkers. On the other side, the resource industry is also suppressed. For example, there is a mine proposal for Tamarack. The copper nickel deposits are really juicy, some of best on Globe. It's arguably better positioned relative to watersheds than others. Probably not going to extract anything anytime soon from it. The mining company has laid off many that were doing surveys. Some I know have had to leave for mining jobs in Alaska now.

And if the Twin Metals mine ever opens, the men working in it would have been born after the hydrogeological review process started all the way back in 2006
I wouldn't hold my breath for the Tamarack mine either

Some quick thoughts on the AI debate in this thread:

• The advent of AI will exacerbate the divide between jobs which require actual intelligence and education in the Humboldtian sense vs routine jobs which might require college-level knowledge, but are ultimately repetitive and not dependent on actual thinking. "Monkey coders" are a prime example for the latter.
  Broadly speaking, AI will exacerbate the bifurcation of the job market, with only the most lowly, menial jobs of manual laborers and the most high-level knowledge-based jobs remaining while everything in between gets squeezed.
  
  
• What is currently labeled as AI has barely made any advances in terms of actual intelligence - it is mostly regurgitating and recombining existing knowledge and ideas (ChatGPT, AI-generated images), or the automated application of methods from statistics and machine learning at scale (image recognition, code generation). Generative AI by and large still lacks any originality.
  
  I indeed see a big risk that human knowledge and culture will begin to stagnate if we rely too much on AI and those who create are displaced by machines which recycle. For example, it's possible that musicians get decimated in the coming years while we listen to AI-generated songs, but that we eventually get sick and tired of AI music because it becomes stagnant without fresh inputs to its data pool. Maybe 20 years from now, if I had to guess. But by then, there are no more musicians left and a once thriving industry is just gone. Same principle with art styles, poetry, scriptwriting, marketing and so on and forth.
  
  
• 80% of the server time of AI farms will eventually end up being dedicated to AI-generated porn, which I expect to further boost the rates of singles and childlessness. Maybe that's the way the job loss is compensated for in the long run, so that the whole problem ultimately ends up being self-correcting.
  
  
• The aforementioned elimination of "mid-level" jobs by AI and automation will imho pose a big sociological challenge because we will outright lack adequate jobs for averagely gifted folks. A huge chunk of people simply lack the IQ required for higher-level professional roles which are safe from AI or automation, but are also too bright to be happy with a job like sanitation worker or maid.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Nov 23 2024 07:17am

The amount of BS tax dollars are going towards is insane.....

You should play some horizon zero dawn 1-2. A very interesting game.
The loss of creativity is the biggest dealbreaker longterm. There is also a book called "Superintelligence". The author goes deeper into the topic.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Nov 23 2024 10:08am

Some industries like food and drugs follow strict federal regulations which will make them resistant to AI. People will not want AI to be the ones judging whether or not their food is safely manufactured. And health care? NO WAY. If humans decide to include AI in health care, that is the most certain way to ensure a mass anti-AI rebellion.

Moving all of the porn demand into the AI realm is actually a great idea imo. That type of industry is replete full of individuals that do demeaning things just to make a living. I would rather computers piece together imaginary scenes than have people sully their lives.

Can't blame that on the pandemic.

The number of schools with 3 or 4 different types of DEI offices is shocking these days.

Do you think there is any way to fire those people? I imagine most of them get tenured.

I think to some extent DOGE should basically look to Argentina and use that as a case study. You probably don't delete entire departments, but we should trim continuously and seriously. Since Milei took over, he fired ~50k workers or approximately 15% of Argentina's total. I don't think we can stomach that type of % in one year but if we get that in the first two years it would be a huge success.

Auditing the shit out of procurement and budgets to find grift is also a must.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Nov 23 2024 12:08pm

In Argentina most of the graft was overt and explicit, while in America its buried in incomprehensible bureaucracy. How do we delve into public works and figure out who is being paid to do nothing?
Argentina just had direct patronage and no-show jobs, people paid for nothing but organizing voters around elections for the socialists.
In the American pubic sector, how do you distinguish the actual output of a mid level manager, or assistant principal, or compliance officer? Yes there is some low hanging fruit like diversity officers, but its a tiny insignificant %.