Someone on here earlier was talking about how AI could be used to help people with their mental health. Quoting a study saying about how 60% of people in a survey asked a chatbot for help with their mental health. The conclusion drawn was that, while admitting we need to remove barriers, we should figure out how to make AI safe for this task.
And I mean, sure. Look at the success of the "Let's Make Crack Safe" campaigns of the 80s and 90s.
Did you see the story recently about people using Meta's AI chatbot to hack into accounts? They did it by the super tricky method of asking the bot to pretty please change the email associated with the account, and then reset the password.
So when a person is thinking really dark thoughts at 2 a.m., maybe we should invest in mental health experts?
From a quick internet search, let's put the cost of a psychiatry degree at $250,000. If Meta paid for 500 new psychiatrists, that would be $125 million dollars. Then let's say they then paid each of those knew psychiatriests $250,000 per year, for the next 20 years. That would cost $2.5 billion dollars over 20 years.
Meta plans to spend, on the low side, $135 billion dollars for AI just this year. It could take 2.1% of that and pay for for the education and salaries of 500 new psychiatrists.
According to the same article, the expected expenditures by Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is expected to be in the $700 billion range. Take a 2.1% cut of that, and that's 2,800 new psychiatrists out in the world.
That would be much more useful than chat bots that can be "hacked" by saying "pretty please."
Look at it another way: In 2025, Meta paid an effective tax rate of 3.6% for $79 billion income. Raise their tax rate by 2%, you pay for 300 psychiatrists. Raise it to the regular 21% federal tax rate and we the people have $13.7 billion for social services.
There's $220,000,000,000 in medical debt in the US. It gets sold for 1-3 cents on the dollar . You could buy it all, at 3 cents per dollar, and pay it off with $6.6 billion. Less than half the taxes Meta did not pay last year would wipe out medical debt.
That's just one company, funding billionaires and doing so on the backs of the working people.
"But you'll eat into their profits!" Yeah, so? I pay my taxes and no one feels bad for me. Nor should you. It benefits me, and my community, and I'm fine with it.
But more than that: If Zuck has $135 BILLION to pay for AI he has the money to pay his taxes. And if he does not, well, then he should cut out the lattes and data centers like the rest of us are always told.
Several months ago I decided to (once again) change the software that powers this little site. There was no real reason for this beyond me just wanting to. So I decided to write everything from scratch.
To be clear, I can't think of many good reasons to do this. There are a bazillion ways to publish a webpage. Funnily enough, it's a touch harder to find a framework that does as little as I want: No JavaScript, no cookies, no tracking, no bloated CSS framework. But again, still a number of options.
It really just comes down to, why not? The answer to that, is, well, bugs in the code, lack of features, you can add any new sections without creating the code to support it, just to start.
But the thing is, it's my mess. My site, running in the server with just my code. Static pages, no tracking. And for an aging hacker like me, it's a lot of fun.
But even more than that, there's a craft to writing code that gets missed a lot. Especially in these days of vibe coding and AI slop. It's not just typing. And this is the problem so many people miss.
This isn't an issue around just software, of course. I'm used to hearing people who think of construction work as "just manual labor." My usually response is, "Ok, let's see you do it."
Everything looks easy when you don't know what actually goes into it. Building a house is just swinging a hammer. Software engineering is just generating lines of code.
Some of us, though, we actually enjoy the creating part, the creative part. And I know, most people don't think of "software" and "creativity" in the same breath. Most people are wrong.
So, that's most of the reason why I've written yet another bespoke blog system.
I had someone tell me today that they didn't want to politicize feeding people. I didn't argue the matter, and I understand where they're coming from. They don't want giving people food to be a Republican or Democrat issue.
I understand, but they're wrong. It is political.
Feeding people is political. Letting people go hungry is political. These are decisions we make.
By "we" I mean collectively. As an individual I cannot feed everyone, and no one expects me to do so. But as a society we decide what matters to us. All of these decisions are political. Politics is, at its most basic, making decisions for a group.
I used to buy into the idea that my Christianity was not political. That I should not be wed to any particular political party. I still believe that, though it looks to be that the people who told me that years ago no longer believe it themselves.
The reality, though, is that Christianity is political. Jesus was political. The ultimate proof of that is the reactons of people in power -- religious power, political power, economic power. He was killed because he challenged the power structure. He was a danger. The early church was persecuted because (in part) they disrupted power.
The were political, and their politics were dangerous precisely because they loved people. Not power itself, not traditions, but people.
James wrote, that, "Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world."
(James 1:27) Care for the helpless, the disenfranchised, the ones who were normally ignored at best, but more often used and abused. Do not be like that, James said, "keep yourself unstained." This is political.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that I was told to keep politics out of my Christianity because it kept me relatively harmless. It reduces politics to voting, and that's not it at all. Or rather, it's not just that.
Hélder Câmara said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." Do things, fine, but don't question things. Help the widow, sure, but don't ask why she needs help.
As Christians we must do both.