The difference being that evidence is something we can find, while proof doesn't exist outside of abstract realms like mathematics, so there's no point in trying to find it.

17USC106:

Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following

[...]

(4) in the case of [...] musical [...] works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;

(emphasis mine).

17USC101 defines public performance:

To perform or display a work “publicly” means— (1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered

it also defines perform as:

To “perform” a work means to [...] play, [...] it, either directly or by means of any device

So, playing your CD in a place that is "open to the public" is performing it publicly, and the copyright owner has the exclusive right to do that. This means that if you want to do it you need a license from the copyright owner.

Note also that a recording of music typically has three distinct copyrights on it. (1) The songwriter's copyright on the tune, arrangement, etc., basically everything you'd find in the sheet music other than the lyrics, (2) the songwriter's copyright on the lyrics and (3) the recording artist's copyright on the recorded performance. It's not uncommon for there to be a lot more than two songwriter copyrights, and in the case of recordings that contain significant sampling, there can be more copyrights in the recording, too.

To play the CD in your bar, you need licenses from all of the copyright holders. As others have mentioned, the record labels take this seriously and there's a high probability that infringing their copyrights this way will result in your being sued for millions of dollars, because the law authorizes statutory damages of up to $150,000 per offense.

They can hire and pay the temp workforce, of course, but the cost of hiring a bunch of people for a few days is a lot higher than the hourly wage you pay them. Best case you can go through some temp agencies, and I'll be surprised if they haven't already done that, but once you've exhausted that resource you're going to be getting bottom-of-the-barrel personnel, if you can even find them.

It makes sense that Amazon finds it more cost-effective to retask office workers for a few days. And if you're going to do that, and you don't want to interfere with those office workers' normal work too much, it makes sense to pitch it as optional so the office workers can determine how much time they can spare without interfering with anything essential. Likewise, it makes sense to give them access to conference rooms with VC equipment in the warehouses, so if they can take any urgent meetings during their warehouse shift.

They're not saving money. They're retasking office workers who make $100+ per hour to do work they usually pay a lot less for.

OTOH, if it keeps customers from having bad experiences because the system is overwhelmed, it may be a good use of those expensive workers.

Nah. These are salaried workers being asked to do something during their normal work hours. It's basically not possible to avoid paying them.

Weekdays 10 am to 6 pm. That's normal work hours. Unless they're being forced to use vacation time, they're being paid.

More likely 100-200/hour, more if they're software engineers or similar highly-paid office workers. $30/hour is only $60k/year. There's no way Amazon white-collar workers in NYC are making that little.

This just raises the question of what it means to "know". The LLMs clearly have a large and fairly comprehensive model of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them. If they didn't, they couldn't produce output that makes sense in the context of the models we have of the world, the things in it and the relationships between them.

That has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I was talking about Trump's cluelessness what is needed to retain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency which is at best weakly related to its valuation relative to other currencies.

Only if hedge fund managers don't understand how the Fed chairmanship works. Trump can't replace Powell until February 2026, when Powell's term expires. Not unless Trump can make the case that he needs to be removed for cause, which would require evidence of misconduct, not just policy disagreement.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

So clueless.

The fact is that the trade imbalance is the largest single factor that makes the US dollar the world currency -- and also helps to keep the federal debt cheap. All of those countries that have a trade surplus with us send us lots of goods and in exchange they get lots of dollars. What do they do with them? They buy US-denominated securities, including treasury bonds. So many people and organizations around the world holding large reserves of US-denominated securities is what makes the dollar the world's default currency.

To the extent that he succeeds at "correcting" the trade imbalance, he'll undermine the dollar's status. And trying to bully countries into sticking with the dollar by threatening action that will make the dollar worth less to them is just... clueless. And that's assuming his actions to explode the debt while escalating financing costs doesn't result in enormous devaluation of the dollar, which would make it worthless rather than just worth less.

On balance I think I'm mostly glad that Trump is a moron, because if he weren't he would be really dangerous. On the other hand, if he had either a brain or the humility to listen to people who do, he might understand that he's trying to destroy what he's trying to control, and that winning that sort of game is losing. Probably not, though. He's amoral enough to be okay with ruling over a relative wasteland, because he and his will be better off.

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.