Honestly, I'm not surprised. I obviously didn't phrase my argument in a compelling way.
I disagree that we don't have evidence for conciousness in LLMs. They have been showing behavior previously attributed only to highly intelligent, sentient creatures, i.e. us. To me it seems very plausible that when you have a large network of neurons, be they artificial or biological, with specialized circuits for processing specific stimuli that some sort of sentience could emerge.
If you want academic research on this you just have to take a look. Researchers have been discussing this topic for decades. There isn't a working theory of machine sentience simply because we don't have one that works for natural systems. But that obviously doesn't rule it out. After all, why should sentience be constrained to squishy matter? In any case, I think we can all agree something very interesting is going on with LLMs.
I'm just pointing out your naïveté. What happens in the US naturally affects the rest of the world. We're all dependent on each other. No one will be isolated from this.
Sure. But if they can't afford the loans they can't afford the car, either. No one really needs a $40k new car, anyone could get by with a $2000 used beater.
Buy the car you can afford. If you can't buy it outright or make a significant down payment (20-30%), don't take out a loan, look for a cheaper option. Those interest rates are insane, I'm amazed how anyone would accept them.
Then you would be wrong.