next_xibalba

You could replace “gesturing at” with “describing,” then explain why the description is technically wrong.

This is very obviously a countermeasure against distillers, illicit resellers, and the like. The scale and competence of the Chinese black (grey?) market has become a serious threat that can’t be ignored.

I think it is dead obvious to anyone willing to be honest that the value created by more satellites absolutely dwarfs the value of ground based telescopes.

Surely you don't think the two are equivalent, right?

Biden was clearly experiencing major cognitive decline over the course of his presidency. Trump was/is not. I've not seen any serious argument or evidence that Trump has experienced a cognitive decline, whereas the evidence for Biden's decline was his every public appearance. Are you being facetious, or is this your actual belief? If so, what is the evidence?

Wait, what? People were offended by that? It seemed an apt cover in light of the situation.

For those unaware, the economist ran this [1] image after Biden’s historically disastrous debate in ‘24 (as a result of Biden’s age based senility being on full display after months of party and media complicity).

[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/04/why-biden-must-...

Fortunately, no one owns space, so we don’t have to listen to these decels.

It is a violation of their terms of service.

There are plenty of good reasons to not use Anthropic's services. If you don't like their terms of service, do stop using them! I personally think Anthropic's increasingly successful attempts at regulatory capture are even more distasteful.

People keep throwing this idea around haphazardly, but U.S. courts have pretty consistently decided that training on copyrighted works falls under fair use. You may not like it, but that doesn't make it "illegal".

Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it

There are enough neuroscience experiments demonstrating how we create post hoc explanations of our actions that I wouldn't trust this intuition prima facie.

Here is the abstract of the paper this article is about(Global Capital and Local Assets: House Prices, Quantities, and Elasticities):

“”” We estimate price elasticities of housing supply for U.S. cities by examining the impact of foreign purchases on housing prices and quantities. After other countries introduced foreign-buyer taxes beginning in 2011, both house prices and quantities increased more in locations with high foreign-born populations. A 1% increase in global capital inflows, instrumented with tax policy changes scaled by immigrant exposure, increased prices and quantities by 3% and 0.5%, respectively, over 2011–2018. We combine these estimates to construct new local supply elasticities. Compared to prior estimates, our elasticities are more inelastic and change cities’ relative rankings. “””

So it would seem the focus of the research was very much foreign investment in housing.

4,000 employees (pre layoff). That’s quite large.

Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

I'd love to know how the demographics of steam's actual users compare against those represented on the marketing page (https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/steammachine).

This is not true.

Broadcom is a public company. It doesn't have a single or even majority owner.

From the article:

She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire. Obviously that's possible. Nor was she talking about the distinction between income and capital gains. She wasn't making a point about accounting. What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.

IMO, that's a pretty fair interpretation, given Warren's rhetorical history.

...one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market

If we accept that interpretation (which I don't), in what way is the latter not "work"?

this single deal boosts SpaceX's valuation by 94 x 11 billion = $1 trillion dollars

That's not how valuations work. Also, it is not unlikely that SpaceX's valuation drops post-IPO (tech was 6.65% in the most recent trading session) due to its very rich valuation and a long tenured investor based that is probably looking to get liquid.

Google is renting compute from SpaceX because they need GPUs and SpaceX owns a huge supply of them and has excess capacity bc no one uses Grok. Google has stated that this is a temporary arrangement while they continue to build out their own capacity.

Perhaps you could share what this person's history of unethical behavior is? Lasker is called a eugenicist by the GP and in the Wikipedia article, but when I read the cited sources, they look a lot more like opinion pieces pushing a viewpoint rather than hard news.

Most public K-12 teachers teach 9 months out of the year. So annualizing that salary gets you to $64,149. Supposing a two income household of two teachers earning that amount ($128,299), the household would be earning a good bit above the median household income of $83,730.

What do they call this type of argument, again? Ad hominem?

See also the OpenAI vs. Musk trial, where Greg Brockman's diary and Sam Altman's texts have taken center stage.

But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.

I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.

Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?

SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?

I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.

If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”

Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.

YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.

A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.

Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.

Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.

SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”

an astounding 90% of chemical feedstocks are derived from oil or gas

What I often wonder is, as the demand for oil declines, the economies of scale in oil production should, too. If that is the case, will not the price of everything with oil byproduct inputs go up? In other words, will the transition to other energy sources actually be highly inflationary?

I'm referring specifically to preventing additional countries from becoming nuclear powers. There was massive effort and coordination expended to this end. It failed repeatedly. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968. 5 more countries armed themselves thereafter.

I don't follow this stuff too closely, but Cloud growing by 63% seems astounding. It'd be interesting to know how much of that is converting AWS and Azure workloads to GCP.

The only real solution is to make AI a public good/utility which should be regulated on an international level and overseen by trustworthy institutions.

There is a precedent for this in nuclear weapons. It did not work. All it takes is a sufficiently resourced nation-state to defect from whatever agreements there are and the whole thing collapses. If the incentives point toward doing so, it is an inevitable outcome.

Whether it was fraudulent or just incorrect is a different question.

And probably the more important question. How badly is the machine that does science broken? If we don’t focus here and fix it, there will be further decades without progress, all while wasting further billions.

Mandatory public service is fascism? Deporting illegal immigrants is fascism?

There are ~68 countries with mandatory military service in the world [1]. To say nothing of countries with some other form of mandatory public service. How many of them are fascist?

The U.S., with the backing of widespread public support, passed bipartisan immigration enforcement laws in 1996 with an aim of rapid and mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and it was not viewed as "fascism". Those laws remained on the books since that time and were only recently under enforced with dramatic consequences.

I honestly feel like we're increasingly living in separate realities driven by media bubbles and wanton historical illiteracy and dishonesty.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Probably something related to leaking or unauthorized use of classified information.