I believe it was well fitting, completely generated by AI.

From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

"One note from a science process technicality: the closed-source nature of these LLMs makes reproducibility very difficult, which weakens the strength of their result."

No more so than a study in psychology.

That's the truth of it, and this is arguably the real news here. I've got agents that do more web browsing today on my computers than I do.

Eh. That's likely a small fraction of a fraction of a percent.

Look around you. People are not generally concerned with privacy, nevermind security.

that phrase has no meaning, especially in this context. Who is dying of thirst in a desert and is forced to pay a huge premium not to die? Samsung should absolutely get as much money now as it possibly can, eventually the profits will reduce to a trickle, they will need all of this extra fat to survive, good for them. You can build your own memory manufacturing plant if you don't like the prices and think you can sell memory cheaper in this current market, go, do it.

#1: Classic Quicken. gnucash is not a substitute as it doesn't download xactions from the eight or so financial institutions at which our household has a total of almost 30 accounts. There are hundreds of pesky little xactions (esp. dividends from a varied stock portfolio and transactions from usual spending - shopping, utilities, etc) a month total and entering those manually is a nonstarter.

#2: HR Block Deluxe Tax Software.

Quicken is a complete piece of trash but it's the only game in town (no, "online" is not an option). It kind of worked under Wine on simple cases but it's even clunkier performance wise and that use is not supported so that's a dead end.

HR Block Deluxe Tax is an adequate package which also "kind of worked" under Wine on very simple cases but the lack of support or an update issued April 13 that doesn't work makes running it under Wine a non-starter.

These are the only two reasons I still run Windows (10!) on my daily driver and since I update/use Quicken daily, I just live on Windows with Linux VMs for Linux things (little "side" projects as I'm retired). I'd love to drop Windows but it's just not an option.

I do like some of the "polish" of Windows and available apps and not having to deal with "which distro" issues but those wouldn't keep me from switching.

I've found that Windows is more reliable (I've not seriously broken a Windows system to a BSOD in many years but my Linux machines and VMs sometimes get hosed but I've learned to just keep up w/timeshift and recover that way).

So let me get this straight. If I live in a hot or cold environment, and/or I regularly use the advertised range (or as much of it that the car will give me, realistically) to avoid having to sit and wait for fast charge to 80% for an hour on a road trip, I'm looking at (probably) no more than 80% capacity available after 5 years?

That torpedos the used market solidly. No wonder they're available so much cheaper.

The ONLY problem is that not everyone else has done so yet. Government shouldn't be allowed to tax income and profit.

Sure. The reason for stupid ideas, like Lysenko, taking over is lack of competition, which is inherent to communism, In a capitalist system people are searching for ways to make money for themselves, so there are enough competing ideas being tried out with private money. If the money runs out before profits are made, the ideas stop. When government can keep subsidizing bad ideas they don't stop, they just keep getting bigger and more stupid.

I went to school in VA. There was rarely a day that the heat would get turned on. They're big monolithic heat islands full of children, calorie powered.

We also didn't have A/C back then, either. Windows would be open all day. I doubt they do that now.

I know this comes off trollish, but: why can't these power companies (which are usually public utilities) just build more power production instead of jacking prices? What's the deal? Why is this a "hate on AI that runs in datacenters" problem, and not a "just produce more power" problem?

Yep. The fundamental problem that requires loops is that opus et al are lazy AF. They do not "implement the plan, make no mistakes". They'll do a subset of {A..M} phases in a plan (90% of A, 70% B, 30% L, 0% M, etc.) and then say "all done!" when it compiles. So, you've got to loop it "do this until it's done". It's fundamentally brute forcing the problem, because the models aren't designed for completeness, just complete-enough, and then lies to you.

The harness exacerbates the problem. People have implemented some privately which do this correctly, but aside from the one I just made available on gh, I'm not aware of any that are public which do so natively/by core design. (And even then, it's sometimes iffy...)

This is all just marketing to try to cover for the fact that Claude Code wasn't properly conceived or designed on the onset to do what agentic tools like Hermes (and others, like Meept, or that Paperclip company with its autonomous employees) already do: create autonomous agentic workflows with clearly defined executors.

"It's a loop" is just bullshit to cover for the fact that they've got no clear, clean way to constrain context or workflows. They're trying to make themselves sound edgy so they can seem at the forefront of something they've clearly fallen far behind on.

Watch, they'll come out with some "new" feature in a couple of months which is already old hat to those at the forefront.

No, of course a broken spar is A Very Bad Thing when it happens in midair.

Is this changing-the-timing-chains-in-an-Audi difficult, or is this replacing-your-spinal-cord-without-killing-you impossible?

Are these planes repairable? I think it's a reasonable question.

(Of course, with the Audi, if has anything more than a loose gas cap it's not economically feasible to repair, but that's what you get with European engineering.)