'some' is a really funny way to spell 'most'

This is going to be one hell of shit show for Wall Street (probably not Main Street) but hoo boy is this going to pull down valuations of some big NASDAQ components... When OpenAI goes tits up, or as likely gets parted up and sold off in pieces.

As I said; I can default. A bankruptcy would let me even keep quite a lot of the property. Government printing is the same as that default, or at least the opposite side the coin. They get to keep their spending, your savings get devalued.

inflation isn't free, and it is not magic - (there are other reasons it might be better for growth than deflation) but in terms of government purchasing power, a growing economy without and increase in money supply would just mean the existing money buys more, so government budgets could just stay 'static' and effectively they'd be increased year-over-year in terms of real value/spend.

I come back to; for all intents my home budget really isn't so different than a sovereigns budget. The notion that maco and micro economics are different in terms of deficit and liability accumulation, is an article of faith, and that is all. Its not backed by anything but orthadoxy and wishful thinking.

1) - Entirely correct; a block chain currency is stupid
2) - Also correct and the reality is governments need these things, which is why I think it would be about the dumbest move in history but..

lets again say your goals are
* Dodge the legislature and the existing body of law
* Get people to continue participating in your economy, while also doing something that will completely destroy any faith and trust in your ability to control a currency for generations because you're effectively going to swipe their life savings.

lets also assume you don't really care about (2) because you have the view, however misguided that you have the biggest guns and enough well-armed law enforcement and military assets that you can just go bust skulls and shatter hands or regime change any entity that won't comply with your edicts.

My engineering hat very much tells me that this had bad idea written all over it but; I don't know if many of the leading plutocrats and elected officials alike even have engineering hats.

People keep saying this but where is the real evidence for it?

We have been doing this pure fiat experiment for less half a century. It seems to me it works only as long as people are willing buy government bonds and that is only as long as they think the interest paid outweighs the time depreciation + whatever value they place on the 'security in terms of capital preservation'

This is exactly the same as my home budget, I can spend more than I make as long as people will continue to extend me credit ...

Once that stops working the government has to rely on balance sheet expansion to meet its obligations. the 2020s have proven deficits DO matter because if you pump the money supply, when there is any supply/production constraint the people that do have money take it off the side lines a buy the things they want by out bidding everyone else for it. Inflation skyrockets! In the market economy distribution of goods then becomes even more wildly unequal.

This too is actually pretty similar to my home budget in that I can default, file for bankruptcy and my creditors will be forced to take a lot of write downs, and I'll get to keep a lot my stuff. I can do this at least once.. (maybe some governments can get away with it more than once, maybe we don't know)

Just be sure who the fools are. While this applies to the Federal government more, Texas might know something and might be hedging.

I mean if I was a large government with structural financial problems, deficits that politically I could never close and mountain of existing debt.. I might be very interested say transitioning the real economy to something like bitcoins, (giving my wealthiest friends a heads up on that of course).

Get business selling stuff in btc, paying employees in btc, collect taxes in btc, pay government contractors in btc, etc; then you can print print the old currency as much as you like, it won't inflate the btc the real economy is running on, but you can pay off all you legacy currency denominated debts with no pesky legal hurdles no force measure, no 'voluntary write downs', no 'default' that trigger other credit events and penalties... You just wipe out everyone's savings and there is fu*k all they could do about it. Everyone would also include foreign sovereigns that hold a lot of your legacy currency in their reserves.

As importantly all your existing appropriations, entitlement obligations are in the old currency too, so if some court say "no nope congress appropriated 150Billion to Harvard to search for snails with reverse twisting shells you must pay them" you can just sure "here is your pallet of newly minted cash, good luck finding anyone who will still accept it"

Now you might say why bitcoin. Well because as crypto goes it probably has the most trust. Importantly you don't control the issuance so even if you are large holder of bitcoin you might still succeed in getting people to accept it and use it as a perceived safe store of wealth, even as you vaporize any trust anyone has in your legacy currency and debt instruments..

Now I am not saying this is going to happen. I am not saying it does not create a lot of problems. I am not saying if someone like Scott Bessent actually has such an idea it won't be recorded as one of the biggest mistakes in human history; because I think it would certainly be among. I can see the appeal though..I can imagine some of our plutocrat class having the hubris, recklessness, and greed needed to think it is a good idea as well.

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

There is an always has been an underlying element to the American-psychology where we sort of admire the conman and outlaw. Its really baked in to how we have characterized our conception.

Even going to back Patriots vs Loyalists, while there were plenty of legitimate grievances with colonial governance. They were inflated to a degree that almost beclowns everyone involved, doubly so in the context of what was implemented in the aftermath at least on the representation, regulatory and taxation fronts. Our very founding revolution was sold on if not lies, radical liberties with the truth. Everyone knows we just don't really talk about it.

So to with something like this. Most people will outwardly condem the guy. At least some people will inwardly be impressed by how much he got away with and wounder what he might do for them, if they happened to throw a little gold his way..

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

The TDS is real;

Yesterday I got down modded for suggesting that the Anti-vax movement while lately embraced by MAGA; is hardly unique to that brand of politics, simply pointing out the easily observed truth that at least up until the pandemic you could find a lot anti-vaxers in very well-heeled, very granola blue areas, as much as anywhere on the right. I pointed out that RFK wasnt a Republican let alone MAGA until suddenly he and Trump thought they could advance their mutual agendas.

Now you people are going to go an insist that Drunk driving laws were some kinda Republican led thing, sure there were a lot of anti-drug right of main-line conservatives that were on board, but there were as many left of main-line liberals who saw it as public health and safety issue and the two came together to form a large enough coalition to get it done over the objections of the general public at the time. Once again though highly revisionist to claim it was GOP issue.

Ditto for the history of "cooperative federalism" as a concept. The GOP has certainly embraced it, and did so pretty quickly, but certainly did not invent it, that was New Deal Democrats!

Lord knows there are plenty of reasons someone can dislike Trump personally, object to the agenda, etc. However I become pretty unimpressed with most of those arguments because of posts like yours. They are mostly made by people who either are pretty ignorant of our political history, and/or are in some sort of deep reality distortion field where they believe Trump and anyone in his orbit actually invented these tactics, let alone anyone at Heritage. None of them have come up with anything new they are just flipping through their catalog of old grievances and successes alike and looking at what political tools brought them about. Then using them, usually with minimal finesse or competence.

Indeed.

All these mayors and governors telling their local law enforcement (you know actual men with guns) to thwart the efforts of federal law enforcement, is a hell of lot closer to 'insurrection' than J6, CHAZ and a lot of those BLM protest looked a lot more like the Whiskey rebellion(s) or Shay's than J6, and we know how those were handled.

The GP should look in mirror and be careful what s/he wishes for..

Don't forget either the antivax movement cross cuts political lines. RFK was a Democrat until about a year ago...

Some of the deepest bluest granola munching corners of the country and major clusters of antivaxers.

But sure MAGA is the problem...

If the heart has stopped how do you get the anti-freeze distributed throughout the body? Do they put the person on an artificial heart for a time?

I am curious is if there is really anything to this; or if these cryo firms are just sure, "we'll take your money and freeze your loved ones corpse, and who knows maybe the future will have nearly magic nano bots that can fix the mess we are making anything is possible right?"

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

But also entirely predictable. Anyone paying attention for the last 30 years or so should realize by now that:

1) Data aggregated for any purpose will eventually be abused.

It is probably the only thing as certain as death and taxes... (sorry could not resist)

Of the top of my head...

People trying to mis-characterize leisure/personal travel as business expenses. Claims of S-corp business related deductions and credits are generally cited high audit trigger risks. I assume that is because the IRS at least believes they are widely abused.

Just as a general top line way to flag people who have life styles that don't seem align well to their reported incomes...and by extension are likely not reporting things they are required to do. The US tax codes is very well weird, we should never forget. You are for example required to report income from illegal activities, but the 5th amendment protects you from having to disclose what those activities are. So for an example that might fit here:

let's say fraudulently arranged some business travel for yourself to meet a client that does not exist, because you want to take a free trip to Monnaco on the company dime. That trip is income. As far as the IRS is concerned you need to report those 10k business class tickets and those 4k hotel fees you received. They may be curious if that was really a business and just how someone with AGI of 68,000 with three dependents managed to bank roll such an extravagant trip if it wasn't.