There is also evidence that they might only work better than a typical placebo because the side effects make them an "active placebo", triggering a stronger placebo response. i.e. if you take a pill that doesn't make you feel any different, you may wonder if it's working, but if you feel weird and have unpleasant side effects then you know it's doing something.
This is particularly underappreciated in the research done on these drugs, because a double-blind study isn't actually double-blind if many of the participants can easily tell whether they're in the placebo group due to very noticeable side effects.
It's been mentioned in other comments, but I really recommend the work of Irving Kirsch on this; he's a brilliant scientist and his book The Emperor's New Drugs is a real eye-opener.
It’s worse than a zero sum game; unless the utility gained outweighs the value of all the energy spent on mining (which it clearly doesn’t) then it’s actually a negative sum game.
Potassium deficiency is actually very common. It's extremely hard to get the recommended daily amount of potassium in your diet, as even high-potassium foods like bananas contain only ten or fifteen percent of the recommended daily intake per serving.
As far as I can tell, this is mainly a problem due to modern farming practices resulting in less nutritious produce; there have been studies done on the vitamin mineral content of food over the last century, and there has been a steady decline in a number of different nutrients, including potassium.
The trouble is, it's also hard to supplement. To avoid stomach issues, over the counter potassium supplements are limited to 99mg in the US, which is only a few percent of the recommended daily intake. If anyone has any good suggestions on how to regularly get enough potassium, I would love to hear them.
Sure, but there's a purely subjective aspect of consciousness, which by nature of being subjective, cannot be objectively quantified or measured. This puts it squarely outside the realm of science, which is deliberately and solely focused on measuring objective phenomena.
Number of openings is very much not the same as the number of jobs that exist; the article conflates the two, but it's entirely possible that many devs just don't want to work for crypto companies, so crypto job openings stay unfilled (and therefore visible) for longer than other types of Rust positions.
Does anyone know why the text content in the images is weirdly off from the prompts? I couldn’t tell if that’s just a known limitation of the model, or a result of the author giving the prompts in some other language or something.
I mean, sure when you frame it like that it sounds insane, but most cars these days have GPS that can look up the speed limit, so it would be relatively easy for modern cars to limit cruise control to refuse to allow speeding. Do you think every major car manufacturer is ignoring engineering safety standards and behaving recklessly and irresponsibly by implementing a driver assist feature (cruise control) that behaves illegally when the user asks it to?
There are absolutely other solutions. The problem is they don’t allow existing participants to extract as much money out of newcomers as PoW, so the artificial hype being generated around alternatives is much lower.
Even if gold were exclusively used as an investment, it would still be lower-carbon than Bitcoin. The energy spent per dollar of gold mined is much less than the energy spent per dollar of Bitcoin mined.
I don't think that's an example of whataboutism, given that one of the stated goals of autopilot is literally to provide a safer alternative to the status quo of humans driving manually; pointing out the riskiness of driving in general is not some unrelated thing that's being raised as a distraction from the real issue.
Ah good point, I was just thinking about the US, you’re right. They are still growing in EU and Asia though, and a lot of the popular EVs in China are serving a completely different price segment that Tesla isn’t even trying to compete in yet.
But currently MSTR is valued less than the value of its BTC, which implies a negative value for their legacy business
Or, alternatively it could also imply that the market thinks the future value of their BTC holdings will drop. It's still difficult and costly to short BTC directly, so I do wonder if negative sentiments about it might be reflected better in things like MSTR valuation than in the actual BTC spot price.
their market cap is now roughly equal to all other car makers combined
Well, they currently sell far more passenger electric vehicles than every other auto maker combined, and demand only seems to be increasing even as production continues to increase exponentially. Many countries and US states have gasoline car bans set to take effect in the coming decades; if the incumbent manufacturers continue to lag behind Tesla as badly as they've done so far, it would seem Tesla is poised to eat a lot of other car companies for lunch.
That alone still might not justify the current valuation, but then you add in their solar panels, solar roof tiles, stationary storage, and other things in the pipeline like insurance, renting out their EV charging network, possible AI applications and/or software licensing, etc. etc., and the valuation seems at least plausible to me.
In an environment where governments and central banks are strongly biased in favor of printing money, I see the possibility of deflation as extremely small.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but keep in mind that the amount of wealth in our economy is much greater than the amount of money; printing cash doesn't necessarily have as big an impact on inflation as one might think, because most value these days is in assets other than cash. You can see this in graphs of e.g. the M2 growth rate vs the inflation rate over time. If the existence of more cash directly caused inflation then those rates would be highly correlated, but instead they are only very loosely correlated and the M2 growth rate has far outstripped inflation in recent decades.
Look at how hard vegetarians and vegans have worked for decades and decades to try to convince people to replace foods they like with other types of food that they already eat but just don't like as much. The amount of success they've had is small, and the amount of backlash high.
With insects you're trying to convince people to replace foods they like with foods they literally find disgusting and have never eaten in their lives. Yes I'm sure it makes sense on paper, but I think you're drastically underestimating the cultural barriers on this one.
Because even in cases where cars have hit emergency vehicles, it's because the software didn't see the vehicles at all and just continued driving straight in its lane. Whatever flaws the Tesla vision system may have, the idea that it is programmed to deliberately seek out and crash into emergency vehicles seems pretty far-fetched (much less that it would mistake a person wearing a red coat for an emergency vehicle and therefore attempt to crash into it); I assume this is why people are downvoting you.
Agreed, though I'll add that on the very rare occasion that my Model 3 does lose the lane lines a bit, it tends to very quickly jerk back into the lane once it picks up the lines again. "it drifted slowly to the left, into my lane, before slowly going back into its own lane" does not sound like plausible autopilot behavior based on my experience; even if it was on autopilot and accidentally left the lane, it wouldn't slowly go back to it's lane, it would sharply correct itself as soon as it found out what happened.
Yes. The over-simplification of dopamine as some sort of pleasure chemical is frustratingly common.
Everyone seems to want to be able to explain every emotion and behavior as the byproduct of a neurotransmitter, e.g. "I'm addicted to the dopamine hits from my phone", "I'm sad because my serotonin is low", "I'm on an endorphin high from that workout", etc. etc.
Besides many of these examples being flat-out wrong, emotions in general are immensely more complex than the simple release of a single chemical in the brain. The belief that everything bad in the brain is just a "chemical imbalance" is a really harmful one IMO, as it turns people away from truly understanding their problems, and replaces any sort of deeper understanding with a desire to simplify everything down to pseudo-scientific brain chemistry quick fixes.
There are a lot of areas of crypto where I feel like I have a pretty good understanding, but I genuinely don't understand why anyone would "invest" in a stablecoin. What advantage does holding something like USDT offer over simply putting dollars in a bank account?
All true, and good points. However the marriage bonus for single earners is much greater than the bonus for double earners, so if you look at it from a certain angle there is sort of a penalty for dual earners vs sole breadwinner marriages.
Right, exactly. And besides the examples you mentioned, the differing income tax brackets on married couples is also a big example of this. If only one spouse is working, and the second spouse is deciding whether to get a job, then having all of the second spouse's income taxed at a higher marginal rate from the get go can easily influence people's decisions.
No, my comment said calculate total purchases for the year as (reported income minus reported money added to savings) which specifically does not require tracking any purchases, only income and contributions to bank/investment/retirement accounts and such.
By not tracking purchases individually, and only inferring the total amount of money spent by subtracting savings from income, you can also apply brackets to purchases, and thus avoid the regressive nature of a "simple" flat sales tax.
I think you're making some incorrect political assumptions about my views. I have no idea what this "FairTax" thing is that you're referring to, but that sounds like something pretty different from what I'm talking about.
Yes, this is correct. The technical term for this is an "in-kind" transfer, and while it might occasionally allow for things to slip through the cracks, it certainly hasn't stopped capital gain reporting requirements from being both feasible and largely effective.
Right, but the problem cited earlier up in the thread is that sales tax would prevent anonymous purchases; if you accept that income is not anonymous (which it already isn't), then you can still have a system with both sales tax and anonymous purchases.
Not sure why I got downvoted; while it's not super well-known, this is a real and potentially feasible idea that has been studied by economists and has had papers written about it. You can absolutely apply tax brackets to sales tax to avoid making it a regressive tax, it's just a little bit more administratively complex.
It could be done anonymously if you calculate purchases implicitly as income minus savings. This would de-anonymize savings of course, but they’re not really that anonymous right now anyway since most methods of savings have to report interest/dividends/etc.