scoofy

Futures contracts exist as insurance contracts. The fact that people can trade them as gambling items doesn't mean they exist as gambling.

Almost anything can be gambling if you make it gambling. Effectively all the assets in the securities world that can be bought and sold as derivatives exist to facilitate and existing industry by offsetting risk.

There is a world of difference between someone treating corn futures as a roulette wheel, and an entire industry existing whose sole purpose is pure gambling with all of the negative externalities that fall out of that:

>I reported an Iranian missile strike... then gamblers who had wagered millions on a deranged bet threatened to kill me

https://www.dailymail.com/yourmoney/article-15651989/polymar...

Any road, no matter how small, prevents the area around the businesses from being a social space.

If you can’t put a picnic table on it, it’s a place where movement must be prioritized over recreation.

I invested in an AI security seed fund started this year exactly because everyone knew that was in the know on the matter all thought we were about to hit a wall of major security problems.

The biggest monetary risk is obviously is the frontier labs, and the variability of seed companies in general, but I really just can't wrap my head around the frontier labs being able to communicate with all the businesses about their individual security needs.

Companies that just do Red Team simulated attacks to find and expose tech debt are going to be critical to literally just communicating these vulnerabilities to management.

I think the real issue we are facing isn't the 40 years of tech debt, that's obviously real, but the real issue is communicating to non-technical management of companies of basically any size that they absolutely need to prioritize this stuff. People don't understand that we're going to live in a world where every single 0-day is going to be figured out in 48 months, and it's going to be easy pickings if you don't take this stuff extremely seriously.

Remove cars, let people have a pint in the sun. The vast majority of the failure of the city is that we’ve moved so far away from what a city is, instinctually, that we don’t notice that they are entirely unpleasant places to be now.

We've build our urban centers as places that prioritize cars over people, and we're suddenly confused as to why people don't want to spend time in them.

I grew up in Texas when football was basically religion. My parents flatly forbid me from playing. Any other sport was fine, no football. Every single person I knew on the team ended up with at least some kind of minimal, permanent injury. This was a decade before there were publications about CTE.

I'm quite thankful that I never ended up on the team, and think the entire concept of high school football is incredibly stupid given what we know about CTE.

So, this is actually my wheelhouse. I did Philosophy of Language in grad school (multiple grad schools) focusing on ambiguity and implicature.

The interesting issue here is that we have a reversal of the function of language. Language is effectively a complicated form of pointing at things: what is a "bridge" we can point at bridges where we agree. Here, we're starting with the word and trying to point at all the things that word applies to, hence we're doing it backwards. We'll start fighting when we get to the corner cases because the rule of "bridge" isn't meant to be stretched to corner cases. This isn't an issue in life because the function of jargon is to cover corner cases. It's all well and good to that thing on your skin a "mole," but when you're in the doctors office, it's much easier for them to adjust the precision of their language between a "common nevus" and a "dysplastic nevus."

Here again, we're just pointing at things with language, but the resolution is turned up. The language should be serving the concepts, not the other way around. When language fails us -- when we don't have a word for what we're pointing at -- it's trivial to coin a new term or adopt a loan word from another language.

In a sense, here, the reason legalese exists is exactly because lawmakers want to adjust the resolution to prevent these types of problems. Otherwise they the same process will happen, but it will happen in the courts.

For me "vehicle" means "a singular thing designed and able to move people around under it's own power or via a powering mechanism that people generate themselves" and "in the park" means "touching the park": hence the memorial is not a vehicle because it no long able to move people around. However I see the sled and the surfboard as vehicles because they are designed to move people under the power of gravity/waves.

My definition, however, is fairly arbitrary and not actually significant except to the way I communicate. J.L. Austin, if I remember correctly, wanted to create a Descriptivist dictionary where they would literally just go around regions and countries asking people what they meant by words... unfortunately, he died very young and the project never happened.

Where I disagree most with the linguists I talk to is that I believe that the concept of "correctness" is instinctual to language, insofar is people care passionately about prescriptive rules. I just think that we can be descriptivists, and see language as a map where people are arguing about borders. That we believe these borders real, and are "correct" or "incorrect" in our tribe is important to the usefulness of the language and our survival, even if they are ultimately entirely arbitrary. Thus, I've always speculated that an instinctual "correctness" value would show up, and we very much see it everywhere -- like in this game -- and the concept basically has to be unlearned by most people when they really get into learning about language.

Nuclear power is inherently part of the electric spectrum. I really hope you're not arguing with me on that. Solar and wind are as well, but we will need plants and physical batteries, and nuclear is a big part of that base power to pull from.

I was talking more about general decarbonization.

The solution was, and still is, urbanism and electrification… not living with less.

Literally the leftist dense cities have been the ones pushing back hardest against high rises, sustainable transportation alternatives, and in large part, electrification through overly restrictive environmental laws designed in the 70s.

That’s over now. Climate change is here, and you still can’t convert a house to a duplex in LA without jumping through a thousand hoops.

I completely agree. That still doesn’t make degrowth a sensible position.

It doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" if it's not a politically viable position.

That I think it's an idiotic position is beside the point. Things and prosperity generally are not the problem, and can grow pretty much indefinitely for the foreseeable future if it's done in a reasonable and sustainable way.

Third-parties are generally full of eccentrics (remember that the UK is still FPTP, even if they're a multi-party system). Eccentrics typically aren't the "very serious" types looking at tradeoffs.

The large portion of the environmentalist left are degrowthers who literally want people to just live with less, which means "less energy" is actually good. It will never be a politically viable position, but again, we're talking about a party that until recently has never come close to wielding power.

>Authors of the voting rights act understood that the former is so often a veneer for the latter that they are functionally the same thing.

You can't say this with a straight face. Before the civil rights act we literally had white's only sections of businesses. Separate-but-unequal was the apartheid of the South. That just doesn't exist anymore in any kind of open and accepted way, thank god.

>You essentially argue that policymakers should enjoy the right to quietly undermine minority voting power up until the point where they explicitly say "and I'm doing this because I'm a racist targeting minorities".

Again, I'm not saying that at all, the Supreme Court isn't saying that either. You are again conflating minorities as a singular voting bloc with a singular voting interest. The entire point here is that there is plenty of evidence that this is about politics, not about race.

I think gerrymandering is atrocious. I think we should move to a proportional voting system where gerrymandering is no longer achievable. The idea that 25% of a population can dictate government control to the other 75% of the population by drawing arbitrary lines is atrocious. I just think it's quite clear that this isn't happening to suppress the vote along racial lines.

The idea here is that I think it's quite plausible that black republicans are being used along gerrymandering line to help elect republicans. If it were about race... then black republicans would also need to be disenfranchised.

Jim Crow was very obviously terrible... it was also very overt and obvious. I grew up in Texas, and the idea that the right is a secret cabal of racists trying to create some kind of white government is insane. The idea that the general socioeconomic concerns of the black community put most black voters on the political left makes vastly more sense, and it also explains the significantly larger numbers of Hispanic representatives on the Texas right.

It's not one data point. There is plenty of evidence that this is about politics... not about race.

Yea, if we bail out, we should nationalize the failed companies through the failure chain. Not just give them free money.

The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.

Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.

The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.

I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.

The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.

It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.

I say this as a lefty.

Anti-trust legislation is all well and good, but worthless when politicians are corrupt.

The level of bullshit the tech industry puts up with without unionizing continues to baffle me.

We are two decades past illegal no-poaching schemes. We've live with very obviously maliciously compliant H1-B abuse. We're getting to the point where programmers expecting high compensation to be asked to be professional prompt engineers, when they know the output is likely unsafe for production.

Yet nobody unionizes. Yea, unions have problems, but they don't have to. You don't have to vote for assholes that use protectionist tactics. You can just ask for a 40 hour work week to mean 40 hours, and vacation to mean vacation.

Social recluses do not become president of a major nation state.

I mean, to be fair, the restriction on freedom is the real punishment. I don't think anyone could honestly say that house arrest isn't genuinely undesirable, especially for rich and powerful people.

What's the point of having all that money and power if you can't actually do the things you want?

My point is only that with Amazon stock, even well after the dotcom crash, the valuation only made sense if they were going to become the biggest, most important company in the world.

At the time, I didn't know whether or not they would become the biggest, most important company in the world. They did in the end, but if you live your life betting on every company whose valuation depends on them becoming the biggest, most important company in the world, you're gonna have a bad time.

I'm old enough to remember when IPO's existed to generate equity financing for growing companies. Now they exist to facilitate exit liquidity for mature companies, but a two decades of near-zero interest rates and enough inflation and wealth consolidation to make the "qualified investor" requirements trivial will do that. We're living in the days of the pink sheets again, where you really have to invest in small companies with very little reporting on them, but you already have to be wealthy to have access to those investments.

> My main thing is - why would I buy their stock at the rumored valuation? Regardless of anything else that valuation is basically saying all their growth has been captured, unless they literally take over the world.

I didn't buy Amazon in the early '00s for this reason, and I won't buy Anthropic for this reason. Maybe I lose out, but I like to invest in stocks that look like good investments.

I actually wrote a thesis on this in graduate school, and completely disagree with the author.

The problem with this argument isn't that natural language programming leads to vague/ambiguous code that would lead to errors. The problem is that the machine does not inform you of the ambiguity. Rational humans do just fine when they interact because they can identify these problems. Programming would work just find if context were identify and clarified while the code was being written.

If I were to tell a program to "buy political ads in Portland," yea, the point is that the program would need to know which Portland I mean. Otherwise it might accidentally think I mean Portland, OR, instead of Portland, ME:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/25-000-mistake-...

Humans can do the same thing if they're not being careful. The point is, the vast, vast, vast majority of time, someone would just say "wait, you mean Portland, Maine, right?" and you'd say "yes" and that would be that.

> I really don't see how a flash-bang grenade is justified against a person sitting in front of a computer, doing non-violent crimes.

People who pretend that nonviolent crimes are some kind of special thing always confuse and annoy me. Coups can be nonviolent, should we avoid flashbangs against a group trying to undermine a democracy? The seriousness of the crime is what should matter, not whether a threat of bodily harm was involved. Are you destroying someone’s life is what matters.

We are talking about an organization ruining people’s livelihoods. Dozens and dozens of lives wrecked. Millions stolen.

Yes, less-lethal force is very obviously justified.

Yea, I started out thinking "well you just use the thing to find citations." Then I realized all this article is just: "I lied on the internet and people believed me, isn't that crazy!?!"

This type of behavior is why gatekeeping institutions exist. We all pay a non-trivial cost because someone thinks that other people taking their lies seriously is somehow remarkable. It's not.

Research is hard work. Publishing fake research is just intentionally throwing wrenching into the machine of academia. All you've done is reinforce the need for gatekeepers (which never went away), show that some no-name journal isn't rigorous (they often aren't), and you've wasted a bunch of people's time demonstrating why institutions exist, when we know why they exist.

Genuinely terrible behavior.

Guns or butter. I’m choosing guns because I have taken a game theory class.

Whether and how we pollute is a political choice. That we want to is a problem unrelated to defense.

I think the relevant law is the fourth amendment, settled in Katz v. United States in 1967:

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

But growth will surely come this time (sigh)

I mean, there is a big grey area between immigrants here who are:

undocumented and here temporarily (most people oppose this),

undocumented and here permanently (the left is split on this, the right is mostly against it),

documented and here temporarily (most people are fine with this, especially tourists),

documented and here temporarily with an option to become permanently (many oppose this because it's impacting employment, especially with H-1B abuse),

documented and here permanently with no intention of becoming citizens (many people on the right don't like this for assimilation reasons),

documented and here permanently an a path to citizenship (most people support this except the extreme right),

former immigrants who are now citizens (nearly everyone supports these people).

The problem is that all of this is put under a single umbrella called "immigration," but it includes so many sub-issue like rule of law and assimilation preferences that you can't have a serious debate on it.

If you want to have a discussion about "what art is" I think I would end up arguing that people creating AI art are artists.

My point is it doesn't matter. All art ultimately boils down to is doing something cool, and then pointing at it. The vast, vast, vast majority of "art" is not paid and never was. Even the art that is called "art" has little-to-nothing to do with effort. Duchamp's "readymades" are basically less effort that typing a prompt into AI.

That said, nobody has to like Duchamp's readymades. Nobody has to like anyone's art. The point of art is that you can like it or not. It's not objective, but the vast majority of people are going to pretend that it is, but that's fine because it's actually not.

The kind of essentialism people hold between the object and the meaning of the object is effectively inseparable, and it's pointless to argue that it's not or shouldn't be. I write in the golf space. There have been many, many replica golf courses built, and they have been largely unsuccessful, except one that is barely open to the public. The have been mostly unsuccessful not because they don't replicate the originals well, but that the vast majority of folks don't want a facsimile, even if it's fine.

I don't live like that, you don't live like that, but most people do, and they have ever right to. Humans aren't analytical engines. Evolutionary biology has pushed us strongly towards caring deeply about meaning, identity, and respect. This is normal and has to be unlearned. Good luck with that. Other people don't have to like and respect art for you to.