Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

Politicians: How do we stop climate change?

Experts: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! AI, how do we stop climate change?

Every single LLM since GPT-3.5: Reduce consumption, limit abuses by the powerful, instate a carbon tax with teeth

Politicians: Unacceptable! Techbros, how do we stop climate change?

Techbros: FEED ME!

The actual answer is that Discord has a serious problem with teenagers producing and selling explicit images of themselves, and the company is well aware that a single well-timed news article about this fact will obliterate their stock price—unless they have something to point to as proof they've made efforts to address the issue.

I doubt this take would hold up in court. No consumers will have the right to "adult" status without providing the aforementioned biometric information, so the California logic is out, as nobody is being singled out. In Illinois they can simply put a EULA clickwrap agreement before the camera part, which they'll probably already do to cover their asses.

https://world.openfoodfacts.or...

> Homemade bread is ultraprocessed, but it's unquestionably good for you.

How so? According to the NOVA classification, bread falls into group 3 - processed foods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A simplified definition would be "does the food contain ingredients one cannot find in a typical kitchen?". Of course, one's definition of "regular kitchen" varies, but it is good enough for a quick assessment.

Van Tulleken's "Ultra-Processed People" covers these points, here are some examples, off the top of my head:

> * Fizzy drinks - Carbonation isn't a problem, it's the sugar.
When a drink is served cold and is carbonated - you are less sensitive to its sugar contents. In other words, you can smuggle a larger quantity of sugar into your body this way. If, in contrast, you let that fizzy drink reach room temperature and get rid of the fizz - it would taste too sweet.

This is an example of a deliberate design meant to make you want to buy more of the stuff. A company uses precise measurements and tests to find the optimal range for temperature and fizz.

> * There's nothing bad about fruit juice concentrates except when they use insufficient water to reconstitute the concentrate or if they remove too much pulp.
In the book he mentions an experiment, the setting was like this:

- group A eats an apple
- group B drinks the juice made from that apple, with the pulp
- group C is like B, but without the pulp

Blood sugar levels are measure before, during and after consumption. What they found is that for groups B and C there is a sudden spike, and then the level falls below what it used to be before consumption. With group A - the rise in sugar levels was very gradual, and then it also fell gradually.

This shows that the 3 categories are not the same, even though in each case you ate the same apple in different forms. The researchers hypothesized that the actual fruit has a property, they called it "matrix" - as I understood it, the "form factor" is very important, it is not just a matter of consuming "the same molecules".

As in the example of the fizzy drink, I think of it as "sugar per unit of time" - eating a real apple takes time, you have to chew it, the body's "digestive pipeline" gets enough time to handle the input. The juice is different, the time is short, there's no chewing, no effort.

I enjoyed the book very much, I think you'll like it too. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself.

It's not a false dichotomy. Volume is a separate axis. We will always need some hydrocarbon source. Better it comes from circulating carbon than fossil deposits.