Even aside from the issue of accurate validation,, Trumpâ(TM)s properties are likely already mortgaged to the hilt. Thatâ(TM)s not particular to Trump, itâ(TM)s sensible business practice. Property gives you access to credit, so you take advantage of that credit to obtain money to grow your business. Mortgaging your property is the ordinary profit maximizing thing to do.

But what you canâ(TM)t do is leverage your property *twice*. So even bonafide real estate billionaires donâ(TM)t have access to limitless instant cash. Independent estimates of Trumpâ(TM)s wealth puts it at a little over 2.5 billion. Thereâ(TM)s probably not a billionaire in the world who could scare up almost 20% of his net worth in cash overnight.

Assuming his properties are mortgaged to the max, such a big cash demand could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction where he sells one property, lenders whose loans are secured with that property demand their money back immediately, forcing him to sell another property and so on.

If Trump can somehow turn this IPO into a fair amount of ready cash, that could spell the difference between financial survival and ruin for him . Heâ(TM)s just got to sell his believers in buying in.

Common denominators... common... *communist*!

This kind of math is un-American.

It's also *smart*, which acting classy often turns out to be. What people want from the leader of a company in an industry that is having these kinds of problems is maturity, perspective, and thoughtfulness. Naked opportunism and unbridled competitiveness at any cost isn't a good look when people need reassurance.

For that reason, not twisting the knife is the most effective way to twist the knife, especially when you can pretty much count on your competitor to do the twisting for you. Also, if a quality error happened to be discovered in an Airbus product shortly after the CEO was gloating about Boeing, that would be catastrophically bad.

This *is* real science. It's just not by itself a sufficient basis for making any kind of evidence-based decision. Nor *could it possibly be*.

I had a friend in collge who participated in a nutrition randomized control trial . For months he had to carry around a gym bag; not only did everything he eat and drink come out of that bag, all his urine and feces went into containers in that bag so they could be weighed and analyzed to ensure he was complying with the research protocol. If he snuck a candy bar or a soda the researchers would know, and he'd lose his "job" plus the bonus for completing the study. While I'm sure that study got high quality data given the immense care it took, it surely tracked only *markers* (like blood lipids) rather than *outcomes* (like heart disease). That's because the outcomes we're interested in usually take decades to develop. It's hard enough finding people to live out of and poop into a bag they carry everywhere for *six months*. You'll never find anyone to do that for *ten years*.

So in nutrition, even an RCT can't be treated as some kind of gold standard for evidence-based decision making. If an RCT proves A causes B, B will never be C, the thing we're actually interested in. B will at best be *correlated* with C. So whether we're talking RCT or cross sectional studies, we are just making a case for some kind of correlation. You need *multiple kinds of evidence*, repeated by multiple researchers multiple times. With that volume and variety of evidence, you eventually develop a picture which connects the dots between A and C in a way that is unlikely to be false in any of its particulars. Useful results are *always* big picture results.

So what should be the gold standard for evidence-based decisions is a systematic review paper published by a scientist current working in the field, and in a well-known journal. This is the *minimal* level of evidence that people outside a field should pay any attention to, at least for the purposes of guiding decision making.

Rural and urban kids are, I think, still more independent than suburban kids. It's in well-heeled suburbs like the one I brought my kids up in that the norm of micromanaging kids' time is strongest. Parents can afford to put their kids in after school programs and summer day camps where their time is programmed. Those parents were early adopters of the cell phone as tether.

It's a bit of dilemma is that those well-heeled suburbs where parents hover over their kids shoulders are where the good schools are, and that in itself takes a lot away from the kids because those schools are assigning a shocking amount of homeowork, even over summer vacation. I had a lot of conflicts with teachers because as early as the third grade they were sending home multiple hours of homework when their own guidelines said there should be no more than thirty minutes.

Sure these test *results* are garbage. But it doesn't mean the testing *protocol* is garbage, since that testing protocol was designed to work on a different kind of sample.

In other words, think of any test result as being a statement of Bayesian probability: "Given that the sample is from a domestic dog, we can say with reasonable confidence that it is around 40% malamute." You could easily modify your test procedures to exclude human DNA samples, but why would you do that?

It's true that life is safer, but it is clearly *perceived* as more dangerous.

The murder rate in the US peaked in 1980 at 10.4 murders per 100,000 population, then dropped to less than half that (5.1) in 2019. There was a spike during the pandemic up to 6.8 -- still way less than 1980 -- but was down below 6% again in 2023.

But even though violent crime and murder in particular *decreased* in 2023, a recent Gallup survey found that 77% of Americans believe it actually went up.

I was a kid in the 60s. We lived like barbarian *kings*, going wherever we wanted with no respect for private property or accountability to anyone for how we spent our time or where.

Especially in the summer. We'd get up, have our bowl of cereal and hop on our bike to meet our friends. Then we'd right to the other side of the city and maybe scare up some kids for a baseball game or maybe a fight. Maybe we'd right out the suburbs and go fishing or build forts in the woods. Sometimes we went down to the trash transfer station to throw rocks at rats and root through abandoned machinery and discarded lumber for building materials to make a go cart. Occasionally we'd hop a slow freight train, or climb out on the girders underneath bridges to watch the commuter trains speed below us.

We'd come back home maybe 6:30 for supper, after being gone for eight or nine hours. During that time our families had no idea whatsoever where we'd been or what we'd been up to. Sometime your mom would ask and you'd say, "I hung out with Steve and Joe," and I guess she pictured us sitting around shooting the shit, which we sometimes did, although often it was probably someplace we weren't suppose to be like the roof of the autobody shop. Even during the school year, we didn't have homeowork like kids in the 80s did. There was none at all in elementary school and even in high school it was less than an hour.

A childhood nearly completely free of adult supervision and management was glorious in ways you can't begin to imagine.

What changed was the "stranger danger" moral panic of the late 70s early 80s, and it only got worse when cell phones became ubiquitous. Now it's positively deviant not to know where your kids are 24x7. Even if you don't buy into that, in a way you have no choice. My kids wouldn't have had anyone to hang out with all day; and if they did half of the things we used to get up to, there'd be a report to the police and a visit from social services.

Well, yeah, that's how this works. It's like a game in which different investor's groups bet on how soon a technology will be economically feasible. Early bettors lose everything, but later players benefit from the money they spent and lost. You want to bet late enough to benefit from all that lost investment but not so late you're trying to catch up with competitors with first mover advantage and war chest of intellectual property you have to work around.

So if you're investing money *now* in something like this, you're either throwing your money away in an attempt to go faster than possible or you're stringing your investment at a rate too slow to speed development very much, in hopes of still being in the game when the payoff round begins. Either way it's not economically rational, if you count the time value of money and opportunity costs. You'd be better off in a strictly economic sense parking your money in a safe investment for a few decades.

Which is not to say it's irrational to play now, as long as maximizing profit isn't really what you're in the game for. You have to be in it out of a desire to change the world.

Well, in this case I doubt the people behind this even intend to pay the investors back.

Technically I think generating an engineering surplus (more electricity than we put in) with 2H - 3He fusion is much more feasible that 2H - 3H fusion. But to pay investors back, you need to generate an *economic* surplus. And that's going to be next to impossible.

First of all, you need to design and build a fusion power plant along lines that largely have only been explored theoretically. Then you need to build a mining installation on the moon. Then you need to extract the 3He and ship it back to Earth in industrial quantities. You also need to get tons of 2H from terrestrial sources. Then you need to put it into your power plant and put it out onto the grid.

The really hard part is this: after doing all that amazing but technically possible stuff, you need the cost per kWh you generate to be cheaper than existing electricity sources.

I think "gin up" in your sense is a UK thing. Check out the wiktionary entry which is pretty much how we used it -- to generate or create.

Different dialect. This is how we used the expression when I was young fifty years ago.

Is that $30.68 per hour available for hire, or $30.68 per hour responding and sevicing customers, or $30.68 per hour of actually driving the customer around?

Also, note the proviso "using personal vehicle". In many places most of the drivers I talked to are leasing vehicles -- from the ridshare company. They aren't clearing anything like a thousand a week, mainly its a way to they can gin up some cash in a hurry.

Well, for example here, although that's rather imprcise not authoritative it's clear that it means a broadband signal has no DC component. I'd have to dig out my old college textbooks from the 1980s for better citation; and they're up in the attic in a pile of cardboard boxes. If you look on the Internet for tthis use of he term you have to look prior to the adoption of the term to refer to Internet, which is when the meaning changed. The problem is most of those instances are quite sloppy and incorrect in several respects. For example check out page 42 of this document from 1988, which gets the definition *somewhat* wrong, but you can at least see what they're getting at:

and

You can see a bit of sloppy metonymy at work here: they are using "baseband" to refer to time division multiplexing and "broadband" to frequency division, but this is not technically correct. You *can* time division multiplex a broadband signal *if you want to*. If a signal has a DC component (i.e., you care about which way a pair of conductors are wired), you have no choice but to do TDM if you want to multiplex. It's also not true that baseband cannot send video signals.

But what is correct is that Ethernet *was* a baseband system, even though it had a bandwidth capcity far greater than early broadband systems like DSL. What made it baseband is that if you wired a connector backwards, then the system won't work because the polarity is reversed and it cares about that. Use the same physical coax for cable TV and it won't care if you swapped the connection between the conductor and the jacket, because there's no DC component of any signal's spectrum. Now it's been decades since I thought about this stuff, but this is also true of at least early versions of twisted pair Ethernet. If you connect the wires of a pair to a connector on a patch cable backwards, that patch cable won't work correctly unless you also wire the same pair on the other end backwards. At least this was true for 10BaseT. Now if you used *exactly* the same coax cable to carry a DSL signal from a telephone system, it wouldn't care if you got tip and ring backwards.

Now I'm not saying that using "broadband" as opposed to "narrowband" is incorrect *today*. Words mean what the most people agree they mean, which means the sloppiest users are usually more influential in the long run than careful users.

Sure. And as connection bandwidth goes up, people find new uses for it, so what's "fast" or "adequate" is an endlessly moving target.

In a way this is marketers being hoist on their own petard. Originally, "broadband" had a completely unambiguous technical meaning: it meant that a signaling scheme had no zero hertz component, and which therefore could be frequency multiplexed on the same medium with other signals. The antonym of "broadband" wasn't "narrowband", it was "baseband".

The big problem in bringing high speed Internet to everyone's house in the 1990s was the "last mile problem" -- how to get the Internet into people's actual homes and apartments. The answer was to *frequency multiplex* Internet service on top of a network connection that was already there, either cable TV or plain old telephone service (DSL). These technologies were in a technical sense "broadband", but that was meaingless to consumers. So advertisers seized on this technical term engineers were using and *redefined it* to mean "faser than regular service", because these multiplexed signalling schemes delivered a lot more bandwidth than consumers were used to with their analog modems.

In other words, compaines *voluntarily* stepped onto the Red Queen's Racetrack on this one. "Broadband" will always mean "faster than average" because that's what companies *mean* when they say broadband. And so regulators will continually be compelled to remove the "broadband" designation from ISP's cheaper offerings so that's not misleading to consumers. And it serves those companies right. Every time I hear someone say "narrowband" I want to throttle them.