The problem here isn't scams and grift. It's that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there's a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It's one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn't actually matter. But it's an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It's already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

Fortunately, that's highly unlikely. There has never been a confirmed case of airborne transmission between humans. Most transmission is due to insufficient and unsanitary health care facilities, due to lack of funds.

I had already received three Pfizer shots when I came down with the virus (confirmed, with a test that came up positive in less than a minute). However, I am absolutely convinced that the severity of my case was so minimal (sleeping under a blanket on the couch in my clothes for 3-4 days) because of the enhanced response of my immune system, due to the vaccine.

Correct. It's like a governor declaring a state of emergency ... for a flood that only affects one region of their state. These alerts are a call to action for officials, not the general public.

AI, huh? And here I thought the, uh, government might seize the opportunity to declare these companies illegal gambling that's rife with insider trading and other criminality, and shut them down.

The problem is always the relative ease of modern travel. This outbreak would be a regional issue if there were no jet planes.

So far, the outbreak is reasonably confined. But it might not stay that way. Raising that alarm is one of the key functions of the WHO.

No kidding! If Trump had decent PR, they would have had one of the "engineers" of the phone "accidentally" leave one at a bar in San Francisco by now.

Other AI models. AI model scrapes web, web is full of AI hallucinations, AI outputs more hallucinations based on false data, rinse and repeat.

It is kinda weird. On top of it not being a programming language, does any DB professional really use stock ANSI SQL? Doesn't every database have its own, unique extensions (PL/SQL maybe being the most famous example)?

Probably people with an existing codebase to maintain.

50 is "elderly"? Ouch.

And let's not overlook that this is yet another attempt by the AI lobby to convince the public that AI "thinks," and even has the same concerns that human workers do. Which it doesn't. But the more the public believes that these algorithms are comparable to human intelligence, the better it is for all the people who keep pouring money into this bubble.

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

"How often do you think I print?"

Seemingly not very.