The IMF uses the proper definition.

I think we can trust those who actually have access to the data to have represented it accurately. If you have a problem with the results, then that's not a fault with the definition.

Nobody has discussed cold fusion seriously in many decades. Hot fusion is catastrophically under-funded (the total spent on fusion research globally in the lat 60 years is about the same as spent just on subsidies for the fossil fuel industry every three days, to give you a perspective on how expensive energy work actually is even for fuels that are simple and well understood).

If you spent as much on fusion yearly as you spend on fossil fuels yearly, then fusion will be cracked before 2030. If you underfund it, relative to the complexity of the problem, then convergence is guaranteed asymptotic.

I mean sure, there could be some kind of conspiracy, though Occam's razor suggests that it is more likely that the person who created it is doing something questionable.

On the other hand, given the current state of the U.S. government, the possibility that they are being targeted for having cached some kind of data that the Trump administration doesn't want seeing the light of day is not nearly as unlikely as one might hope.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Donald Trump on there just to see what it said. Ignoring a couple of really recent posts that seemed jarring by their inclusion, it mostly seemed like a competent summary of a lot of stuff, and I didn't see much there, if anything, that I disagreed with.

The problem was what *wasn't* there. The impeachments were about a paragraph long. Basically nothing about the January 6th committee was there, none of the myriad civil and criminal cases were there, etc. It was the most whitewashed article I've seen in a long time.

And then I looked up "Barack Obama". Far from being whitewashed, that article was mud-bathed. The controversy section was quite detailed, but tended to leave out any details that could be seen as positive. For example, it points out the 2013 Inspector General report about the IRS targeting conservative groups, but conveniently omits later revelations that at the time he made that report, he was aware that liberal groups were similarly targeted, thus creating a false narrative that the behavior was specifically anti-Republican, when in fact, it was anti-PAC. Still problematic, but very differently so.

So basically, the information that is presented seems to be mostly correct, but is massively right-biased by the information that it chooses to leave out. And lest you think that they just omitted things they didn't consider important, I would point out that both articles were packed with copious amounts of tedious and meaningless trivia that nobody should care about, and the articles could easily have been reduced by 90% without meaningful loss of useful information. For example, how many people care that one of Obama's elementary schools had a lot of Muslims in attendance? Exactly nobody... assuming it is even true and is not an AI hallucination or right-wing propaganda.

I'm not impressed. A trustworthy source should omit trivial and unimportant details, but should not omit details that would bias opinion. This reliably failed on both counts. Horribly. Irredeemably. To the folks working on that site, my advice would be this: Start over. This is trash.

But I guess that's the whole point — creating a right-biased Fakeipedia so that people don't have to be exposed to facts that exceed the limits of their political bubble world. So in that regard, I guess they succeeded. But I have exactly as much trust in that as I do in AI hallucinations.

And as I read this, I realize that the bill hasn't passed yet. So consider this a pledge that if my assembly member does vote for it, I will support his or her opponents, without regard to their positions on any issues, simply because almost anyone would be better than someone clueless enough about technology to vote for a law like this.

The California standard is completely and utterly infeasible. It fails Goodhart's law, which states that as soon as a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

As soon as you say "A part that looks like this arbitrary gun part cannot be manufactured", it's open season on designing a new version of the part that doesn't trip the rule. And as soon as the government adapts to that new design, five minutes later, there's another new design that still doesn't trip the rule.

It's a game of cat and mouse, but there are infinite numbers of ways to design the part, and only finite storage for models to recognize the part.

Basically, the game is already lost before the government even starts to play. The only way this would ever work would be if you were required to provide documentation telling why you're making each part, and what it is, and having someone validate that the part is plausibly what you say it is based on it looking like something you are allowed to print, and therefore presumably not part of a potential gun. And even that wouldn't be foolproof.

But as soon as the presumption is that it is okay to print something unless it matches any sort of pattern, model, etc., you're screwed. This can't be done, period, or at least not in any way that will meaningfully prevent... well... anything, really.

No, they won't. Nobody will care. Just like they don't care about all the murders that happen now. The only way somebody cares is if some blowhard politician screams, "Oh, my g*d! It's a ghost gun! Everyone has to panic and be outraged!" And then they will care. But as long as the people in power don't act like morons, someone will use a ghost gun, and there will be exactly as much of a response as for a murder involving any other firearm, because it really doesn't make a dime's worth of difference in the end.

Traceable guns don't catch murderers all that often. The overwhelming majority of gun crimes are committed with guns that were not purchased through a legitimate dealer — almost 86%. Even if the serial numbers have not been removed completely, you'd end up tracing the firearm back to the person from whom it was stolen, rather than the actual killer.

There is basically no benefit to serial numbers on firearms from a public safety perspective, and there never was. The only real benefit is getting stolen firearms back to their rightful owners. And while that's a laudable goal, the people pushing it as a way of preventing crime are being completely disingenuous.

The people pushing fear of ghost guns are doubly so. Every gun used in a crime is a ghost gun. The only difference is that someone of them were manufactured, and the rest were just de-serialized.

Anyway, my current plan is to figure out whether my assembly member voted for this trash, and if so, pledge the maximum dollar amount to the campaigns of every person running against that person in the next election. If everyone reading this post did the same, these shit-for-brains-stupid laws wouldn't keep getting passed.

Seems like after two days, the emergency services are going to come in and find a bad smell. Would be better to have an app for your watch that detects loss of consciousness/heart rhythm and calls emergency services when it would actually be early enough to maybe do some good.

The thing is, you don't even have to have collusion. When there are only a few companies in a space, there's no incentive to innovate, and there's no incentive to spend money that would drive operating costs down to compete with the other companies. Therefore, the cost stays high. Almost invariably, the appearance of a new major player drives costs suddenly down, because all of those cost-saving innovations suddenly are worth spending money on, because the new competitor jumps in with the latest, cheapest tech. But until that happens, even without collusion, there's no strong incentive for any of the companies to disrupt the status quo, so they don't.

False. For the most part, oligopolies don't compete meaningfully. There's usually zero price competition, often with most of the firms taking their cues on pricing from whichever company is the price leader for the market. They may differentiate their products slightly from one other, but not by enough to convince a significant number of customers to change providers.

Fossil fuels are globally subsidised to the tune of $11 million every minute, according to the International Monetary Fund. That money has to come from somewhere, and there's no way in hell a billionaire is subsidising some soccer mum's SUV. Which mean that the money has to come out of taxes.

So it's not particularly cheap, net. It's just that the total cost is diffused across the food you buy, the house you own, the car tags, the money you earn. All of these different taxes contribute some percentage of the cost of the coal and oil. However, collecting and distributing the money isn't free, which means that you're actually paying MORE than you would if you were paying honestly.

Still, if people want to pay more and get less, and die young as a result, that's really their business. Of course, they're making other people die young, too, but that's a democracy for you.

But I don't want any DRM. Can't we get a panic screen without DRM?

Well you could always get DRM, DRM, Panic, Sausage, and DRM. That's only got a little bit of DRM in it.

Up until the point where it hallucinates absolute nonsense. And now you have multi-million-dollar legal or tax liability or whatever.

I would argue that for Street Atlas, the software isn't changing; the data is. Getting map updates should cost money. Continuing to use the software with the existing map data shouldn't. So SaaS is still bad. DaaS (data as a service) is less so.

For antivirus, the same thing is true.

And in both cases, limiting the software to a single data provider harms consumers by forcing a software change if you change data providers. In an ideal world, other map providers would be allowed to write data files compatible with Delorme, and other AV providers would be able to provide data files compatible with Norton.

But TurboTax is the worst of the worst. Their software is horribly buggy, requiring huge amounts of user effort for things that would be simple if they just provided open standards for how companies provide data, e.g. a standard digital format for data from your brokerage. And the need for constantly updating software is largely driven by the government not providing the forms in a standardized data format. Otherwise, you would only need to update the software if you need to take a new deduction that didn't exist or fill out a form that didn't exist previously.

But if they actually got the IRS and brokerages and banks to make their forms available in a standardized format, then most of what TurboTax et al do would become trivial, and nobody would be willing to pay their high fees. So SaaS actively contributes to the enshittification of tax software.

It wouldn't be so bad, but there are hardly any lumberjacks in the UK.

*runs away and hides from an irate mob of Monty Python fans

Seriously, it very much depends on the area. Rugby, a town-borderline-city, has fewer pubs than the Marple/Mellor collection of villages up in t' norf. This is mostly because Rugby is a run-down dump with a dying town centre and hardly anything left in it, whereas Marple (although it lost its engineering back in the 60s) is a major commuter/retirement town with just enough rational people to keep the businesses vibrant and alive.

And that's what keeps pubs open. Not the economy, but the attitude.