A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

No idea. It's fine so far, but I've only had it for a few months. Honestly, I'm pretty brutal on devices. Odds are high that I'll break it in some other way before the flexing causes a problem.

In a case like that I think Claude is "smart" enough to push back. Claude often catches my mistakes. It's also pretty easy to add rules like "Request confirmation for any purchase requests that are unusually large or otherwise out of the ordinary for the user. Review past purchases to determine user purchasing patterns." to make this explicit.

Claude is far, far smarter than Alexa.

OTOH, it sometimes does do stupid things. On balance, I think I screw up more often than it does, but you can't just assume it will make the right decisions, so adding rules that require doublechecking with the user is a good idea.

Without a foldable phone, I'd agree. With the foldable, I can unfold it and have a reasonably large on-screen keyboard, which I can type on with both thumbs. And of course my phone is always with my, while a tablet would be an extra device to carry -- and if I'm carrying an additional device, the laptop is more functional.

Me too. I looked! Termius + tmux works reasonably well, but an app specifically for this purpose would be nicer.

I use the Termius app on my phone, SSH to my workstation, run tmux attach -d to attach to the tmux session in which I'm running Claude, then tell it to do stuff. It can only do stuff that can be done via the command prompt, HTTP requests or MCP integrations (Gmail, Drive, Confluence, Jira, etc.), but that covers a lot of ground. "Only what I can do from the command prompt" is not much of a limitation.

I've told Claude to write a design doc in Confluence (which I reviewed and shared with others to get feedback); then implement the feature, including tests; build and run the code and tests on two hardware platforms (the host and an attached embedded QNX board); commit the code to a feature branch and push the branch upstream (where I reviewed it and told Claude what to fix); create a pull request; respond to reviewer comments; and merge the PR, all from my phone while a thousand miles from the workstation. I've only done the complete cycle from the phone once, but I've done pieces of it many times.

To make this work well, it helps to have a phone with a big screen. I have a Pixel 10 Fold, unfolded for Termius use. A tablet would be better... but if I'm going to lug a tablet around, my Macbook is better yet, since it's not that much bigger than a tablet and has a keyboard. And, obviously, I do reach for the laptop rather than the phone if I have it. But I can get a lot done from the phone.

This new feature is basically "Let poor GUI users do what command-line jockeys have been doing for a while".

This isn't true.

Members of Congress and congressional employees are not exempt from the insider trading prohibitions that apply to everyone else. Trading on non-public information is a crime. In addition, if they're trading on classified information, the mere act of making the trade could constitute public disclosure of classified information, which could constitute several additional felonies, potentially including treason if the disclosure aids enemies of the United States.

However

While what you said is patently false as a matter of law, in practice there's basically no enforcement of the law against members of Congress. So, while your statement was wrong, you could say "Insider trading is ignored when done by a member of Congress" with near 100% accuracy.

The fix I would propose is not to ban members of Congress or their staffs or immediate families from trading, but instead to require them to disclose all trades 48 hours in advance. This wouldn't change the legality of trading on insider info (it would still be illegal), but it would serve to eliminate most of the benefit of acting on insider info, because their disclosure would move the market. Violating the disclosure requirement or failing to follow through on a disclosed trade would incur a fine equal to 150% of the value of the trade. This should be coupled with a requirement that members of Congress put their prior holdings into a blind trust and refrain from trading in any security over which they have a direct regulatory role.

I think that's a terrible white vs blue collar crime example. Sports betting with co-workers is ubiquitous, but if anything is even more common in blue collar workplaces.

Last weekend, Trump announced plans for massive strikes against Iran's civilian infrastructure (unequivocal war crimes, if carried out). Oil futures spiked. At 7:05 AM yesterday, Trump announced that his strikes were on hold for five days because he's negotiating with Iran [*]. Oil futures fell... but the fall actually started before the announcement, because at 6:50 AM oil futures trading volume spiked as someone suddenly offered for sale large contracts they'd been holding. There was no news that could have motivated those sell offers. The parsimonious explanation is that someone knew Trump's announcement was coming, and cashed in.

I'm sure Trump's DoJ and SEC will be conducting a thorough investigation into who sold 15 minutes before Trump's announcement, and what motivated them to make that move when they did, and will be aggressively prosecuting those who acted on insider information and those who leaked national secrets to them. </sarcasm>

My point is that prediction markets are utterly irrelevant in this situation. There are and always will be vastly greater opportunities to cash out on insider knowledge by trading in real commodities that play an actual role in the global economy. Argue for banning prediction markets if you like, but trying to claim that doing it will prevent insiders from making money on their inside knowledge is ludicrous.

[*] Note that Iran denies that it is in negotiations with Trump.

I have never, ever heard loan forgiveness called a "refund", in any context, anywhere. The label makes no sense at all.

A refund is when I return to you money that you have paid me.

Loan forgiveness is when I tell you not to repay me money that I gave you.

These are completely different things. In the loan forgiveness case, there is no "fund" being "returned". I challenge you to find any dictionary that defines refund in a way that would apply to loan forgiveness. I'm not making a political statement here, or taking a position on Biden's actions, I'm talking about the meanings of words. I think it's important that words have meanings. If we humpty-dumpty all words, we'll have no way to communicate, and that would be a bad thing.

That's an... odd... definition of "refund".

Apologize to customers, obviously, while charging them the current price as specified by the authoritative source: The checkout computer's database. Maybe knock a few percent off by way of apology.

Even where price changes weren't blocked by previously-advertised prices, retailers didn't change the price for TP when demand surged. Why? Because they knew that raising prices would piss off customers, who would remember the "gouging" after the surge ended.