Because the British government was considered stable and people believed that they would continue to pay forever. If the issuer defaults, you are out of luck.

I owned some of those series E bonds when I was young. They made a great birthday present and helped put me through college. Governments can do that because people assume (not always correctly) that they are eternal. Eventually the government decided they were a bad investment and stopped the interest, so you had to cash them in. It only works if you are sure that you can redeem the principle when you need it. If a company sold such a bond, you would likely lose some or all of your money if they go bankrupt. Bond holders get paid before stockholders, but that only applies if there is money to be distributed.

Exactly. Conservationists should not be worrying about honeybees any more than they should about soybeans. It is the native pollinators that are at risk. The causes of their decline are much less clear.

Honeybees are critical for a large part of our agriculture. Their decline has been traced to pesticide resistant mites than carry diseases that can devastate colonies. There are no other miticides approved for use in bee hives in the US. In other words, none of this has anything to do with conservation. It is all about commercial agriculture and regulatory barriers. It should be easy enough to get an emergency approval for alternative miticides, if people can get moving and file the paperwork. Then conservationists can go back to actually worrying about conservation issues.

I guess a trillion dollars is not what it used to be.

The financial sector makes its money from fees and commissions; it does not matter if they make their clients money or not.

Read is Wikipedia biio.

Epstein made his money in the financial sector. The evil was about influence not cash.

A tool is a stick you have modified to be able to do something you could not do with the stick.

Which one?

Neither do I, but the AI pushers want to claim it is better for everything.

You can bet the people affected by the regulation will read it. They have whole departments that do nothing else. Most of them also have lawyers and lobbyists.

You have a much higher opinion of the quality of the typical US regulation than I do.

The issue is not the algorithm; it is that the larger the number of people the lower the chance of any particular time being free. I remember one case of a large meeting where the only time when everyone was available according to their calendars was over a year in the future.

Exactly. That is why it is important to block off things like lunch on your calendar. Otherwise, that is the most likely time for everyone to be available.