foolswisdom

Why is a council of seven better for the executive branch?

> The way America was designed may have been pretty novel / innovative at the time but we've learned so much since then about how to build better democracies.

Well, a lot of dysfunction in government is the result of later evolution, whether evolution of circumstances or of government.

As an example, the combination of senate filibuster (which was around from the earliest days) with the reconciliation workaround (which is pretty recent) results in omnibus bills, which is a well-known driver of partisanship (because you don't talk to the other party at all in order to pass your bill on the floor), and also has significant consequences to individual responsibility (for the same reason, that omnibus bill must pass for your party to do anything, so you can't be faulted for voting for it, and instead you look for carve outs for your interests. If you do decide to hold up the whole bill like the freedom caucus tried, then you get everyone against you and you will eventually fold).

This also has repercussions that for things that can't go through reconciliations, just because the usual way of doing things involves more party dependence (than it would to pass bills another way). This of course also gives more power to those running the party within the chambers of congress.

My point is that things evolve, and people tend to try to explain the current state of things with reference to the 18th century, and while I definitely believe we should evolve systems to be better, we shouldn't ignore evolution that's already occurred.

It's also possible that OP means short term savings kept for circumstances like these, and long term investments bear more cost (e.g. keeping money in a money market fund vs in stocks has different tax implications when you take the money out).

> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.

It's probably a weighted average, as described earlier in the article.

Part of the problem is that many of the issues are not really critical, no?

The argument is that the need for abstraction doesn't mean we must reuse an existing concept. We should be able to talk about corporations as entities and talk about what laws or rights should apply, without needing to call them people.

> Nike’s Project Amplify is the world’s first powered footwear system for running and walking,

So this is straight up false?

The nature of a free market is that someone wins the competition, and the winner is then happy to figure out ways to prevent anyone from competing at all (this kind of action doesn't require a complete winner either, but I'm focusing on a thought experiment here).

Ergo, if you care about maintaining a free market, then you care about limiting what kind of moves you can make in the free market, in order to preserve a free market. A truly free market with no rules has an end state where it is not a free market, more like a much more sophisticated version of the nobles of the land owning everything. So we declare many activities that make it difficult for others to compete that are not simply about manking a better product, "anti-competitive" and illegal.

Wait, this actually happens?

I actually came here expecting this to be a language model application of that recursive reasoning paper.

As noted by sibling comments, the arm of the Healthcare company that wons the doctor's office wants to collect as much as possible, while the insurance arms are anyway capped at how much they can make. Incentives (conflict of interest) are towards paying more.

You make it sound like the newspapers/companies are un-culpable for that effect. I believe it to be the case because I've seen cases were a newspaper presents a narrative as fact when those involved know very well it's just someone's spin for their own benefit. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect>.

We don't know at all that AI will actually make Google search moot.

> Section 11 point 4

You must be looking at something other than the terms of service you linked, because section 11 has no point numbering (and just in case, the fourth paragraph of section 11 says nothing of the sort).

I really don't know what you're talking about. There's nothing about commercial use in section 11 (nor does the language you quoted above appear anywhere in the Searching "business" and "commercial" makes it easy to verify this).

What is says there is

> Evaluation and Additional Services. In some cases, we may permit you to evaluate our Services for a limited time or with limited functionality. Use of our Services for evaluation purposes are for your personal, non-commercial use only.

In other words, you're not allowed to trial their services while using the outputs for commercial purposes.

Why? It's not obvious that an employee works 2080 hours, for example, because they take vacation (or work extra), so charging a 2100th of salary doesn't cover vacation benefit. Also, the employer will pay part of health insurance, and that isn't included in the salary number, so why would it be covered by a calculation from the salary.

When I read

> My rule of thumb as a contractor is to take the hourly rate x2100 to get an equivalent full-time salary plus benefits, 401k, vacation, etc.

I thought you meant to include everything on top of salary. Reading it again after this thread, maybe you meant to this is the calculation for hourly from full time salary, and then you need to also do ("plus") a calculation for everything else.

Seems like it was originally CC-BY-NC.

Can you tell us more about the phoning home?

This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.

The primary goal of big companies is (/has become) maintaining market dominance, but this doesn't always translate to a well run business with great profits, it depends on internal and external factors. Maybe profits should have actually gone down due to tarrifs and uncertainty but the big companies have kept profit stable.

> It does appear that this is part of a site-wide refactor where some material got lost because the same truncation is visible in the annotation page

You mean that if you already assume it wasn't malicious, there must be a problem that affected multiple pages because the source material in the build somewhere got lost.

Power is power when it is exercised, and power can be exercised when people think you have the power. Overly formalizing things and ignoring how they play out is why congress is today a dysfunctional body, for example. See also here for an example in practice https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/dead-letter-live-...

Why not? Congress is meant to be a check on the other branches of government (though the filibuster rule / partisan omnibus bill system has degraded its collective will, which is why they won't do anything), so pre-emptively removing the powers of congress from the list sounds like a power grab. It's not like it's something completely irrelevant. Same for the limitations of government listed there.

Besides, the thing about organizations is that they encourage behaviors. A big corporation encourages different behaviors than a startup, and different company cultures can also encourage / optimize for different things. There's also a reason why we do expect ultimate responsibility to rest with leaders.

It's worth noting that the METR paper that found decreased productivity also found that many of the developers thought the work was being sped up.

It's difficult to fix because the incentive is to make sure it has the answer, not to give it lots of questions to which there are known answers but have it answer "I don't know" (if you did that, you'd bias the model to be unable to answer those specific questions). Ergo, in inference, on questions not in the dataset, it's more inclined to make up an answer because it has very few "I don't know" samples in general.

Well, meat wasn't mentioned, unless fish counts.

What setting is this? I can only find "Enable machine learning powered autofill suggestions" which seems to have defaulted to on.

That's because it's obvious due to effects other than the one you're trying to observe. Which is of course the case when you're dealing with psychedelics (and of course many other drugs).