NickM

took advantage of...the political narrative...to raise prices for more profit

I genuinely don't understand why so many people think this matters. What do you think would have happened if companies had decided to raise prices without having an "excuse" like this?

Prices aren't kept under control by consumer outrage; we all may be mad about food prices, but we all still have to eat anyway. Yes companies are bragging about being able to raise prices, but it's not "because they can", it's because there's a supply/demand mismatch.

The cause of that mismatch is complicated and varies by market sector, but this isn't some case of like, they couldn't raise prices in the past because people would get too mad at them, but now they've finally figured out how to fool everyone into not getting mad. It's clearly a much more nuanced situation we're in, no?

If you lose $100, and you get to deduct that $100 loss, then that saves you the taxes on $100, but unless the marginal tax rate is somehow greater than 100% then you have still lost money.

I assume this will become more ubiquitous as charging speeds continue to increase.

(You're right that a megawatt is a high power draw in the context of normal household electricity usage, but keep in mind that if you can pump ten gallons of gas in a minute you're effectively drawing the equivalent of something like 20MW, so in the context of vehicle refueling it's not so crazy.)

Can you share more information on this? Who is this doctor you're referring to?

I have no personal experience or affiliation with that company, but I read about them the other day and it seems like a cool concept that could help a lot of people that have issues with normal LCD screens.

That seems consistent with OP's comment of "SSRIs...mostly don't differ from placebo" (emph added).

Also not addressed in the paper is the fact that SSRIs and SNRIs have well-known and pronounced side effects, with make it questionable whether double-blind studies are really fully blinded.

Investing in Bitcoin is like investing in shares of a company that produces nothing, and which only is able to fund its continued operations by continuing to issue and sell more shares once every ten minutes. Investing in a real compay that worked that way would be considered crazy, but somehow it’s supposed to be different because it’s decentralized. The financial implications are the same though; it’s a negative sum game instead of a positive sum game.

That’s why it’s more like gambling than an investment. The amount of money that comes back out is always going to be less than the amount that goes in, in the end.

And sure, maybe bringing huge amounts of rare earth metals back might reduce the price a bit, but to the point where rare earth elements are cheaper per mass unit than water?

I'm frankly surprised it hasn't had more of an impact; it really does seem like SSRIs are causing a lot of harm to a lot of people in the form of side effects, and the scientific evidence seems to point strongly toward them being no better than any other active placebo. Yet, they continue to be prescribed in ever-increasing numbers.

State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.

By this definition, NPR is not state-affiliated.

If the Bitcoin miners in upstate NY are just using generation capacity that would otherwise go unused, why does their presence seem to be having such a dramatic effect on local energy prices?

But, of course, when demand goes up, prices go up for everyone; more demand isn't going to lead to the creation of more natural resources, so the benefits of cheap hydro are limited, and usage of them is a zero-sum game. Power companies have no incentives to discourage crypto miners, because obviously increased demand leads to more profits for them, while meanwhile the externalized costs are being paid largely by households and small local businesses.

You could make miners pay more for electricity, but unless you charge them so much that it's no longer profitable and they go away, they're still going to be using that electricity, to the detriment of everyone else in the area. Better to just ban them entirely, IMO, but it's pretty hard for politicians to just unilaterally kill off entire businesses, even bad ones like these.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3779720

tl;dr: they found that the increased electricity rates costs households and small businesses in the area hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

In 2009, NY started working on a high-speed rail study, which finally completed last month after 14 years. Now, the completed version of the study recommends a 25-year project that will increase train speed from 80MPH to...wait for it...90MPH.

Insanity.

This is a common misconception. One big reason it's not true is because the vast majority of the wealth in the economy is stored in assets other than money (real property, stock, bonds, etc.), so doubling the money supply is very different from doubling the amount of wealth everyone has.

Now I imagine some might still be skeptical, but luckily this has been studied, and there are metrics like M2 that represent money supply. If you look at a graph of M2 vs inflation, they look pretty independent, and indeed studies have failed to find any statistically significant correlation between the two.

By your logic, nobody would ever want to take up running as a hobby either, since no human could ever run as fast as a cheetah.

Chess is still popular, despite AI being able to defeat the best humans.

Good ways to upgrade homes that use radiators to use heat pump heating seems like a big gap in the market right now (though, not sure if this is just a market problem or a gap in the technology, since my understanding is that radiators need higher temperatures than forced air systems).

Like the article says, it's often with food where I wouldn't expect to find artificial sweeteners, but there's a very distinctly odd, kind of sickly sweet taste that I'll notice sometimes; whenever I do, I check the ingredients label and always find fake sugar on the list.

Regardless of the effects it may or may not have on the brain, the paper mentions that "the differences might be side-effects of long-term mild inflammatory reaction", and for general health reasons I'd certainly prefer not to have permanent long-term mild inflammation.

I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent poster's point of view, as I do think there are big societal changes leading to decreased mental health that are unrelated to the way we treat mental illness...but I do think the increase in usage of psychiatric drugs is a big problem, and may at least partly explain the increased suicide rates.

Writing off a loss on your taxes does not cancel out that loss, it only lessens it a bit. Shareholders still lose lots of money if the company they hold shares in goes bankrupt.

Perhaps you already understood that, but your comment makes it sound like you think tax writeoffs mean that shares can go to zero and the shareholders won't ultimately lose anything. This is very much not the case.