jfengel

I believe your last paragraph hits the nail on the head. The author has the solutions they want (restricting women's rights). The "fertility crisis" is their justification for it.

If overpopulation had been the problem instead, he would almost certainly have the same prescription.

It was always a sham, but it used to be possible to think that it was gradually getting better. In the 20th century, we extended voting rights to women and 18 year olds, and we put measures in place to protect black voters. The moral arc of the universe did seem to bend towards justice.

It has been really disheartening to find that it can also bend away. Voting was always going to be at least something of a farce, but it genuinely seemed to be better than the alternatives. Now, it's not clear that it is.

Why would somebody pay so much for something that should be saving money?

From the first paragraph:

two hours of virtual learning a day and entrepreneurship workshops.

There ya go: they think they're buying access to Silicon Valley venture capitalists. That's probably a bargain, compared to getting into Harvard for that same kind of access.

Cities have city councils that pass laws.

This likely doesn't even require a new law. There is probably an existing law against deceptive advertising in renting. This is just the mayor announcing that he will interpret the existing law to cover AI generated staging images.

"Unconstitutional" is whatever the Supreme Court says it is.

It depends on who gets to define "meaningful". There are a lot of things that I think are meaningful that you probably don't. And while many would say that STEM automatically qualifies, I don't think that really holds up to scrutiny.

For the most part, shooting wars avoid taking out leadership. You need somebody capable of surrendering, and with clear authority to order the troops to cease fire.

That said, the US has already broken that with Iran, so all bets are off.

People routinely spend many hours indoors, with CO2 levels several times the overall global CO2. I'd expect that effect to swamp the fraction of a percent that global CO2 levels rise.

Rising CO2 isn't going to be great for any of us, but I'd expect that the climactic consequences are going to be far more than the consequences of our breathing gas.

The thermodynamic arrow of time is very old news. I'm having a hard time figuring out what's new here.

That sounds like a horrific idea.

Polymarket isn't a stock or commodities market. There is no underlying value to it. It's zero-sum: the only money coming in comes from the other players. (Minus their overhead.) It's gambling.

It's bad enough that desperate people can lose everything gambling. Leverage allows them to lose more than everything, and that seems like a recipe for disaster.

I don't want to just waggle my finger at prediction market gambling. If that's how people want to spend their money, it's not up to me to protect them. But having the market itself encourage people to spend more than they have seems more like greed than like a serious consideration of market dynamics.

Because we like property.

According to my contact at Nike: several years. (She cautioned me against buying too many pairs at once.) Foams break down.

As with food "best by" dates, you can get away with rather a lot more than they recommend. But a quarter-century seems like too much to ask.

Nobody has ever asked me that. I'm having a hard time imagining how that conversation goes. Anybody interested in it would just find out.

I wonder if you were telegraphing it, which caused them to ask. I'm reasonably confident about mine, so perhaps that conveys sufficiently well that they're willing to risk finding out.

There are US parties that support open borders, DEI/wokeism,

There really aren't. Nobody supports "open borders". That's just a Fox News lie.

People do support diversity, equity, and inclusion, but Fox News' version of "wokeism" is similarly a deranged right-wing nightmare.

I'm hard pressed to think of anyone who believes that America has a healthy democracy. Even those most recently elected continually claim that democracy is under threat.

The $10 gauge is of dubious accuracy. Especially if I bought it at a convenience store that happens to sell gas.

Not quite sure what you're suggesting here; perhaps it's satire?

If P!=NP then it is arbitrarily smaller, for the same reason that e^x > Cx^N for any constants C and N, as long as x grows big enough. There is no epsilon in that can overcome that, no matter how big you make it, because x will eventually dominate the equation.

There are a lot of cases where pragmatically x remains small enough that it doesn't matter, and a P algorithm will give you an answer more quickly. (For the same reason I only ever write bubble sorts: I would only write my own at all if I knew that the list would never be bigger than 10. Even then it's only when using the library is too much trouble for some reason.)

But we care about P and NP when the number can potentially be very, very large.

I had noted a few weeks ago that Hacker News used a font without serifs, causing confusion. I'm not sure when they changed that, but there are now serifs on the capital I and lower case "l".

This headline is much less confusing for the change. Thanks.

Headline is a bit over-dramatic, given that it's already 9 years late. "A decade late" means that it will finally be certified next year.

The news, such as it is, is that it might actually get certified next year.

That article was written in January 2017. I think that even the article writer would be shocked by how bad the reality of it actually is.

They do show it folding shirts, which I'd think are harder than blankets.

Is your doubt caused by blankets being bigger than shirts?

(I didn't see it folding a button-up shirt, only tee-shirts. That's an extra degree of difficult and I do doubt that it can do that.)

Why?

Corporations already owe the government part of their earnings, via taxation. What does the government need, or want, with actual ownership of the company?

They can't sell it; the government isn't any good at managing stock portfolios. They don't have enough votes to matter in the direction of the company. If they do want to control the direction of the company, they should do so via a law regulating it, not as one voice on a large board.

If the government feels that the corporation isn't paying its share of taxation, they should pass laws to alter the tax rules -- for every company. Why should AI companies be special?

The US is getting a national windfall. During the dotcom boom, we used that to nudge the deficit to near zero, by taxing profits on capital gains. That's sufficient. We don't need a meaningless ownership stake, which grants us neither cash nor control.

It's a common enough expression. It has an entry in Wiktionary (sense 2):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/do_a_lot_of_work

A random example from 1991:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Object_oriented_Program...

Of course Claude picked it up from usage; it didn't invent the phrase. But I don't see any indication that it's uniquely Claude-y. I use the phrase on occasion myself.

I don't really believe that egg prices could have made that big a difference. It was an easy thing for media reports to grab onto, but overall inflation was just not that high. I don't see people getting that bent out of shape over it.

It seems more likely that it made an easy thing to tell pollsters, rather than admit their real reasons. Exactly what those real reasons are, I have only dark suspicions, without evidence.

I think you're making a mistake in assuming that they're stupid.

Maybe they like that other people are suffering because they wouldn't make the least conceivable effort to help them. Maybe their goal is to make the world so much worse that there will be a revolution.

A whole story about how they screwed up. Kudos, for real.

In what sense do they not understand it? What could we teach them that they don't already know?

Constitutional amendments that can actually be passed:

Well, here's Gizmodo's source, the local newspaper that did the original reporting:

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06/another-ice-threat-vis...

We don't really amend the Constitution every ten years. We got 10 all at once, immediately after the Constitution was written. They were amendments only because there was debate about whether including them would deprive people of even more rights by omission.

Of the remaining ones, two cancel each other out, and several others (including the most recent) are trivial. The Constitution has not been meaningfully amended in half a century, and it seems wildly unlikely that it ever can be.