It should be mentioned that this was a 2012 trial after a 2009 earthquake, and that all but one of the convictions were overturned on appeal. The one whose sentence was confirmed also had his sentence reduced and suspended. In Italy, convicts don't go to prison until after their first appeal, so none of the scientists served a day of their sentence.

The one that had his sentence confirmed, though not his punishment, had provided information in an interview that was scientifically invalid and discourage evacuation. Specifically, he told them that the many small quakes reduced the likelihood of a big quake by releasing pent-up stress, but the scientific consensus is that this isn't true because the amount of energy released by small quakes isn't enough to affect the energy of a big one, not unless there are tens or hundreds of thousands of small ones, and that a rise in the number of small quakes more often indicates increased probability of a big one.

I don't think he should have been prosecuted for what he said, but he really should have been more precise, and more responsible. A suspended sentence to make the point that scientists need to be careful and precise with their public statements in cases where lives are on the line is excessive, but it's not ludicrous.

It would barely inconvenience them. These guys are well-funded. They'd just set up their own relays outside of China.

Will it actually help his coin and the crypto bros? I'm not so sure.

A lot of crypto bros believe that all that crypto-assets need now is legitimacy and they'll blow up and take over the world. They also think, probably correctly, that regulation will legitimize crypto-assets. In some sense that may be true, but the ability to sidestep regulation is and always has been crypto-assets' killer feature. Take that away and they may be legitimized, but they'll also lose their only actual reason for existence, which I've got to think will ultimately be bad for crypto-coin valuations.

Trump is clearly terrified of it being released. That's why he's taken to insulting anyone who brings up Epstein, attacking the credibility of the file contents (just in case he is ultimately forced to release them) and engaging in delaying tactics like this grand jury testimony order.

More than that, grand jury files are secret and can generally not be released to the public. The president can ask, the AG can ask, but only the court can approve the release, and the court can only do that only as defined in the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6(e)(3)(E):

The court may authorize disclosure—at a time, in a manner, and subject to any other conditions that it directs—of a grand-jury matter” in a number of situations including:

(1) in connection with a judicial proceeding;

(2) to a defendant who has come forward with evidence that something improper occurred before the grand jury and he may be entitled to have the case dismissed; or

(3) at the request of the federal government, to another jurisdiction that needs it to prosecute a case.

Which of those apply in the current situation? Granted the language says "including", rather than "limited to", but the judge will take guidance from the specified situations and unless there's some similar reason to release the files, the judge will refuse.

No, he's throwing it to a judge to decide, for three reasons (which he probably didn't come up with and probably doesn't understand).

The first is to delay and hope that people demanding the info calm down and forget about it in the meantime. The judge probably won't act quickly (they generally don't), and while the judge is thinking about it the administration can just point to the order and the judicial process and shrug, saying "Trump ordered the release, that's all we can do". That's bullshit of course, because Trump absolutely could just order the DoJ to release the files it has, but because it's mostly Trump's own people who are upset, and most of them know nothing about the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, they'll probably buy it. For a while.

The second is so that when the judge ultimately refuses, Trump can throw the court under the bus. "Hey, I tried, but those damned courts and their activist judges", again ignoring the fact that Trump doesn't need the courts to do anything. As you pointed out, Maxwell's pending appeal may help him get this outcome.

The third is that because the grand jury testimony was focused on what Epstein and Maxwell did, so in the unlikely event that the judge does order its release, it probably won't include a lot of damaging information about other people in their circle, like Trump or his associates, that might be in the full files the DoJ has. As you pointed out, Bondi also gets to decide what parts are pertinent, so there's that filter as well.

To be clear, I strongly doubt there's a "smoking gun" in the Epstein files that could convict Trump of sex crimes. If that were there, the DoJ would probably have acted on it after he left office. But there definitely is something in those files that Trump is afraid of. Maybe it's about him, maybe it's about someone near him. But there's something he doesn't want to come out and that's why he's refusing to release the files and trying to pre-emptively discredit them in case they leak or he is somehow forced to release them.

Statistics is highly useful for CS, and calc is a prerequisite for (real) statistics.

Not if coding is all you can do. That's his point. He's not saying you don't need a degree, he's saying you do need it because it teaches more than just how to code. If all you want is to code, you don't need a degree. But if you want to be a computer scientist or a software engineer, you probably do need a degree... and Google hires computer scientists and software engineers, not coders.

Heh. That reminds me of a conversation I had with my academic advisor in the CS department back in college (~35 years ago). I had been working as a programmer for a couple of years while going to school to get my degree, and had been writing code of various sorts for a decade. I was also young and very cocky. While laying out my path to graduation we were looking at scheduling the required software engineering series. I asked if there was a way I could skip it because "I've been writing code for a while, so I'm pretty sure already learned everything on my own". The professor gave me an indulgent smile and said "I think you should take it anyway".

Looking back, I'm embarrassed for and amused by my younger self. So clueless. So arrogant! I assumed I had discovered, on my own, in a few years of solo projects, the software engineering lessons accumulated by the industry over decades of large-scale projects. I took the classes and immediately realized how much I didn't know, and that the classes were only going to scratch the surface. In hindsight, I'm not sure "scratch the surface" is even accurate, but they did at least make clear to me that I had a lot to learn, and show me something of what the shape of that knowledge might be.

As for whether you can get hired by Google without a degree... you actually can. Google cares about capability, not credentials. That said, there aren't many non-degreed SWEs at Google, because auto-didacts smart enough and dedicated enough to give themselves a good grounding in all of the things a decent degree program provides are pretty rare.

It is hard in practice to get hired without a degree because the recruiters generally discard resumes that don't include a degree (or clearly-equivalent experience), but if you happen to know a Google SWE and can convince them to give you a mock interview (most are happy to unless it's clear to them that you're going to fail badly), and you pass, they can jump you past the screening process, straight to the onsite interview.

Observations of Trump's character and behavior, plus the fact that he's set up extremely hard to trace ways for anyone to funnel arbitrary amounts of money to him.

If he'd like not to be accused of selling favors for cash, he should do what previous presidents have done, put all of his assets in a blind trust, first selling anything non-fungible (e.g. hotels and golf courses), so that no one can give him money except by dropping off a briefcase full of cash which will undoubtedly get noticed and reported.

If you set out to make it easy for people to untraceably bribe you, you have to expect everyone will assume that it's because you want to be untraceably bribed... and when you make governing decisions that generate windfall profits for some people you have to expect that people will assume it's because you've been paid off.

This is why it's important to avoid even the appearance of corruption.

It occurs to me that there's one important difference: Investment. If they won't give me a straight answer but I've invested several minutes of my time in talking to them I might give in to their crap process. If I haven't invested that time, though, just gotten a report from the AI caller that they won't answer unless I come in, I won't feel like I've wasted my time if I just give them a miss.

On the other side, businesses might find that giving the AI the runaround is ineffective, because of the lack of investment by the potential customer. Then they'll have a choice: Either just hang up on the calls and ditch those customers, or else start being clearer about their pricing and services. Ideally, they'll be clearer by just putting the info on their web site, so no one has to make or receive a call.

About as anti-social as I am. I hate talking on the phone. Given the choice between calling some business to ask about their pricing or just not using their service, I'll do the latter every time. What I really prefer is that they put their pricing on their web site. Then neither of us have to be bothered. If they don't want to do that and would like my business, though, they should appreciate the AI calls, because with that feature I just might buy from them. Without it, I almost certainly will not.

Google has customer support lines for paid services. Forcing them to provide customer support for free services would just force them to begin charging for those services.

They should respond by putting the information on the web, so people don't have to ask.

It is true in the US, looked at nationwide. There is variation, of course, and there are some areas where housing is shockingly expensive, primarily due to local building policy and state property tax policy. But on the whole each generation is doing better than the previous in income, home ownership and net wealth, though the younger generations believe the opposite and get quite confused when presented with the data. Somehow they seem to have forgotten that every generation starts out with very little and accumulates wealth over time. Instead, they want to start where their parents are.

Another data point that I think is very interesting, this from a research paper from the Federal Reserve Board: Every generation also has more student debt than the one before it, which isn't surprising, but each generation's increase in income more than offsets this debt load. This data is across a broad spectrum of people, and some obviously do much better than others, but as cohorts it appears that borrowing heavily to invest in education has proven to be a good choice.

The biggest and most important isn't so much a guardrail as a fundamental change in what money is: The shift from metal-backed currency to debt-backed currency, AKA fiat currency. Because fiat currency is backed only by contractual obligations to repay it, the money supply can expand rapidly when times are good and contract gracefully when times are bad, preventing the credit crunches that used to cause frequent crashes and the deflationary cycles that made it take long years to recover. That plus the Fed's ability to influence money supply by tightening or loosening credit have meant that we suffer only relatively mild recessions. The other guardrails you mention are important, but the change how we define money and regulate its supply is far more crucial.

This has nothing to do with "society" or the economy. It's just fools who will be parted from their money. I suspect the prices are driven up primarily by crypto-asset "whales" swapping "traditional" crypto-assets for these stock coins, with just as little understanding of the value of a stock coin as they have of the value of BTC, etc.

And yet home ownership is higher among Gen Z than Millennials at the same age, and higher among Millennials than Gen X.