Agreed. The promise that limiting renter's choice to a single provider would result in beneficial cost savings was one of those lies that everyone knows is a lie the moment they hear it, yet everyone with decision making power pretends it is the truth (and many other adjacent parties just thoughtlessly repeat it).

Similar to "this merger will allow us to eliminate wasteful spending on competition and thus offer higher quality service at lower prices, without firing anyone!"

Or "disallowing third parties from making repairs will keep our clients safe"

I could go on, but I wouldn't be saying anything novel or revelatory.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

When I was a kid, we too had stupid things. Besides elephant jokes (how many elephants can you fit in a VW Beetle? Five -- two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove box), the dumbest joke I remember was to run up to a friend fast and breathless and demand "Guess what!" as if you'd seen a UFO or fire engine run by, then shout "Langendorf bread, that's what!" and run away cackling like Kamala Harris.

There are other forms of crazy that also motivate self-cutting. Some forms of dissociative identity disorder include strong feelings of being fake, as in not a real person. One might think they are a robot or an animated manikin or similar. Of course this sounds unrealistic (and unlikely) to most of us because we don't experience this. But for people who suffer these episodes, they are extremely disturbing.

So they cut themselves to see their own blood. It helps alleviate the anxiety of the condition. Seeing their own blood helps ground them in their sense of being an actual living creature. Apparently, feeling the pain can help with this too. Though if episodes are lengthy, one cut isn't enough, because the blood dries and resembles plastic, which adds more fuel to the fire.

On a different spectrum, as I understand, there is "sympathy-seeking" cutting, where people cut themselves so their injuries will be seen by others who will then offer support and sympathy and attention. Our society tends to take a pretty dim view of this one, seeing it as mere selfishness or immaturity. Which it may be, in some cases. But in cases of extreme feelings of isolation, loneliness, rejection, etc., the emotional imbalances are enough to drive on to depression and suicide, so it can actually be indicative of a serious condition, and a legit cry for help.

I have read about religious cutting as well, as in "stigmata," where a person internalizes an expectation that this should be happening to them (from their religious upbringing) and experiences cognitive dissonance when it doesn't happen for too long, and wind up doing this to themselves with only semi-awareness so they can then surprise themselves at the discovery of the injury mere moments later.

"Ok class, the next time anyone disrupts class with an outburst like that, they will go into detention. Furthermore, any time any one of you does this, you are all getting extra homework assignments for the day, that will affect your grade."

Back it up with action.

Of course, I have never worked as a teacher and have no idea what the problem with this is. I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025...

It's a legal blog with a legal perspective.

It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.

I don't know what what means?

One example is AlphaFold an AI program which predicts folded protein structures "with near experimental accuracy" from amino acid base sequences. This ability is going to have a huge impact on many practical problems like pharmaceutical development, agricultural science, and engineering custom proteins. For example, since the human genome has been long since sequenced, the program means we now, with a fairly high degree of certainty, know what all the protein coding sequences make.

I'd say that's a pretty significant result.

If you work in technology long enough, you see this over and over. Every time something new comes along, it's actual usefulness gets buried in the breathless media response by a mountain of bullshit. But that doesn't mean the uses aren't real.

I had no concern with Joe Biden being Catholic, but I *would* think something was fishy with the *Electoral College* if six of the last nine presidents were Catholic given that fewer than one in five Americans are Catholic.

I'm not saying Catholics (or Jews) shouldn't serve on the Supreme Court, although maybe it would be good idea to have some justices who weren't Catholic or Jewish. Maybe an atheist, or polytheist.

One of the casualties of the Internet has been newspaper science desks. In the post Sputnik era, major city newspapers built teams of reporters with science and technology backgrounds to cover breaking science stories. To make use of that manpower in between big stories, they'd do a weekly science supplement, which was one of my favorite parts to read. These bureaus even had people on staff who could cover breaking news in *mathematics*.

That's all gone now, and you can see the impact of that in the scientifically ignorant summary you are objecting to. Twenty years ago, no major city newspaper would ever print anything that stupid. Today just the New York Times and Washington Post still have a newspaper science desk, and those are much reduced. Smaller newspapers barely cover local government anymore, they tend to just reprint opinion, purchased content, and press releases by politicians and corporations, and dueling reading letters on hot button issues. Actual shoe leather find out the facts journalism is in steep decline. In other words cheap content is more profitable, and science reporting is the least profitable content of all. The most widely consumed remaining sources of science information are non-profit -- the public broadcasting outlets.

I'm not implying anything. I'm saying the Pope's opinion is particularly significant to more than half the Supreme Court. They won't necessarily take those words as marching orders; I doubt that they would even agree that all the other Catholics on the court are good Catholics. But it means those words are automatically more weighty than if, say the Dalai Lama or the Lubavitcher Rebbe said them.

If we're not Catholic ourselves, I mean.

I'll tell you why: 2/3 of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic.