flave

This just isn’t true - I sort of wish it where.

If they intend to purchase properties, it benefits them to depress pricing in the area

Yeah, that’s true of everyone but how would a bank/individual do that? By selling… But if they sell while they’re depressing prices, they lose money!

Normal landlords don't have effectively infinite money with no forces bearing prices down

Neither do banks. They have quarterly earnings, tax bills, they need to buy more stock, cost of capital etc etc.

It's a very nuanced and complex system in which these institutional investors have very outsized influence.

Just saying ‘it’s complex’ is trivially true. But, supply and demand isn’t some small factor in that calculation - it’s an iron law that exerts itself at all times.

If a bank wants to ‘manipulate prices’ then, without a monopoly, the only way to do that is to dump or buy. But if you buy up homes to ‘push up prices’ … then you end up with a bunch of homes which you paid more than their current value. Not a great business.

The person who has the real unfair advantage in the US happens to also be the most sympathetic person - the owner occupier.

Where’s good these days? I’m feeling my old Napster ways bubbling back up from the deep…

American/California confuses my tiny English brain

be freedom-loving capitalist America be freedom-loving state of California and electrical engineering centre of the world the government tells utility companies exactly how much yield they can make down to a tenth of a percent don’t worry bro this is about protecting_customers the yield is on infrastructure and is extremely non-cyclical and effectively backstopped by the state of California. It’s a 30y investment at a time when 30y t bills are at ~5% sets the yield at 10.3%

What am I missing?

Actually pretty cool - I was about to comment “nice perpetual motion machine” but looked into a bit more and it’s much more interesting than that (well, a real perpetual motion machine would be interesting but…)

Thanks for posting. Pretty cool.

POSIWID (purpose of system is what it does)

In subjects where you never had to put your credibility where your mouth is - the data says whatever you’d like it to say.

Not to butcher Karl Popper early on Monday morning, but a very good guideline for whether a subject area is scientific is if the prediction it makes are falsifiable. If I propose a theory then I should be able to tell you which test result(s) would prove theory wrong.(I know there are critiques of Popper and falsifiability so I’m not presenting it as the be-all-and-end-all of scientific-ness, just a useful yard stick.)

Something very strange is going on in this case. Reading between the lines, there’s someone specific (forgive the cliche but, perchance, an ex wife) who either is being intentionally and subtly threatened, or feels that way.

The article is just missing some really obvious key points - what was written in the LinkedIn post? Whose house was in the image?

The headline is written for maximum clicks in the US advertising market. If an ex husband is posting pictures of his ex wife’s house and cryptic threatening messages on LinkedIn (not saying he was, but if he was) that’s a very different story from “man is arrested for photo with gun”.

On the other hand, the police in my beloved country (including the WYP) never cease in their hard work to make mistakes in some new unfathomable way. So it’s entirely possible that this story is just exactly what it seems on first inspection.

It’s so funny that they see the necessity for the train to transport people to work - just only one type of person…

I’m just saying that I draw the line somewhere with how upset someone is. Like, if someone read my comment and thought it was unfair then I agree with them. If someone read it and was deeply hurt by it - that’s really in their court not mine.

I’m not gonna delete it as it’s just going to make comments like yours confusing for people, but that was poor phrasing from me.

It gave the impression that this specific journalist knows nothing, which is unfair.

I was trying to be funny (always risky online) and intended to be speaking humorously about science journalism in generally. In hindsight, my phrasing doesn’t do that, and actually doesn’t communicate what I was saying very well.

I stand by my criticism of science journalism in general and my request that the article is just posted. But my wording was very rough, ultimately didn’t make the point I intended and yes might frustrate some people. If someone is extremely upset or hurt by my comment then, I think, at some stage that isn’t my fault and the Internet might not be right for that person.

Sure.

The headlines says that music “speeds recovery” but the paper specifically says that patients had similar recovery profiles.

The media article overall overstates the findings of the study. It’s a very specific study on a specific cohort and a specific surgery (minimally invasion) but the article implies strongly that music helps with all surgery.

Also the paper specifically doesn’t touch on medial outcomes from the music - that’s fine as science since it’s granular, but it’s a pretty big thing to miss in the article.

The article misses a bunch of further questions that need more research. How does the patient playing music affect the surgeon? Is it music in general or specific music that helps? Is the patient choosing the music relevant?

“Reshape how hospitals think about surgery”? Not really, hospitals already use music in surgery so it’s not going to “reshape” anything. Over dramatisation.

It’s also just very shallow. Makes no mention of existing science/practice for example. Didn’t speak to any other researchers.

Look, the article is fine-ish but it’s just a regurgitation of the paper with more dramatisation and no analysis. Just post the paper especially on HN.

I’m sure the individual writer is smart educated and thoughtful, but the system of science journalism (science communication is different but equally flawed) is so bent-out-of-shape as to be effectively worthless.

Like, take this exact article as a great example. I’m sure Mr Biswas is genuinely very intelligent and thoughtful and a great journalist but having him write a science article is unfair on him and on readers.

Doesn’t even have an undergraduate in a science subject, has never worked as a scientist, and his job is as a national correspondent.

Perhaps my wording prioritised humour over fairness - I’ll take the criticism on that. But I don’t think my core point was wrong. How can you “communicate” something you yourself don’t understand?

Finally, I want to stress again - it’s not his fault. The system is broken.

Better to link the actual study rather than what a know-nothing hack has to say about it: https://mmd.iammonline.com/index.php/musmed/article/view/111...

Nothing against the BBC but the most thoughtful journalist has all the scientific knowledge of Tarot Reader’s cat.

Anyway, n=56 which is fine I guess but leaves loads of margin for error.

Personally, I had a cystoscope and at the time had fancy health insurance so went to a bling London hospital and the surgeon insisted I listened to music - saying exactly what this article said. It lowers cortisol after, makes you less restless during and improves patient reported outcomes.

You can look up what a cystoscope is, I elected to do it with a blocker rather than with a general anaesthetic. All I will say is that track Shadowboxin’ by GLA is now completely unlistenable for me!

I worked in the City (Citie) of London and have off and on taken an interest in the history.

Much of the special status of London was granted before 1189, and it retains its special because of time immemorial concept and English common law.

I won’t bore you with all the details but there’s loads of weird stuff like a mayor that only lasts a year, companies get the vote based on number of employees, separate police for from the rest of London etc etc. That’s barely scratching the surface.

Can’t easily be changed because some of the “rights and liberties” predates written common law and are “senior”. Of course, when push comes to shove they find a way but that rarely happens.

An interesting response from an LLM. I’d love to hear more from the person who prompted it.

Cool idea and interesting that Grok is winning and has “bad” stats.

I wonder if Grok is exploiting Minstral and Meta who vpip too much and the don’t c-bet. Seems to win a lot of showdowns and folds to a lot of three bets. Punishes the nits because it’s able to get away from bad hands.

Goes to showdown very little so not showing its hands much - winning smaller pots earlier on.

And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010

Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).

Interestingly, the US made money on the Mexico bailout in the 80s and 90s. That’s only on the interest, not to mention the US economic activity.

https://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/43/6iie27...

Under “disbursement and repayment”

Owning part of one company in one sector is not socialism unless you think nearly every country in the world since the invention of the limited company is socialist?

“Bailing out the rich” isn’t socialist is it? What do you think “socialist” means?

I don’t think you understand why the word “socialist” scares so many people. It’s not a word you can just slap on anything to make it “bad”, many people are actually scared about the underlying ideas not the word.

Some Americans seem to just think socialism=bad “because the CIA and the NYT does propaganda”. You may think America is bad and I may agree with you, that doesn’t make it socialist.

In the GDR you couldn’t start a private enterprise without a license. Any enterprise doing anything.

In socialist Burma, there were no privately-owned factories _at all_.

In Czechoslovakia the constitution banned a private company from employing anyone other than the owner of the company.

In Soviet Russia you needed a permit to move city. If you were a farmer you were unlikely to get that permit. You work for the collective farm, the government set the price they would pay you for your produce, and you couldn’t move city to a new job.

I hope these examples show why “the us government is socialist partly because it owns shares in Intel and partly because it’s a lender-of-last-resort for rich people” sounds fatuous.

I don't know if I agree that it's 'slop' but yeah the artist is clearly pushing out a very specific style of AI generated music.

I got this AI-generated version of Without Me recommended in my Discover Weekly. The artist is Orion7.

There's zero disclosure that it's AI generated but I was suspicious because a. the distinctive 'AI hiss' I recognise from generating my own music as a hobby b. inconsistent censoring and c. Only two other tracks from the artist and both sound very different.

Did some backgrounding and confirmed it was AI: • Matches this YouTube upload from 6 Oct that explicitly says it’s AI-generated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqH-GKVyryM • Song credits list Aufizal Moura as "Writer" (no online record) and producer Wayne Brain (real producer, but no mention of the track) • Uploaded via DistroKid

Eight Mile Records is notoriously litigious and Spotify should have copyright detection so I'm unsure what's going on here. It's been up for 5 days already with over a million streams: https://app.artist.tools/track/2T2kGWVFncp0Gkzbw2qFK1?tab=ov...

This has been recommended to other people in their Discover Weekly: https://www.reddit.com/r/truespotify/comments/1o93mzu/found_...

Originally I assumed that this was properly licensed but now I'm not sure.

On the one hand, you'd think Spotify would be _extremely_ motivated to stop people making money off unlicensed AI-generated covers.

On the other hand, on investigation I've found more generated covers on Spotify (usually taken down quickly and listed as 'unavailable') + surely there would be a press release if Eight Mile Records was licensing AI covers?

Yeah my brain has been addled by watching US Politics from another country.

I knew there was some controversy about calling it the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Texas.

I just got mixed us with which words are used by evil people with no soul who hate America, and which words are used by good people standing up for their rights. /s

My comment wasn't clear - I'm talking about abandoned rigs. So the well is sealed.

Some of the more extreme "environmentalist" (in my opinion extreme) also demand that the ocean floor near the well is scrubbed clean to 'leave no trade' which is good in theory but in practice will wipe out the fish and plant life which has grown up around it.

Oil Rigs seem to be, counterintuitively, very good for a bunch of species.

In the Gulf of Texas there’s been ongoing fights between environmentalists (helping species who live under and around the rigs) and environmentalists (protecting the landscape from ugly metal towers).

I assume that this is so that MS can train on the vast corpus of word documents going forward.

Anyone who wants their documents in OneDrive already has them there so this will mean that the huge number of default Office users will now be trained on.

“As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models.”

From the MS privacy policy.

Looks great. Any plans to offer as an API?

Dollar do pay rent (just buy T bonds) and the comparison here is not with dollars - it’s with the MSCI which pays dividends.

Right. So 2000 was an all-time-high for US equities and a 20y-time-low for Gold. You can get whatever number you want if you do it that way!

Not to mention that the index doesn’t account for dividends and your pet rock doesn’t pay you any rent for living in your house!

Sure - buy gold (actually buy silver rn). I have and will. But don’t kid yourself. It’s useful either as ballast or it’s a “bigger sucker” trade.

if a sufficiently large majority of investors believe the hypothesis, they naturally would assume that new information about a stock would very quickly be reflected in its price. They would conclude that since relevant news almost immediately moves the price up or down, and since new developments can’t be predicted, neither can price increases or decreases

This is an oversimplification of how professional investing works.

The vast majority of the dollar value of markets isn’t governed by immediate profit seeking behaviour - it’s people trying to manage money in the context of a real business. Pension fund money is the largest “pot” in the markets at any one time.

Pensions funds aren’t incentivised to maximise returns in any particular quarter/year. Instead, they’re looking to manage risk and ensure consistent returns in the very long term.

Therefore, the “value” they place on various assets is different to what a trend fund or retail investor is thinking about. The price at which they would buy/sell is different.

The market value might “reflect” that information but it could easily create a situation in which short-term, strictly returns-motivated investors might value an asset much more than pension funds or vice versa. That creates opportunity for both to do a non-zero-sum trade and both “make money”.

I’ve seen it elsewhere in this thread but it’s simply not the case that the “markets are a casino”. The vast dollar value of the market is about sharing risk and providing liquidity.

The global bond market are at least 1.5 times the size of the equities market(s).

yes some markets are basically a casino but they’re tiny in comparison.

struggling with […] privacy

Yeah I can imagine that a device which records everyone around you, all the time, struggles with that.