Think about the swing voters. The ones that there is a chance they will vote for either party. To them the Dems run sane, well spoke, somewhat reasonable candidates. The Republicans have pretty much abandoned reality in the eyes of this group. That makes the Democrats the default ruling party and the Republicans the party of dissent. Elections are for the Democrats to lose. To an outsider the idea that the Democrats are at a 50% equilibrium in voter support makes no sense.

The dynamics though are the Republicans are a united party and as the party of dissent they don't have to meet the same standards as the Democrats. The Democrats are an umbrella of often conflicting factions. The Republicans say nasty things and do even worse to people who are unlikely to ever vote for them.
The Democrats regularly do things to alienate segments of the voting population that could vote for them. Every job application in the USA asks if you are some other race than white, if you identify as a sex other than male. Democrats regularly pick fights with landlords, owners of businesses, or the wealthy. They support policies that disadvantage cis women athletes. They regularly pass virtue signaling legislation that hurts the economy (the Republicans do this more but no one expects better from the Republicans). The Democrats made promises to both sides in the Palestinian Israeli conflict, two groups that already supported them and alienated both.

Every time Republican incompetence pushes the Democrats above 50% the Democrats figure out a new group to be singled out and alienated.

Fraud for commercial gain. Microsoft is getting advertising and exposure for their product. That exposure surely would cost tens of thousands of dollars if you were to pay the developers to add that line. I seriously doubt an employee did this on their own "without review, notification, or documentation." I think jail time for corporate employees doing shit like this should be a last resort but at this point I don't really see any other good options.

“The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones. The Oil Age will not end because the world runs out of oil.” - Former Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani

The world will one day stop burning oil. We can likely guess today how much will actually be consumed in the next 50 years and the UAE knows that number is less than the current developed reserves. Anyone who doesn't sell their oil soon isn't going to sell it at all. And soon everyone will realize it. The price will drop to the marginal cost of the lowest producer needed to fulfil the worlds need. This might be as low as $15/barrel. The smart producer will sell as much as they can as soon as they can as the price craters.
Anyone developing new oil production or infrastructures is an ...

By being a lapdog to Putin he forced Europe to wean itself of Russian gas
By attacking Iran he's made oil more expensive and also unreliable accelerating the rest of the worlds movement away from it
By being a totally unreliable trading partner and trashing the integrated North American auto industry he's made it politically possible for Canada and Mexico to import Chinese electric cars. In putting an oil embargo on Cuba he's forced Cuba to move to solar and wind. If Cuba survives it will serve as an example to the developing world on how to transition.

Think about that for a second. Trump is a spiteful, easily fooled moron but he beat the Democrats twice. His party beat the Democrats in the presidency, the senate and the house. And he didn't win because of the crazy, religious, uneducated, white men. They were always going to vote for him. He won because the Democrats systematically alienated the swing voters. Trump mostly picks fights with people who would never vote for him. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is about to alienate anyone owns a business. Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion laws alienate young men. Vindictive rent controls alienate landlords. The Democrats, are always at a 50% support equilibrium. The more crazy the Republicans are, the more embolden the insane parts of the Democrats are to permanently alienate a group of voters that might vote for them. And worse, the Democrats then, instead of trying to win those voters back, call those voters names and demonize them. Many Fox news Republicans couldn't find reality with a map but you can still have a conversation about topics you disagree with them about. Try doing that with most Democrats.

Most large companies suck at innovating. They don't get crushed by smaller companies mainly because small companies don't have the money to navigate regulations and large supply chains. I might be able to build a better widget and have a contract manufacturer make it for less than the large established companies because I'm using newer cheaper parts that use less power. What I can't do is sell in volume around the world because I can't meet the explicit and implicit regulations. Meeting the explicit regulations is hard enough but my sales channels also have regulations that cause them to create even more rules for me to pass. Some devices are going to be so cheap or they will require so much time to diagnose that they aren't worth fixing even if the required part is only pennies. I have no idea when a part will become obsolete. When it does, I rework my design to use a newer part. Adding a right to repair for many things will require me to make my device more robust and to store replacement parts. Since I don't know what parts might be needed I'm likely going to store way to many parts. The robustness adds to my design time and costs. None of these things will make my device more attractive. For most of my devices, even if a non-trivial number of my devices are repaired, the extra plastics in my device and the stored parts will lead to far more e-waste.

Look around small towns in rust belt USA. 100 years ago they used to be filled with small companies that could make a wide variety of fairly complicated things. They could make them and ship and sell them all over the world. If you look at the founders of these companies, the founders often were not that old.

In general, in the west, we are incapable of building large projects* but in the case of nuclear we passed a lot of safety legislation that didn't add to safety but drove up costs and slowed construction. Many "environmental" groups lobbied for laws in bad faith, not to make nuclear safer but expressly to stop it. Legislators took the easy way out and approved legislation to appease groups that were never going to be appease with anything short of banning nuclear. Three Mile island demonstrated that 60s nuclear was safe. In the late 60s coal mines were going bankrupt. The "environmentalist" saved coal and in the process helped doom us to global warming.

*My city, Ottawa Canada, is taking 12 years to build a dog park in an open field. Government and competence is something only my grand parents experienced.

We see this architecture problem often. Data that shouldn't be stored is passed to some other process that doesn't know it isn't to be stored. Often it is with secrets, keys or the graphical display of a password. We see untrusted data scrubbed by one app to not do anything bad to that app but then the data or data derived from it is passed to another app that trusts it completely. Many of our systems are evolutions of years or decades of code piled on top of one another. What might have been an understandable architecture 15 years ago has likely morphed into a scrambled mess of data being passed around. Good for Apple to fix this since in many systems I've worked on this type of problem wouldn't have an owner or someone who would even take responsibility for fixing it.

He was good at introducing ambitious people to established well connected people. He was good at introducing rich people to talented people with ideas. He was good at enabling companies to get audiences with politicians writing legislation that affected those companies (he helped facilitate regulator capture). He helped lubricate the wheels of commerce between countries. If you were rich and needed something Epstein likely had a friend who owed him a favor who could help you.

So yes, lots of people dealt with Epstein who were not into his sexual exploitations. Some knew, some avoided knowing, and some ignored it. However guilt by association has a few problems. The USA has been involved in some very questionable military adventures. Is every US tax payer guilty for funding that military? If you sign a contract with a man in a Hugo Boss suit are you a Nazi sympathizer? If you use Starlink at your cottage do you agree with everything Musk says?

I think this is more about virtue signaling than anything else. It is a way for some people to claim they are morally superior to Gates or Trump.

Yes, you lose a very important part of the free market. Price is information. It tells producers what to make and what not to make. When governments subsidize things or distort prices then we get shortages or the wrong things made. When we discriminate against some groups that group is hurt directly but there are others indirectly hurt. When governments offer preferential pricing they almost invariably screw things up worse than they normally screw up. In Canada, it is almost impossible to get off welfare. If you are on welfare you get money, extra subsidized healthcare and most importantly you pay well below market price for housing. Getting even a part time job will cost you your home.

1. A fair price is a price that two parties agree to assuming no duress caused by the other party
2. A fairer price is one where one party didn't gain an unfair advantage through a monopoly or failure of a free market - real-estate agents inserting themselves in a transaction, monopolists, government intervention..
3. Fairer is a price where the buyer and seller offer the same price to anyone
4. Fairer is when both parties know what information the other has
5. Fairer is when both parties have similar bargaining power and neither party is sticky, i.e. has a significant preference to buy from the other party - company store, specialized workers with only one employer (NHL, NFL etc), renters already in a unit.
6. Fairer still is when both parties have the same information

Ideally we always have the first 5 and at least some parity on the last. The less fair a market is, the less efficient it becomes. Item 4 actually helps both parties by reducing uncertainty by the buy and increasing the price for the seller.

I'm wary of supporting bills like this because governments have a tendency to support policies that break these conditions of fairness and while they seem as if the policies would help "the little guy" in practice they often do the opposite. Rent controls and zoning regulations have been a horrible to younger people and have created most of the homeless problem in Canada (we regulated away flop houses, the housing of last resort). Rules on insurance have caused insurance companies to stop offering insurance. Regulatory burden has lead to regulatory capture in many industries and a huge barrier to entry in others. Unnecessary licensing drives up costs and restricts young workers from entering many trades. The track record of these laws is terrible. This one seems like more virtue signaling than anything else. No brick and mortar store will raise prices based on who you are, although they may have selective discounts. On line stores are already doing this but since their servers aren't in the jurisdiction I don't see how this will help. Finally, voluntary price discrimination is helpful. When I travel by air in the livestock section my flight is partially subsidized by the people paying 10x as much as me in first class. So we have more regulation but I'm not sure we are better off.

Interestingly, I was in a lab yesterday and met a PhD student whose thesis was largely about using LLMs to fake fingerprints and retinal scans.

Birol dumbed it down for the media. Normally the EU has about 40 days worth of jet fuel in storage or transportation within the EU. The issue is that the EU is using fuel faster than than it can be replenished. In the next 42 days they expect to be only able to replace about 12 days worth of fuel. So on day 43 they will have only 25% of the fuel they need if they don't start rationing soon.

Unfortunately rationing or raising prices is difficult in the short term, tickets are already sold, and price rises are deeply unpopular. EU politicians are already reducing taxes and releasing reserves to keep the price of petrol low. The politicians are effectively removing the price signal that there is a shortage. Probably not the wisest thing to do economically but the voters will reward it. When the fuel runs out they can blame Trump even though the EU will do nothing to mitigate the problem. Trump doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity.

If you were willing to pay $400 for tickets for yourself and your kids to see a concert would you really wait till the tickets were $200 and risk not getting them? This is entertainment, discretionary spending. Most people will not try and game the system. Most people are risk averse and will want to plan their evening in advance. This also means the artists who might not sell out likely will even if the last seats sell for only $5. It even makes it possible for bands that wouldn't normally be viable to tour be able to tour. It's like the airplane that holds 100 people and costs $10,000 to fly between two cities. I might not be able to find 100 people who will pay $100 for a seat but there might be 9 people who really need to go. I can remove 5 seats form the plane, create 10 first class seats, sell 9 first class seats at $500 each and then offer the rest of the seats $75. Those 9 people get to fly in comfort, everyone else gets a cheaper flight and if I sell 75 of the remaining seats I turn a profit with a 90% full plane. Everyone wins.

Scalpers are a market failure. I already said that. Instead of throwing out the free market and replacing it with what - communism? Ration tickets? Lotteries? We need to figure out what the market failure is and how to correct it. In the case of scalpers the original seller is selling the product at less than what the scalpers think they are worth. The problem is that the original seller doesn't know the market price. Information has a cost. In the old days, scalpers were a good thing for both artists and fans. The artist didn't have a good way to know the true price but the scalpers gave them a reliable sale. The scalpers took on the risk that they might not be able to sell the tickets. TicketMaster breaks this. They sell themselves the tickets on the secondary market and if they don't sell them they return the tickets to the primary market. So then you get unsold tickets that some fans might have bought at the original price and the venue/artist gets screwed out of the sale and any secondary sales like beer and merchandise.

Today, with the internet, the market failure can easily be fixed with a Dutch auction. The artist will get the most money, all the tickets will sell, the fans willing to pay the most will see the show and no middle men will skim anything off.