Fear or corruption?

This isn't some Manhattan style project, with great secrecy over methods, attracting the best and brightest.

It is a MASSIVE wealth transfer though, disregarding law and scrutiny, with some of the most dubious leading the charge.

I would rather that it was fear driving this as there would be more evaluation of how this will play out globally instead of an endless black hole to dump the nation's wealth.

Collective action problem

Or maybe the idea that efforts like environmental protections are down to individual changes is and always has been a tactic by those polluters to shift blame and responsibility off to the consumer, the consumer who by individually entity have very little effect. Case in point plastic recycling; pushed for decades and decades by plastic producers as viable when it was never really so and they knew it all along. The goal of that little charade like all these claims of "oh just plant a tree!!!!" is a way to avoid actual legislation.

So no, it has *something* to do with billionaires. Saying it doesn't is just as false as saying it has 100% to do with them.

The oil industry has a half dozen or so new technologies for extracting oil from the ground that wouldn't be otherwise accessible. They aren't using them because it costs a lot to ramp up manufacturing and deployment of new gear, and training people to use it. Fracking and traditional pumping work fine for now. Once what's available gets harder to extract using those methods, prices will go up and they'll switch to a different technology.

Modern models will take into account statistical biases in lotteries. For example, here's ChatGPT:

Pick good lottery numbers for the Virginia powerball lottery

Good question. First, a reality check: Powerball is pure chance — there’s no “good” numbers that are more likely to win. Every set of 5 white balls (1–69) + 1 Powerball (1–26) has exactly the same probability.
wwwuat.valottery.com
+1

That said, I can give you a few tips + a sample “random but balanced” pick, if you’d like to pick your own numbers rather than use Quick Pick.

Some tips when choosing your Powerball numbers

Spread your numbers
Try to pick a mix across the range (low, mid, high). According to lottery-strategy advice, not clustering all your numbers in one group is better.
samlotto.com

Avoid patterns
Many people pick birthdays, anniversaries, or sequential numbers. That’s fine—but if you win, you might have to share with more people because these are popular picks.
lotteryvalley.com

Use “due” or “hot” numbers carefully
Some sites (like lottery-analysis tools) track which numbers are “hot” (drawn recently) or “overdue” (haven’t appeared in a while). But remember: past draws don’t change future odds.
m.lottostrategies.com

Mix even and odd
According to some statistical analyses, it’s less likely to draw all odd or all even numbers.
samlotto.com

Play responsibly
Odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are extremely long: 1 in ~292 million.
lotterycritic.com

Sample “balanced” Powerball pick

Here’s a random-but-balanced combination you could use just for fun (or as a basis to tweak):

White balls: 8, 23, 41, 57, 65

Powerball: 12

If you like, I can generate 5 different “smart random” picks for the next Virginia Powerball draw (balanced by probability and number distribution). Do you want me to do that?

It's a damned shame '99942 Apothis' will miss us in a few years

It's not too late to fix that.

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

I can see one advantage of that type of transaction system is that it could in theory be decentralized from a single entity, much less a for-profit entity.

That said that actual and possibly noble goal of a decentralized, easy to access a cheap to operate global transaction network is nowhere close to ready and none fo the stable coins seem to have a genuine interest in developing it so when its brought up it feels like a lie (because it is a lie)

All you've done is take an absolute statement and qualified it with a time, a cause, a measure and a place.

Congrats, your an economist now because if you asked an economist "is inflation good?" the answer you wouldn't get is "yes" you'd get "one, define good. after that it would be questions of how much inflation, whats causing the inflation, what is the state of the greater economy. These are relevant and important questions.

It's like asking a physicist "is gravity good" its sortsof dumb and pointless without context

Well sure, that natural fuzzyness of economics and it's predictions makes it susceptible to bad and stupid actors and like a lot of academeics many economists struggle to translate their concepts into something the layman can process.

By that logic no fiber optics anywhere matter, not in your business because the fiber touches a SFP module before it hits your NIC. Ok i'm being a little absurd but you get my point, the only reason not to run the fiber is to save $$$, thats the only advantage coax has today, it's cheaper for Spectrum.

why does spectrum even bother running fiber for their backbone? Those same reasons can apply to peoples homes. It's not just about today it's that house could sit there for 50-100 years.

Free up the human capital to do what exactly? I like the Star Trek vision as much as anyone, but it's not like we can go explore the galaxy on star ships because we're freed from working in factories.

I think even Star Trek illustrates that work and even existential struggle is an essential part of our development as humans. Kirk had more than one soliloquy to that effect.

Perhaps we might get farther as a society and an economy if we value work and employees as assets rather than mere costs and liabilities. Would change the focus of what we are making and why we are making them.

Awesome! Let me know when you're ready to work union free on the assembly lines in the widget factories. Or to pick produce. Or do you think you're somehow in the management class?

Nah, it's not politically noble, it's self protection. It's avoiding the change of political strife meaning they can't sell the cars they make.

Given what's been happening, it's probably a wise decision. I expect the stress between the US and China to get worse. I hope it stays at "economic warfare".

I think the justification is that gambling should be discouraged....not that I think that this works, or that they are at all consistent.

Tariffs are a bad thing from a pure economic perspective. They introduce inefficiencies, and make things more expensive. This is a basic concept of macroeconomics.

However, some things are more important than making the most money. Among them, national defense. In America, both parties have decided they don't want to work with China anymore, for varying reasons of ideology, ethics, and self defense. And they have decided that is more important to them than economic efficiencies.