A better solution is to do the same thing that should be done with stock trading: Require government officials (and their family members) who might have access to insider information to publish their trades in advance. The advance notice wouldn't even have to be large if the information was published electronically in a feed that could easily be monitored by other investors and the press. A couple of business days, maybe less. This should apply to all securities, real-estate purchases, predictions, etc., anything people speculate on. Not only would this highlight possible insider trading, it would erase most of the potential benefit of trading on inside information. It wouldn't harm government officials' legitimate investment opportunities.

It would still be possible for officials to pass tips to friends who are outside the group required to disclose their trades in advance, of course. It's ultimately very hard to stop that sort of thing, assuming the friends stay loyal, but that's a risky bet. Especially since the sort of friend who would engage in such illicit trading is probably the sort who might end up in some other sort of trouble with the law, and might find it convenient to flip on their buddy.

If it's the principle that's driving the decisions, not the affluence of the beneficiaries, across a sufficiently-large set of cases we'd expect to find no correlation between the political leanings of the justices and their votes benefiting wealthy vs poor people. Which is what the article said happened for many decades.

Unless, of course, the principle being applied is "Who benefits?"

It's worth pointing out that although gtall framed it as the Republicans siding with the wealthy, it's equally true that the Democrats are siding with the poor. Both sides are inordinately focused on who benefits.

His advisors told him that he wouldn't be able to get a cut. Not even a measly 5%.

I used HP/UX as a development platform in the mid-90s, cross-compiling to m68k boards running pSOS and VxWorks. It was a little weird, but rock solid, utterly reliable, as were the HP workstations it ran on.

The data shows that college improves your options and your income now. Who cares what effect it had 50 years ago?

That's funny. My EV is the vehicle of choice for long trips. Fuel costs are much lower than my ICEV, and long-distance travel makes that more important, not less.

Nah.

All that's required is that EVs be cheap. A 300-mile range is sufficient. When the purchase price of a car with a 300-mile range is at or only slightly above the purchase price of a comparable ICEV, EVs sales will explode because they're cheaper to operate and maintain. All of the range anxiety and concerns about fires (which are silly, since gasoline vehicles are a lot more prone to burning) will inhibit a few people, for a little while, but pretty soon they'll all have friends and relatives who are driving EVs and happy about it, and they'll start making the switch, too.

It's all about the benjamins.

They are if you tell them to search for the information.

Sure, but Claude, at least, knows that its knowledge cutoff date is January 2025. It's sometimes lazy and will tell you that current events precede its knowledge, but if you tell it to do a search, it will, and then it will accurately describe what it found. Other times it just automatically searches when it realizes you're asking about something that is too recent to be included in its training data.

It seems strange that other LLMs that have the ability to search the web don't do the same.

Which AI?

I asked Claude, and it gave me a much more reasonable figure (200g of bacteria in a 70kg person), and provided a link to the relevant research.

And you could have achieved exactly the same thing at lower compute cost with a stateful firewall. NAT didn't save you from worms, the stateful firewall that NAT requires in order to work did. But you can have the firewall without the NAT, and the result is simpler, more efficient, easier to manage and more flexible.

So have your router run a firewall that denies inbound connections be default, the same way NAT does. This is a side effect of NAT, but can be done better and more easily by a simple firewall.

Then don't run a web server in your bedroom. And maybe have a firewall that blocks inbound connections by default (which is a side effect of NAT, but absolutely does not require NAT).

But many of us would like to run servers from home.

Silver and gold aren't like fiat, they're inherently inferior to fiat currency, for exactly the reason you cite.

PPH is deeply incorrect when he says that fiat currencies are not backed by assets. Fiat currencies are backed by legally-enforceable promises to repay debts. Every dollar created is balanced by the simultaneous creation of an obligation by someone to do some sort of productive work to generate value that is used to retire that obligation (at which point the dollar is destroyed).

Precious metals have a small utility value coupled with a large speculative value. Fiat currency is also a mixture of utility and speculation, but the mixture depends on the probability that the borrower on the loan contract that created the dollar will repay the debt. Since nearly all debt is repaid, dollars are mostly real utility. Further, the probability of default is offset by the fact that borrowers that don't default repay more than 100% of the debt, because of interest (though interest must also offset the discount rate, i.e. currency devaluation, i.e. inflation). So the precise mixture of utility and speculation behind a dollar is hard to nail down with precision, but the speculative part is very small, usually indistinguishable from zero.

Fiat currency evolved rather than being designed, but it's hard to see how a more perfect system could have been designed. Not only does fiat currency have greater intrinsic value than precious metals or similar physical exchange media, it naturally expands and contracts the money supply as needed, which facilitates rapid economic growth in good times and prevents devastating deflation in bad times.

Cryptocurrencies are among the worst possible forms of currency. They have negative intrinsic value (they cost money to produce but have no intrinsic utility), have very limited ability to expand money supply when needed (they could adjust the mining success probability, but there are strong disincentives to do so) and cannot contract the money supply when needed. Further, they have very high transaction costs, which leads to them being treated as assets rather than currencies. The fact that they're very hard to regulate does, however, make them great for crime of all sorts.

No, fiat currency is asset-backed. The assets in question are legally-enforceable contracts to repay loans. Fiat currency is precisely a legally-enforced commitment to produce something of value in the future, bundled up into an exchangeable medium.