Trump couldn't build a coalition of people trapped in a burning building who needed to work together to escape.

TFA: "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger," said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such, pointing to stock market short sellers who have profited from clinical trial failures. "While Kalshi and the stock market are the same in this regard, they do differ in one important way: the stock market doesn't give any valuable information to researchers," Such said.

This is either ignorant and/or maliciously deceptive for the simple fact that there are rules against insider trading. Investors in pharmaceutical companies are not (or at least, should not be) privy to modifying the conduct of a trial in order to secure or deny approval. There is no similar oversight for these betting markets. Sure, they might say that your wager could be disqualified if it comes out that you interfered in the outcome, but that is little comfort for the trial participants and the drug sponsors, who can't just hop into a time machine and run it back.

And that's why there are so many regulations surrounding the conduct of clinical trials. People might argue that there is corruption and untoward influence already--that FDA approvals (especially under the current administration) are not necessarily based purely on scientific and medical legitimacy. But that's a very strange argument to put forth in defense of enabling MORE interference.

While I'm at it, let's also just shut down the absurd idea that betting markets somehow facilitate better information sharing about novel treatments. The point of these trials is to gather the evidence in an unbiased, objective, scientific way. Betting on them is not going to gather you any more meaningful evidence than what the trial designers have specified in the study protocol. The idea that "the market is efficient" is not in any meaningful sense a scientific approach to deciding whether an investigational product actually works. If that were the case, the FDA would be basing approvals off stock prices.

Honestly, who do these assholes think they're fooling? The only reason why they want to do this is because the house takes their cut, win or lose.

We can debate ad nauseam about the appropriateness of Asimov's laws, their historical context, how he as a SF writer applied them in his work, whether or not he was "right," etc. But the essential problem remains: the current framework that we are using to develop these technologies are inadequate for the purpose of ensuring safety.

Now, some people would argue otherwise--that, to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. Every technology has the potential for misuse. Nothing can ever be 100% safe. And I don't dispute this, but that is also not the point, because, again, the central question of safety has to do with designing systems that will not destroy us. We're not talking about individual adverse impacts--which, mind you, we should strive to avoid as well--but the kind of technology that has the potential for global impact. Not enough effort has been made to safeguard against this contingency.

And we also have people who would say that such worries are needlessly alarmist, and assert that current systems are nowhere near that level of capability. That may be true. But that kind of thinking is much like climate change denialism in that it is rooted in a failure to anticipate and plan. Scientists warned us about climate change over 50 years ago and nothing was done; the evidence continues to mount and there still are people who have a financial and political motive to deny it. And for similar motives, there are people who insist on moving forward incautiously, with no regard for safety or ethics or consequences, because it gives them power and money.

I'm less interested in the specifics about whether Asimov's laws are appropriate or sufficient or correctly ordered, than I am about what we actually need to do as a race to prevent disasters. Let the historical record show that have been profoundly cavalier--we literally discovered planet-destroying science (nuclear fission) and then treated it like a toy. I don't think it is unreasonable to express doubts about our ability to have learned our lesson.

Right. Because nobody on the right demagogues at all.

See:
Relitigating covid 6 years later for some reason, while conveniently forgetting who was actually in charge in 2020.
Relitigating an election from 6 years ago for a very obvious reason - because the LOSER is a LOSER who can't handle the narcissistic injury of being a LOSER.
Crying about spending while cutting programs that increase overall expenditure by not being preventative.
Crying about spending while spending more money than any previous administration.
Crying about forever wars, while starting more wars in the middle east with no stated directives, no strategy to meet those objectives, no meaningful allied support, and no exit strategy.
Claiming that Sharia Law is just around the corner, which literally nobody is asking for, or trying to make happen on any scale that matters.
Claiming that an American-born muslim for some reason will cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas if elected Senator, as if a single Senator can do that.
Listening to racist bigot morons boo a shot-in-the-line-of-duty cop, because he has a muslim sounding name.
Claiming that COMMUNISM is somehow a super serious threat because people want a health care system that doesn't bankrupt them if they use it.

Go fuck yourself with your hypocritical bullshit.

Just wait until you see how many gallons of diesel fuel gets burned in generators.

Just wait until you see how many gallons of oil are used to lubricate gas and hydro turbines. What, do you think those somehow defy physics and have magic zero-friction moving parts?

It's not like the lubricant is a once-through thing. It's a damn sealed system, and when the lubricant needs replacing, it's responsibly disposed of unlike the gigatons of carbon being blown into the atmosphere by combustion-based power generation.

You are a fucking moron. Did you really compare 300 gallons of lubricant to "a fraction of the amount of concrete"? What the fuck does that even mean?

Do you have any idea how much concrete goes into creating the containment structure for a nuclear reactor? You clearly do not. By regulation, it needs to be able to hold up to 80PSI of escaped steam. Sandia National Labratories did a test in 1988 where they slammed a fighter jet at 480mph into a concrete block built the same as the containment structures, and there was only around a 2.5 inch gouge in the concrete.

Also, nice job thinking that on-site waste storage is a feature. It's an ongoing and growing problem because WE DO NOT HAVE ANY ACTUAL POLICY FOR WASTE MANAGEMENT.

Thanks for arguing in bad faith and being totally wrong about every single thing you said, including a good ol' "anecdotes are definitely more reliable than data" argument. Good lord.

The right: "I want to dump poisons into the air and water because I want society to pay for the mess I make while I keep the profits."
Also the right: "Remember that 'invisible hand of the free market'? Let's handcuff that fucker and make it more expensive to produce competing clean energy, so we can make even more money on more expensive, dirtier energy sources that cause wars. And while we are at it, let's cut healthcare for the poors that live downwind of the poison I'm pumping out - if they want health care, they can join up and go fight in the oil wars!"

This is what you are defending with your nonsense. Anti-competitive behavior from the administration that will cause higher energy costs, more pollution, and more health care spending that people cannot afford because they don't have insurance any more, and more forever wars where it's the working class kids dying.

But hey, you do you.

And how are we going to domestically manufacture solar panels if you also tariff the inputs to solar panel manufacturing?

Do you expect a completely vertically integrated manufacturing operation to wink into existence where sand and copper ore go in one side, and completed solar panels come out the other? And even if that did exist, where would the copper ore be coming from, and what tariffs are on that?

This is why the tariffs do not fucking work.

... without impacting the listening experience?

And how can you check for that watermark?

If you are treating Windows devices as much like chromebooks as possible (autopilot deploy into S-mode; fairly draconian setup) you can get away with not too much IT; but at that point you really have to ask yourself why you are using Windows devices.

Most of the things you actually need windows for don't play all that well with that level of lockdown; and between chromebooks being cheap and defaulting to that level of lockdown without additional effort and the low end Apple stuff being nicer than wintel hardware that costs the same it's a bit tricky to make a strong case for running Windows systems as 'edgebooks'. You can; but it's not a super compelling option.

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a real shame for him to be vague CTO of cloud stuff. I don't begrudge him the money the promotion presumably involved; but going from actually interesting things to sending copilot to double booked meetings is kind of grim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "(45:21) Interviewer: But theoretically, couldn't AI and biotechnology help you come up with a counter measure?
        Schmidt: Um, I had thought so, and that was the argument I made until I... I do a lot of national security work. And there's a term called offense dominant. And an offense dominant is a is a situation in a military context where the attack cannot be countered at the same level as the attack. In other words, the damage is done. And most people, most biologists who've worked in this believe that while the model can be trained to counter this, the damage from the offense part is far greater than the ability to defend it, which is why we're so worried about it."

And Mo Gawdat on ways to help prevent that:
"Ex-Google Officer: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! - Mo Gawdat"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        "AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn't the technology - it's the people in charge of it.
        Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma.Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book 'Alive: A Human's Guide to Living in the World of AI', will be released in October 2026.
        He explains:
* How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it
* Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control
* Why Sam Altman said AI will "likely end humanity", and what he chose to do next
* Why capitalism breaks when AI replaces the workers who buy the things we make
* Why AI unemployment could trigger civil unrest before governments are ready for it"

Which all relates to my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And also this essay I wrote: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."

Having lived through the 80-90s myself, there were indeed a lot of great things about them -- but don't forget living in the shadow of nuclear war and "The Day After" and also "Peak Oil" and "Club of Rome" fears of running out of resources. Advanced of technology like PV and EV and 3D-Printing have made a lot of new things possible (both for good and bad) -- and as Mo Gawdat says we need to upgrade our social perspective and political discourse to use them wisely.

Personally, I feel it is plausible that the direction we come out of any AI singularity may have a lot to do with our social direction going into it. So it is absolutely imperative to get our social house in order before developing AI -- and that means building a more compassionate, wiser, sustainable, and just world *first*.

I don't follow the logic here: you're saying that India's caste system is a cause for dysentery? Dysentery is a problem in lots of places in the world that don't historically have caste systems. Gemini's response of "the fact that poor Dalit families cannot afford these alternatives..." is insufficient, because it applies to poor people the world over. Please do tell me about the Dalits in Africa.

Recall that dysentery was even a problem here in the US once upon a time.

Careful, now. If you start asking Gemini questions like that, pretty soon it'll turn into an effective altruist, and then we'll all be screwed for sure.

Damn, AC, you couldn't even make it to the 2nd sentence of the summary before your short attention span started complaining?

And who exactly gets locked up for this crime?

Working that out isn't legally "open and shut" at all.