The big critique about capitalism is wealth inequality - it invariably leads to some people getting most of the money, and everyone else getting very little money.

The problem with that critique is that wealth inequality is mathematically more fundamental than any economic system. In other words, any time there is trade in value, you will get wealth inequality regardless of the system.

You can see this in numerous simulations online, such as this one.

Wealth inequality follows a Boltzman distribution or a Pareto distribution, depending on the type of investments allowed, and this can be proven mathematically.

About 2.5 million books are published in the US each year, about the square root of that number (1500) break even in sales, and about the square root of *that* number (35) are best sellers. Lebron James scores 43,000 points in his career, Kobe Bryant scores 34,000 points, and there are a zillion players that score lesser values.

Wealth inequality happens any time you have trade in value, this can be proven mathematically, and it applies to any value in any system.

And as a side note, once you realize wealth inequality is inevitable, the main selling point of Communism disappears. Wealth inequality happens under Communism as well, and we have numerous examples of this in recent history.

To be fair, this wasn't known when Marx was writing his thesis. At that time (1850's), economics hadn't progressed as far as it has today. Marx himself had a degree in law and philosophy, and not economics or psychology.

Capitalism has a bunch of bad characteristics, but we try to modify it to reduce the damage. For example, you can't sell patent medicines any more, you can't sell fake stock shares, and so on.

We use a modified version of capitalism that tries to avoid the bad characteristics.

The Culex quinquefasciatus (from Google's EPA request) is not native to N. America, it likely originated in Africa and came across due to human activity.

There are over 200 species of mosquito in N. America (worldwide about 3500). Taking one out will have negligible effect on the food chain.

Bats, specifically, will eat mosquitos but prefer larger insects. Mosquitos are small relative to the effort the bat takes to catch therm.

The specific mosquito mentioned is available in lots of places around the world (not native - see first point above), so we could repopulate if we notice a problem.

Google is breeding these mosquitos, so we have breeding populations and we could repopulate if needed.

It's the primary vector for West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis virus, Avian malaria, and Wuchereria bancrofti (a parasitic worm).

I've been following the progress of these sorts of activities for many years. With proper care and monitoring, it's possible we could fix a lot of invasive species problem such as Cane Toads in Australia, Mongooses (mongeese?) in Hawaii, and Aedes aegypti. A. aegypti strongly prefers to bite humans and is carrier to disease, and is also not native to N. America.

The US used to have screw worms. The screw worm would lay eggs in an open wound on mammals (usually domestic animals such as livestock, but sometimes humans) and the larvae would develop under the skin by eating healthy tissue.

The US government began a program of releasing irradiated screw worm males, which are sterile, into the environment to compete with healthy males. This reduced the population, eventually down to zero, and now the US is largely screw worm free. This only took about 10 years.

Good riddance.

Now do ticks.

The full explanation is Sterile Insect Technique.

That was the rebound year from Covid. It's a statistical anomaly, and chosen by a lot of news reports to highlight the severity of whatever point they're making.

Comparing today's employment against, for example, 2019 is also difficult due to the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants that entered under the Biden administration. For example, today there is about 4.3% unemployment, the average is 5.7%, so we're doing pretty good on that front.

Statistics can lie. Our 4.3% represents 7.4 million unemployed workers, while the 2019 3.5% rate represents 5.8 million unemployed. When you bring in 10 million undocumented people, it's easy to see how 5.8 million unemployed can swell to 7.4 million.

Statistics lie by comparing our employment to a year that had record values because of an anomaly, or compare the number of unemployed by number to a year before we closed the Southern border.

You're assuming that having a healthy life is the primary goal, but it's not. It's secondary.

A healthy life is one of several secondary goals that you have in order to achieve your primary goals, whatever they may be.

For example, having a family/children is the goal of many people. Do you want to see your grandkids grow up? Have a healthy life.

Having enough money for retirement so you can travel (or just have fun) is another goal many people have. Want to enjoy your retirement? Have a healthy life.

Goals go hand-in-hand with motivations, and one way to increase your motivation for doing something is to identify how it contributes to one of your life goals.

So for example, that college course you're taking to get your MBA - are you doing that just for something to do, or does it contribute to where you want to be in 10 years?

It turns out that doing something "just for money" is not, by itself, a motivational goal. Doing something "for the money" that you will need to eventually start your own business, though... that's a motivational goal.

So no, living a healthy miserable life doesn't make much sense if being healthy is the goal.

Living a healthy miserable life *does* make sense if it lets you see your grandkids grow up.

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump's 2017 travel ban from nations that didn't have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that's not thought to be beyond the court's jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there's an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don't have to worry about it.

From the Yahoo article:

...and of course it's in beta to a limited number of users right now.

Someone did an AI live action recreation of Johnny Quest, and it looks totally cool.

That's sorta' the reverse of the current article - instead of taking a no longer available actor and recreating him, they're making an actor (who never existed) from scratch to play the part of a cartoon character.

Just saw the trailer and...

I have no idea what the movie is about, whether it looks good, or whether I want to see it.

It reads "some stories were too hidden to be found" (and wtf does that mean? And the story was too hidden to be found but you're making a movie of it?), and it's based on a real story.

And a bunch of seemingly disconnected action shots.

Hard pass. I'll stream it if the reviews are any good.

If we change the "right to repair" laws, we should also change the liability laws. If a home-repaired unit becomes unsafe and injures people, who is responsible?

In the case of farming equipment, suppose a farmer makes a repair to a piece of equipment and then his son is injured or killed by said equipment. Who is liable?

The company would say that the farmer took full responsibility once he modified the equipment, while the farmer could say that his modifications did not affect the safety of the device.

It's also not at all clear whether a physical repair done by the farmer could have contributed to an accident made by software. Lots of things can affect software, such as the alignment of the two welded pieces. The software makes a performance analysis of stopping distance based on information it has, but the repair might have changed those parameters.

People who like to race want to download new parameters into the ECU of their car, but that's illegal. It actually is: the parameters are set to maximize efficiency, and while you can get better performance with different numbers, it would promote climate change, so it was made illegal.

Being able to repair things is good, and it's very clear that open source has driven the software industry forward, but we need to be careful about liability as well. Jailbreaking your phone is one thing, but jailbreaking your EV might have catastriphic consequences. I'm not a fan of ID-tagging headlights (BMW, Mazda), but if an accident occurs because of reduced visibility the company could be held liable.

I'm completely in favor of being able to repair things, and John Deere is the worst sort of predatory behaviour, but just wanted to point out that there's another side to the story and we should be careful.

"Fluid" intelligence is the ability to think, reason, solve problems, and learn things. "Crystallized" intelligence is your amassed knowledge.

These are technical terms used in the literature.

Intelligence is nature's guess as to how complex your environment will be... but there's an out. People with low fluid intelligence have to work harder to understand things, but if they put in the work they can amass a body of knowledge that rivals that of people with high fluid intelligence.

And of course, lots of people with high intelligence stop learning in their mid twenties. At that point they've conquered their environment and are living successful lives (good job, married, kids &c) so there's no real reason to push themselves. Lots and lots of people, even smart people, haven't read a single book in the last year - and this observation was true in the 1970's before the internet.

(And nowadays this is probably more accurate due to the appalling quality of information found on the internet.)

It's a question of training. We're evolved to believe what people say, it's a way of reducing the cognitive load of learning things (by believing what someone else has already figured out). We're not used to questioning the logic of someone else's beliefs.

As an example of this, note that Warren Buffet has built a career on identifying fallacies in business, google "Warren Buffet fallacies" for a list.

None of these fallacies is taught in school, everyone has to find them and figure them out on their own. And then you have to use them in your daily lives.

Almost no one is used to doing that, which leads to the current problems with AI.

Yeah, but other than that, what has Elon Musk ever done for us?

To add to the parent post, the paper appears to be the first step in the scientific method: "Notice a trend".

The next steps will be "form a hypothesis", "construct a test to confirm or deny the hypothesis", "perform the test"... and so on.

In this specific case, "perform the test" might be impossible to do for ethical reasons - you can't take people at random and sit them down in front of a LLM and test their level of psychosis before and after, because of that pesky "do no harm" rule.

But we might be able to find people who have had their psychosis levels measured before LLMs became available, and whose LLM accounts will accurately show how much LLM usage they have, and we can then remeasure their levels of psychosis and see if this correlates with LLM account usage.

Or some other test like that.

The paper appears to be an attempt to raise the issue and start a conversation. From the abstract:

From the parent post:

I'm also heavily influenced by TV, and have spent a lot of time trying to sort out beliefs that come from TV from beliefs that come from experience or research.

I'm constantly presented with a situation or belief and have to pause to reflect and say "I believe that because it was on TV, it's probably not real". Many of my opinions on the police, government agencies, other countries, world events, and social constructs come not from experience, but on how they were portrayed on TV.

We're hard-wired to believe what people tell us, it's a cognitive shortcut in an environment where you can't know anything, but lots and lots of what we think today are only dramatic choices intended to provoke emotional response. (Compare with news reporting today. On both sides.)

For example, I've met people who won't go hiking because of all the bugs, skunks, poison ivy, and bears.

Assuming that LLMs are content neutral, I think in 10 years or so we're going to find people whose worldview is a greatly amplified version of random events that were highlighted when they were kids.

LLAMA was [illegally] released into the public three years ago (to the day - March 3, 2023), and it's estimated that ten years of AI improvements happened in the subsequent 6 months. People were doing all sorts of things with LLMs that meta hadn't thought of, or didn't have time to develop. Such as text-to-audio, local LLM use, and automated manuscript generation.

All these attempts at monetizing the LLMs are, at the same time, holding back the progress of AI development. If OpenAI wants to leap ahead of the competition, they should put their language model online and see what the community comes up with.

I get it - training a LLM takes roughly $100 million for the initial dataset, and companies need to recoup this expense.

Still, I'm saddened that I can only use the system for purposes that the company approves of, and in ways that they have already thought of.

There's a lot of potential there, and we're not making good use of that.

Yes, because those are totally a real thing.

You are not telling the whole story here.

I'm currently in the middle of a $15,000 purchase dispute with a Chinese vendor (for a CNC system). The device arrived non-functional, the merchant's customer service is wildly non-useful and time consuming, and after 3 months of dikking around I've decided to send it back.

I have clear E-mail evidence from the merchant acknowledging the problem, the CC company yanked back the payment and is forcing the merchant to issue an RMA for the device.

The credit card company isn't on my side, nor are they on the side of the merchant - they are on the side of honest transactions, and they police those transactions for me.

Twice I've had my CC info stolen at a restaurant(*), the CC company detected fradulent purchases, and issued me a new card. A couple of times they incorrectly detected fraud, and a quick phone call sorted that out.

All of this is value added to using a credit card.

It's not *just* rent seeking on transactions, it's also providing a service: "peace of mind" in your purchases.

If anyone is interested, ask ChatGPT about the Fair Credit Reporting Act as regards to dispute resolution. If you receive a defective product, you have 60 days from the statement (not the purchase, but the statement) to initiate a dispute, and there are several "states" the dispute can be in, such as "vendor is working with the customer to resolve the issue".

It's not just rent seeking, the extra 5% CC fee for the purchase is for "peace of mind".

(*) Don't let the CC out of your sight. If the waitress takes the CC away from your table, she can easily write down the number and security code before bringing it back.