Alpha3031

The (classical) liberals believed in inheritance taxes but that would probably get you called a pinko commie by today's standards, even by the supposedly classical liberal parties.

Suite A is fairly specialised. Nobody can publicly comment on specific use cases of course, but it's fairly well known that Suite B is used for most national security information, including TS/SCI. But yes, technically non-public algorithms exist and are in use, it's just not even nearly automatically applied to everything.

The EU and European countries in general have in total provided more aid to Ukraine than the US, it's just divided across multiple countries, not that it's a competition. I'm not sure a military budget 200 billion vs 600 billion is going to make such huge a difference if the goal of your military is actually defence instead of force projection, it's not like they're giving Ukraine the fancy pants expensive stuff and both the US and Europe probably both ran out of (or significantly depleted at least) their stocks of regular old dumb artillery ammunition, rocket launchers, etc, and that stuff is what's used and actually useful.

> concede that processes which disrupt/regulate social networks produce, at best, power-laws in a theoretical limit

I'm going to interpret that as acknowledging that the bulk of the distribution is not Pareto with Pareto fitting well only at the end of the right tail. This fits with a mostly multiplicative dNW/dt but in a random walk rather than monotonic increase, or a sublinear PA, but with increasing linearity at the very high end. Not that we actually need to model this blindly, dNW/dt is to a significant extent just Y, income, and we can and do measure income, at least. A lot more accurately than wealth, even. More importantly, there is enough data with both for the same individuals that we can examine the relationship between the two. Certainly, there is a positive correlation, but overall it seems R ~ 0.33 across many countries, which is fairly low, really, and if you want to eyeball the graph you can probably see the data points clustered tighter near the top.

Now, I can't tell you what distribution @linschn might target as desired or if there are things beyond mere distribution that they would wish to address. My reading of their comment would be that they wish to focus on ensuring non-NW effects >> NW effects, i.e. high mobility, not necessarily high equality (does raise an interesting question here, would a combination of mobility and inequality also tend to increase zero-sum vs positive-sum competition?) Still, given that the correlation, although low, does exist, any actions increase to mobility does seem likely to reduce final inequality as a side effect. This does not necessarily shift the shape of the distribution (rather than spread) significantly, but there is no reason why it should need to.

> How on earth do you propose to hault 22222... vs. 0.0011.0011.0001* ... ? By what means are most individuals on the planet coordinated so that the labours of one do not multiply benefit themselves, but "divisionally benefit" everyone? What process to the general benefit of society could be imagined where net wealth grows without inequality?

I don't see why anyone should care for growth of total NW over Y. Wealth isn't real, there is not literally a warehouse full of stuff and services that wealthy people can draw upon, so it can only be a claim on future Y plus or minus inflation. I entirely agree with @linschn in this respect, seeing growth in wealth being higher than growth in income as a good thing is complete and utter madness, and yet those are the scenarios where the PA or PA-like effects relatively dominate. If during relative stagnation it's a choice between infinite paper growth (plus increasing concentration) and the apocalypse, let's have the apocalypse. At least the apocalypse is honest about what it is. In a way, it's the Greek sense of the word.

No, you've made the claim that that it's impossible to alter, I'm fairly sure it's up to you to show that one of imperfect information, externalities, market power, ~LNS or non-convexity of preferences or production result in the impossibility in the real world of producing a single even slightly different distribution when you're making a universal quantification on what is certainly a non-null hypothesis (never mind the abuse of mathematics that is drawing a straight line on a log-log plot and calling it a day, I know it's a good approximation for almost everything but so do you that it often fails to hold for the whole domain if you've ever took a single maths class) which otherwise clearly contradicts a well established fundamental result of economics. This is not a new theorem, if you're making the case that it cannot possibly hold in the real world in any way under any conceivable circumstances then you really ought to have a rock solid case already prepared, one that stands up to slightly more scrutiny than looking at any graph, literally any single one of them, and seeing that there is clearly a non-linear region there. You know, where all the people actually are. Maybe if you had the time to take a second math class you'd know that being able to fit a power law to the upper tail of a distribution is utterly meaningless considering you can fit it to the upper tail of basically any empirical distribution. You can go for sub- and superlinear PA schemes in your third one. The questions posed continue to be uninteresting, and they don't even have the honour of being accurate.

Mmm yeast flakes and vegemite, yum. I'm not even vegan and I can say that anyone who thinks only animals have B12 is missing out on some good shiit.

Well, I have no idea why a hypothetically omnipotent and benevolent god would allow bugs in my code to exist either. Unfortunately, not being omnipotent myself I have certain disadvantages in that regard.

There is no ethical issue in breaking materials, that we're aware of. Performing experiments that cause suffering to sapient beings, when sapience is clearly not required for the phenomena studied (humans without brains get cancer just fine) seems harder to justify ethically.

> All policies which affect the wealth distribution do so by moderating the gini coef, ie., the specific shape of the power-law -- they do not make it normal, uniform, etc. or however the ideologue would wish it to be.

Again, you are assuming your conclusion, and you do not even do us the favour of stating premises, which is hardly conducive to a productive discussion (or, any, really). On the other hand, it is quite fundamental to welfare economics that under a few assumptions, some unrealistic and some less so (namely: perfect information, fully internalised externalities, absence of market power, local nonsatiation and convexity of preferences and production) it is possible to reach any point on the Pareto frontier. The policies required to reach a desired point in such a toy model is left as an exercise for the reader. Now, the actual juicy questions here are how things like market power, externalities and imperfect information affect this? Is the model still a good approximation? To what extent are we able to correct things, and do we even want to? If we do, how best to do it?

> The "natural mechanism" of "fair procedures" in the case of systems wherein parts attach to other parts based on their current size

Again, you assert that it's "natural" and "fair" as if the result is a foregone conclusion. If it is inevitable that dx be a f(x) ~ x then yes, that's an exponential. Why would it be unnatural or unfair for dx to be instead a function of y, some other factor that has no proportionality to x? You are stating as a conclusion and premise that financial wealth experiences preferential attachment unconditionally, that is in essence, circular reasoning. What is the actual mechanism, the force, and how irresistible is it really? Would resisting it simply divert its effects to something else, for example, concentration of political rather than economic power?

Quite frankly, the dismissal of everything outside of a frankly ridiculously narrow space, where your model with an unspecified mechanism (which does achieve the results that you say it does) clearly must be an accurate reflection of the real world in all circumstances... Well, it gets old quite fast. If you really must use that model, describe and justify the accuracy of your proposed mechanism at least, if you please.

"Preferential attachment", to the level of detail that you have specified, is an observation that a thing occurs, not a mechanism, a reason or a force, or even an estimate of the rate. Modelling a process by circularly assuming that is how the process will work provides exactly zero information, and is how one comes to conclude that heavier objects accelerate under gravity faster than those lighter, or more analogously, the impossibility of aerostats, satellites and hyperbolic trajectories.

Instead, I would like to encourage those interested to consider and discuss the similarities and differences between capital income taxes and wealth taxes, between taxation and non-voting ownership of an asset, and between voting and non-voting ownership. What is the average rate of return on capital and what is the volatility? What is the difference between the CPI basket and that of the implicit GDP deflator and why? Those are all interesting questions to ask and answer.

Carroll is probably one of the better known researchers focusing on the evolution of cis-regulatory elements, non-coding sequences which regulate the expression of nearby genes. I would consider his 2005 book Endless Forms Most Beautiful to be a reasonable introduction. For something more less pop-sci I understand Davidson and Peter's (2015) Genomic Control Process has been fairly well received, as well. Though both are on the older side of things now, and admittedly I'm not too familiar with the current literature, they would probably be my recommendations. There are also non-gene regulatory elements of course.

A cynic would say that the right-wing isn't about efficient use of resources, it's about a justice where some people deserve to be kept trodden down even if it costs more to do so.

Lead-208 is the heaviest "stable" nuclide, assuming proton decay is not possible, but it is not the only stable nuclide. Excluding isotopes like argon-36 (which has an energetically permitted double electron capture to sulfur-36) and not considering possible spontaneous fissions for those A>92, there are still 146 nuclides (all of which Z<67) that are stable.

Incidentally, astute readers that have picked up on the fact that Pb has Z=82 which is larger than 66 should pat themselves on the back and note that the 4 isotopes all have a yet-to-be-observed decay to mercury, with half life of >1.4×10^20 years for 204 and experimental lower bounds of >10^21 for the other 3. Theoretically, 208 takes >10^124, which means 207 is "more" stable.

Shareholders of large public companies have limited ability to challenge the actions of directors, as proxy fights are in a majority of cases unsuccessful and shareholder lawsuits are also difficult as courts such as the Delaware Chancery are generally highly deferential applying the business judgement rule. For optimal effect, if non-corporate liability desired, suggest liability attach to directors and officers first instead.

Petrochemical use is currently what, about 20% of total crude oil use? Yeah we'll probably need to start at least trying to tackle that soon even if the CO2 in the atmosphere thing is more urgent, but there's no pressing need to be a viable plan for 100% reduction now if we won't even think about using it for probably a decade at least. We've got the time to move forward one small step at a time and then verify each step so it isn't like plastic recycling ("Oh yeah we'll totally do it" *dumps in lower income country*) and measurable goals on shorter timeframes (say, 30% reduction by 2030) are much more achievable and effective than a vague long term goal of not using any more oil ever, not even a little bit. There's no shame in picking the low hanging fruit first.

If they came in cereal boxes I wonder if it could help improve noninvasive BCI to the point of usability.

cripes does anybody remember Google People

"Making the knowledge" gives connotations of fundamental research to me, rather than the further development that private industry more often deigns to pick up the tab of, and ohhh boy...

Scientific publishing is possibly one of the biggest scams there is. The public funds scientists to do research who then haven't to pay the publishers for the privilege of publishing with them (no royalties! just the opposite!) The publishers who then send the papers out to reviewers who do what is essentially the entire point of the process, peer review, for free (reviewers almost never get paid) and then, once accepted for publication, they then charge exorbitant amounts for the same scientists (who want to do research, which requires knowing what your colleagues have done) to read that work.

Honestly, say what you will about Big Pharma, Disney or whoever else people usually complain about when it comes to abusing the state of intellectual property rights, but the sheer brazen balls of charging the people who actually do the work not once but twice, and charging everyone else as well (that's three!) Let's just say I'm glad cOAlition S was launched—and their current plans? Getting rid of APCs as well? *chefs kiss*. But yes, the exact models are something that are still currently being worked on, see PLOS: https://theplosblog.plos.org/2023/06/moving-away-from-apcs-a...

(Also covered, somewhat ironically, behind a paywall at Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03342-6)

Would be nice if a higher proportion of the profits accrued to the author though.

Exactly my thoughts, thank you. Most of my CC licenced work is under CC BY-SA. I would possibly be willing to licence under CC-BY, but certainly not CC0, and I believe I am well justified to do so, as would someone who prefers NC-SA or NC-ND. I don't see why the exploitation rights should be elevated on some pedestal even if it is a easy compensation scheme to set up. Then again I don't expect to change the minds of anyone so committed to the British model as juped clearly was, and I'm sure nor do they, mine.

I think there are certain benefits various continental models have over the British one. Assignment of copyright to the author, with a degree of non-transferability, advantages individuals rather than monopolistic corporation. Of course, a dualist system where the financial rights are explicitly separate and less enduring would perhaps be better still.

A quick summary of the takeaways of Vecellio et al.'s recent (October 2023) paper (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305427120) indicate that at +3.5 °C GMST we should expect high exposure to uncompensable heat stress every year primary around the Indus River Valley (India and surrounding countries) and the highly populated cities in eastern China. In North America, there is some exposure starting at +3°C but until +4 °C those exposures do not become substantial in the typical year.

Another thing noted is that urban features such as green spaces, water features, and increased shade may work where exceedance is typically nonhumid (i.e., North America, Middle East, Australia), these factors may not be as effective or even actively detrimental in more humid environments due to the added humidity.

According to 2019 EIA figures (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296), Natural gas plants in the US release about 43% the CO2 per unit energy of US coal plants. This is both because of higher energy per unit CO2 (would be about 56% per MJ or Btu or whatever) and better conversion efficiency. The highest thermal efficiency possible from a modern CCGT plant running at its ideal output is something like 60%, as there is a second steam cycle capturing the heat from the exhaust of the first turbine for more electricity. The numbers given for the efficiency of the fleet of gas plants in that article translate to about 44%, and 32% for coal.

Additionally, increased photosynthetic yield on some staple crops may not necessarily be the win that some people suggest it might be. While this is an area not yet very well studied, a number of papers have raised concerns regarding the nutritional quality of the resulting crops. Humans, after all, do not survive on a diet of exclusively carbohydrates.

See for example, Ebi, Kristie L., and Irakli Loladze. "[Elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate change will affect our food's quality and quantity.](https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(19)30108-1)" The Lancet Planetary Health 3, no. 7 (2019): e283-e284.

On longer time scales, in another century or two we could potentially deploy fusion at scale, depending on how that works out relative to space-based solar. In this one though, I'd agree the most effective way forward would be the one naturally arises without assuming massive changes to cost trajectories.

One thing to note is that there has been a systematic divergence between the implicit GDP deflator and the CPI (this is noted, e.g., by a 2012 article in Slate by Yglesias[1]). More generally, inflation is always measured using a basket of goods (and services) but there is no guarantee that a specific basket you're using for one purpose is suitable for any other.

[1]: https://slate.com/business/2012/08/the-price-index-divergenc...

Like CUPS or something?

I'm not sure that there's consensus among neuroscientists and electrical engineers and what-have-yous (who are presumably the people doing the project) that the influence of quantum effects would be any more significant than they are in a field effect transistor. Of course, the project could prove them wrong, but what a remarkable result that would be, to falsify a significant hypothesis with your first attempt.

> Do they?

Have the resources to develop zero days? Of course they do. Like, even Iran, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, etc have the resources required to either make their own zero days, pay someone unscrupulous for it or acquire them some other way. It only costs a few million.

> No, the US wrestles with these problems because we prefer to wrestle with them instead of sweeping them under the rug and hoping that "government" will somehow solve them without we the people having to get involved.

There's this fascinating concept called res publica that means that the public (you, the people) are supposed to do this "government" thing. I've been told you've actually got some of it in the US. Of course, it's entirely possible that what you have is so dysfunctional that the demos have entirely given up their right and responsibility in running the place, but I don't think that's actually true.

While you'll always have a special place in my heart for beta testing the modern version, some of you haven't let that develop into a chauvinism that prevents one from seeing good things elsewhere that might be applicable at home (or for that matter, good things at home which might be applicable elsewhere, because home is completely and utterly incomparable in every way, and one needs not ever even bother finding out) and that's certainly better governance than trying the same thing over and over again, and somehow expecting better results.