Tell me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity without telling me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity. Vulture private equity is a thing; the basic trick is:

1. Buy large, well-known company X with stable but not outstanding economic performance, low debt, and lots of real assets (read: Cheap enough to buy and take private, with lots of collateral available)
2. Sell all the real company X assets (buildings, land) to another company, company Y, also owned (directly or indirectly) by the private equity firm or its individual owners, with the theoretical idea that that money can fuel expansion.
3. Maybe borrow additional money from company Z (also tied to private equity firm) while you're at it, at above-market rates.
4. Lease all the assets back to company X, at exorbitant rates.
5. Don't actually expand, just pay all the money acquired from the asset sale to pay the leases and loans over a few years, extracting all of the value from the company as it becomes a hollow shell
6. Discover, to your great surprise, that company X, while profitable when it owns its land, is unprofitable when paying insane lease rates for said land
7. Regretfully have company X declare bankruptcy, sell off any IP or remaining inventory to squeeze whatever additional drops of blood are left in that stone
8. goto #1

They did it to Toys "R" Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Joann Fabrics, and more. They're doing it to hospitals and housing (but piecemeal, so aside from an occasional hospital failing, it doesn't make a big splashy headline). It's all 100% legal, and morally bankrupt. It's less ethical than the publicly traded companies because the reporting requirements are far lower, the number of interested parties far fewer (no shareholder activism here), and the regulations preventing egregious actions fewer to boot.

Yes, there are privately held companies that are forward-thinking and ethical. Largely because their owners are. Until said owners (or their descendants) decide to cash out, and look who comes swooping in with money to buy them out (hint: it's private equity) and destroy what they built for another quick buck. Saying "private equity is good because good people can do good things with it" is like saying "despotism is good because an enlightened despot can run things more efficiently and morally than a democracy", ignoring that it also gives them the freedom to behave terribly with little or no accountability.

Well, when a major collapse in private equity or cryptocurrencies takes out the retirement funding for millions of folks in the U.S., destroying the U.S. economy thanks to seniors no longer having money to spend, the resulting U.S. economic collapse is likely to affect the world economy. So, yeah, when the U.S. makes major changes that undermine its own economic stability, it's likely to affect the world.

I began working for a hedge fund in June of 2008, midway between Bear Stearns failing and Lehman Brothers failing. In early 2009, seven or eight months after I joined, and after it was very clear how bad things were, and what caused it, I got called into a meeting with the quants (I was just a code monkey) in which they decided that, while we hadn't been in subprime mortgages before, now was the perfect time to get in on them, as the collapse supposedly made the prices more proportionate to the risk.

Nobody learned lessons, they just saw cheap assets they could snap up and profit off of, and a clear precedent that gov't support would prevent a complete collapse in the future.

One big concern is that bad 401(k) managers will integrate these much riskier investments into the limited selection of custom funds offered to investors. Sure, you can choose not to invest in dedicated crypto or private equity funds, but if it's hidden inside most/all of the investment options offered by your 401(k) provider, you're screwed by this flexibility.

Unless you're stupidly wealthy, in which case your failure can become a structural threat to the market, and your mistakes and losses will be met with gov't intervention to ensure you can't really fail. Or you just send enough money to various super PACs and election funds to ensure the gov't isn't picking winners and losers, except when it comes to you; you're the winner, your competition is the loser.

That's not necessarily enough to implicate "poisons". All sorts of conditions were rare or functionally unheard of until Industrial Revolution periods, because our lives were rather closer to the conditions they evolved for (large amounts of time spent outdoors with a different mix of pathogens than you get in a fairly sterile indoor environment) until that point. Allergies, various autoimmune issues, asthma, and even nearsightedness were rare, less severe, or non-existent in the before times.

For the first three, the working theory ("hygiene hypothesis") is that, because our immune systems evolved to expect a certain level, and certain type, of disease in the environment, to calibrate the body's idea of what constitutes a dangerous pathogen, when we moved from "exposure to lots of digestive system pathogens and parasites" to "almost none of that, just lots of respiratory ailments that spread easily indoors" the immune system went haywire and either identified harmless things as harmful, or failed to even properly identify what constituted "self" vs. "other".

For nearsightedness, that's always existed, but it's gotten worse. Some of that is likely genetic; we developed cheap enough glasses and it became less important to have good eyes to pass on your genes, so the selective pressure to preserve genes for good vision largely vanished. But it's also because our eyes calibrate as children by looking at distant things in good lighting (that is, outdoors, in sunlight). When we moved indoors and stopped working and playing outside as much, the lighting got worse (you may think you use a lot of lights, but that's your eyes fooling you by adjusting to make indoors seem brighter; it's a tiny fraction of what natural sunlight provides), and we mostly looked at nearby things, and whoops, myopia becomes more common and more severe.

And of course, many disorders, like Parkinson's, are largely diseases of old age (typical age of onset for Parkinson's is 60), so in a world with lower life expectancy (yes, a lot of it was child mortality, but some of it was shorter lifespans even for those who survived childhood), the percentage of people who live long enough for Parkinson's to be a meaningful risk would be lower.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that Parkinson's isn't possibly triggered by an environmental toxin. Just that "it was only described recently" as evidence for "it must be caused by a brand new toxin" is overlooking the many, many changes we've made to the environment we live in over the past 200-odd years that cause all sorts of disorders in ways we still don't definitively understand the causation behind, or only very recently found explanations for.

Compressed elliptic curve points is not some crazy secret or complex thing to be making up conspiracy theories about. The nature of elliptic curve cryptography is that knowing the curve and the x coordinate, there are literally only two possible y coordinates, and a single bit signals which of the two possible y coordinates to use, allowing you to reduce, say, 512 bits of key coordinate down to 257 (256 for the x, 1 for the y), at a trivial cost to compute y from x before doing the rest of the math.

The only reason this wasn't done automatically in every implementation of elliptic curve cryptography from the beginning is because some idiot at the patent office issued a patent for point compression (that is, one specific case of selecting one of two options with a single bit), and so for a couple of decades free projects didn't want to risk implementing it for fear of patent trolls. The patents have now expired, so people are doing the sensible thing.

The problem is that the people most harmed by this aren't the morons themselves, but their kids, who have no say in the matter. Sure, in an evolutionary sense, eliminating the children does curtail their influence on the gene pool (depending on how much of their idiocy is heritable), but I'd really prefer it if they took themselves out of the gene pool and let their kids learn from that example.

checks current RAM usage Almost precisely 1 GB from all Firefox tabs put together (seven loaded and an embarrassingly large number of unloaded tabs I'll probably ignore for a few years before cleaning them up by the thousand). uBlock Origin and uMatrix probably reducing the load a bit by blocking all the ads. Chrome is no better at this (and worse at the ad blocking), I really don't get why people are so down on Firefox memory usage.

Umm, carbon dioxide does in fact damage health directly. No, it's not doing anything to us right now outdoors, but indoor levels of CO2, especially with large numbers of people in a poorly ventilated area are substantially higher than outdoor levels. A higher baseline outdoor CO2 makes those indoor levels rise even higher. Health effects begin at around 1000 ppm, which we regularly hit already indoors, and which we could hit outdoors in urban areas by the end of the century. It begins with reduced higher-level cognitive function while exposed to the higher levels (read: we get dumber and dumber as levels rise), and chronic exposure weakens bones, forms kidney stones, and damages the circulatory system (more cardiac arrest, more strokes, etc.). It's why solar radiation management isn't sufficient to solve the problem; if we cool the planet without reducing CO2 levels themselves, we'll all get dumber and sicker no matter how much we do to restore pre-industrial temperatures.

That's only true since 2017. Prior to then, lots of folks itemized. Post-2017, with itemized deductions for regular people limited to the charitable deduction, the (capped) mortgage interest deduction, and the (heavily capped, to punish blue states, and not adjusted for inflation so it's less useful each year) SALT deduction, yeah, basically only singles with new mortgages or those who earn and donate a lot of money get anything from itemizing, but that isn't a permanent and automatic state of affairs. It could happen next year if the One Big Beautiful Bill fails, because all the changes to deductions and the standard deduction were officially temporary, and failing to extend them means the old deduction regime returns.

At the same time he was talking about "undoing some mistakes", he was also talking about gutting the regulations, and regulatory agencies, that fixed those mistakes of the past. A phrase that rings true is "Every regulation is written in blood." No, it's not 100% true, but it's the case for many, many regs. The regulations on food safety, water quality, removing lead from the environment, etc., are all there because people died. When you say "I want to cut regulations (in general)" as opposed to "I oppose these specific regulations as being poorly targeted and in need of improvement", you're saying "It's okay if we kill some people if it saves money." And that's exactly what we're getting.

Capital-L Libertarians lately haven't been all that distinct from Republicans. Sure, they tend to be more marijuana friendly. And they claim to want to cut spending or balance the budget, but so does almost every Republican, and 95% of them, given the right environment, e.g. single party control of all branches of gov't, immediately unbalance the budget further, barely cutting spending, if at all, and handing out even more unsustainable tax cuts. And you'd think, given the whole "personal autonomy as guiding principle" thing in little-l libertarianism, they'd be pro-choice, or at least "we may dislike it personally, but the gov't has no business getting involved". But basically every prominent Libertarian politician and thinker either is vocally anti-choice, or, even if they claim to be pro-choice, glaringly avoids criticizing massive steps towards anti-choice policies at both federal and state level.

I'll take the Libertarian party more seriously the moment they clearly decide that bodily autonomy, the single most basic human right, trumps (rather newly invented; within the last 100 years, most churches tended to go by quickening, not conception, as beginning of life) religious beliefs about non-conscious entities. For now, they're basically NRINO (Not Republican In Name Only).

Gaming via VPN sounds like a lag clusterfuck. You could do it, but for real time games, you'd be at a huge disadvantage.