CGMthrowaway

Of course it is. It's "The People's House." Look up the Great Cheese Levy of 1837, Lincoln's Office Hours, Coolidge's reception on New Years 1927 or Jackie Kennedy literally giving an "MTV Cribs" on TV in 1962. Or consider, if you can remember, the outcry when they permanently closed Pennslvania Avenue in 1995. Or when they closed Lafayette Square in 2020.

>No human can go edit a brain to become better at math

Weights are just the output of training, right? So can't "no human" be replaced with... a parent? a teacher? a textbook?

Does Figure 1 account for lower GDP due to higher taxes?

Raw milk, anti-vaccine, homeschooling etc used to be solidly the purview of the West Coast liberal. Somewhere along the line it flipped polarity entirely.

All news is politics news now in the US. Didn't used to be like that. (Dear readers, go watch some old 80s-90s TV news broadcasts on youtube if you don't believe me)

Or corporate espionage

I think Elon's big political contributions didn't begin until 2024, so pretty recent.

Do we know who was the largest individual political donor prior to Elon?

> Humanities 10a will tentatively include works by Homer, Sophocles, Sappho, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Mary Shelley, Marx, Kafka, Du Bois, and Morrison.

I had read all of these authors before college, with the exception of Sappho/du Bois - which feel like "modern" additions to a traditional survey - but my school was good about classics and American lit.

What are high school kids assigned to read these days, if not these authors?

Third - a rogue IC that doesn't fully answer to congress or/nor the president

May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.

Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."

What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)

SNAP is not provided on an individual basis? Quite sure you have to apply for it, on an individual basis.

>Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.

That's not a sound refutation. For example, 100% of published opinion can be 100% anti-Floc, while still being composed of 50% real people and 50% astroturf.

Perhaps you misunderstood my comment.

One thing that can be derived from this effect is that the mind influences reality through observation. The mind creates, by directing focused intention/attention on a particular outcome. The body is the final link between mind focus and reality/human experience

As with most antistate issues today, there is a mix of bots/institutional interference (both foreign and domestic), and real people. Both can be true.

This article makes a good point. Surveillance pricing is not different from means-testing for government benefits. If the government gives SNAP benefits for groceries to the needy, why not the grocery store itself offer reduced prices? Might even reduce the burden placed on SNAP

Anybody that visits near the Wieliczka Salt Mine (outside Krakow) must take a tour. It's incredible. Lick the walls (they are sanitary). My favorite part was the craftsmanship - chandeliers, relief of the Last Supper, etc entirely formed by unskilled workers hands in their spare time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieliczka_Salt_Mine

Why is a murmuration of starlings so pleasing to watch?

It would not take 5 years for a competing interest to complete a takeover bid of the water utility and implement faster/better fixes. Nor would it take 5 years for water customers (if they could) to divert the money that funds the municipal water district away from them and towards an alternative like water filtration or truck deliveries

Accounting earnings are not simply the markup on electricity, or revenue collected from electric customers minus the cost of supplying them. NEE's financials include many other things such as investment earnings, gains from the sale of assets, energy futures and tax credits

It's not clear what public company status has to do with anything, but it's easy to point out that there is plenty of extraction and hollowing out on both the private and public company sides of the economy.

>The interests of the shareholders diverge quite strongly from the interests of electrical utility customers

That is true for most businesses. People in different circumstances have different economic wants and needs, that is a neutral fact.

The parasistism you describe is only enabled by barriers to competition.

Only if it's in updateable software. Hardware takes longer to correct.

Hence Sam Altman's latest public comment: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."

>only at unrealistic levels of bad

Bad water or water service is not unrealistic.

It took FIVE YEARS for Flint Michigan's water to be re-declared "safe to drink without a filter." The solution involved FEMA and the National Guard.

That can't have been the best way.

"Shareholder value" is just another way of saying return on capital. Do you want to reduce return on capital? (the answer could be yes or no, just advancing the discussion)

Or do you want to redistribute the ownership of capital?

This guy thinks waste in government is only 15%.

At the low end, the GAO estimates of federal spending, 3-7% is fraud, 3% is improper payments, 7-10%+ is legal but wasteful (e.g. zombie programs) - totaling 13-20%.

In the middle, DOGE (don't smite me, just citing multiple sources) estimated 30-33% was waste.

And at the high end, the American public according to Gallup polling perceives 59% to be waste. https://www.cato.org/blog/americans-say-federal-govt-wastes-...

Even if there is only one set of pipes under the street, the owner of those pipes is constrained from acting in a predatory way if the market is free. They are disciplined by potential competition (if prices too high or lets the water quality drop, it suddenly becomes financially viable for a competitor to dig a rival pipe, or set up localized system, or offering water trucking to your site).

Under a government-granted monopoly, that threat is legally banned (except for maybe water trucking)

What was the hypothesis here, did we think they would be charging less?

>Good example is ETOPS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETOPS - some time ago, we required flights over ocean to have three or four engines. Now, reliability improved a lot, and the engines got good enough that single-engine operation is not so catastrophic as before.

And yet, single-engine jets are prohibited from operating under Part 121 and must use Part 135 (the analogy here might be to an apartment building where the developer takes on the responsibility of structural code-compliance and safety, vs. a single-family home where the homeowner does).

There's a big difference in going from 4 to 2 engines, vs going from 2 to 1. And to be certified single engine jets must have battery backups, rapid depressurization tech, and a host of other things twin engines don't have to. In one case (Vision Jet) they use a whole-plane parachute to compensate for the lack of a backup powerplant

Sounds like a decoherence trap

>We don't really need multiple exits in case of fire because fires are occurring less often and people are getting plenty of warning.

I'm not a fire expert but I don't think that logic holds. The point is redundancy. If one exit gets blocked, you have another one you can use. Hospitals don't stop carrying backup power supply for life-saving equipment just because "the power grid downtime has improved."