jellicle

> Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. The two go out to dinner one night, and next week they both double their prices. Both widget merchants are pleased.

We are going to have an ever-increasing supply of stories along the lines of "used a LLM to write a contract; contract gave away the company to the counterparty; now trying to get a court to dissolve the contract".

Sure you'll have destroyed the company, but at least you'll have avoided bureaucracy.

So, HN has deleted this off the front page after about 20 minutes, and sure, they generally want to avoid "political" stories but the simple fact is that when a "political" story reaches a certain legal of magnitude it becomes the only thing of real importance. This is an issue of seismic importance for the tech world, or at the very least the US tech community, whether HN accepts that or not.

Trump to Bukele, 2025-04-14:

Trump: they demand you, they love you, they love what you do...

Bukele: {something about supporters}

Trump: you know what I want to do? Home-grown criminals are next. {louder, to his senior staff in the room} I said HOME-GROWNS are next. The home-growns. You've got to build about five more places.

Bukele, laughing: Yeah, that's fair! Alright.

{big burst of laughter from Trump's staff}

Trump: It's not big enough!

The problem is both US political parties would strongly oppose any attempt to "get people in the streets", making it very challenging for any such protesters.

Two or three very small opsec failures equals one massive opsec failure.

Yeah. The only lesson that would be learned from a bunch of tablets depicting agonizing death to those who approach would be "I'll make sure to send the low-paid workers in first before I go in".

If you've honestly never seen the types of leaders envisioned in this article you are very lucky indeed.

For a large majority of supervisors, if you give them carefully-worded, polite, respectful, private, accurate, truthful, ego-preserving feedback about something they're doing wrong, their response will range between "immediate firing" and "hold a grudge against you, fire you as soon as they can find a replacement". There is nothing that makes people as angry as accurately pointing out their flaws.

The way around this is in essence to get the leader to think it was their idea to make a change, which is possible in some cases but not in others.

Over and over we've seen the same financial scam play out:

a) company starts up that explicitly avoids being a bank

b) company does something where some amount of money is placed in FDIC-insured banks, and it TRUMPETS on its website: "FDIC INSURED" over and over

c) consumers are misled into thinking their money is safe

d) regulators do not act

e) consumers lose all their money

f) profit (for a very specific set of individuals)

The company can even fake up a bunch of social media accounts to tell people reassuring lies right up until the scam collapses.

These scams will continue until regulators get serious about putting people in jail for them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/yotta/comments/1ctf25r/is_our_money...

The California school curriculum includes and has always included algebra.

The "rigorous supplier vetting" of any corporation consists of checking which supplier is charging the least.

The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.

Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.

Article writer does not understand how significant figures work or why they exist.

The idea that the human race will never exactly agree on what is "true" is correct and obvious.

The opinion expressed here that nothing has changed in the world recently about how truth and politics are handled is false. With the collapse of reasonable arbiters of "truth", such as network TV anchors, who were imperfect themselves but nevertheless served as a check on the falsehoods that a political party could put out, parties have discovered that 100% bullshit 100% of the time is a workable approach to politics, and some of them are pursuing that. That was never true before.

Based on other mass extinctions, we can expect ten+ million years of very low life diversity during this extinction that we're causing. So, for a period much longer than humans have been around (which you describe as "the interim"), we will experience only the dying. No human will experience any eventual recovery of biosphere diversity which may occur, long after we are gone.

Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.

Done and dusted, problem solved.

Luckily for the government, the law doesn't say "monopoly" or require them to prove there is only one company operating. The law just says that anyone that has market power (which one might have with only a tiny percent of the whole market) can't do certain things. It's anti-trust law, not anti-monopoly law.

Luckily for the government, the law doesn't say "monopoly" or require them to prove there is only one company operating. The law just says that anyone that has market power (which one might have with only a tiny percent of the whole market) can't do certain things.

> which are the point of the concern.

Well, that's not in evidence here. There is maybe one commenter total in this thread other than myself who is NOT commenting as if these are real debts, that cannot be paid off since "the UK is broke" and will somehow cause the UK to be bankrupted or harassed by debt collectors.

> It can be good if it is invested wisely with positive ROI exceeding the cost of borrowing. Borrowing for negative ROI obviously impoverishes the future for the benefit of today.

Even this is a misunderstanding of sovereign debt. The UK can pay off all its debts by tea time. The cost of borrowing can therefore be $0. The UK is choosing to make payments to debt-holders for various reasons but none of them are "we need the money to make investments and this is the only way to get it, making payments to debt-holders". The UK does not need to borrow in order to spend.

The UK, which creates UK pounds, can pay off these UK pound debts any time it likes; any day between lunch and tea time that it decides to do so, it can.

Discussions of sovereign debts as if they were the same as debts owed by individuals are laughable.

The stated actions planned by Labour (generally impoverishing the populace and slowing the economy) will have the effect of increasing the notional indebtedness of the UK, not decreasing it.

"my retirement is safe and secure, I've invested with Crypto401K"

The bulk of content on Youtube today is some stock video footage, an AI-generated script read by a computer voice. Maybe a human spends a few minutes cutting together the video footage? But almost entirely automated spam designed to feed Youtube some pink slime and rake in the $.

Compared to that, Mr. Beast is fine art, worthy of the Louvre.

Yes, at great expense, we bring in tons of life-sustaining supplies from habitable parts of Earth so that people can live briefly at the South Pole or on top of Everest. In the absence of those supplies, of course everyone on Everest or the Pole would die, quickly.

And the South Pole and the top of Everest are way, way, way, way, way, way, way more habitable than Mars is.

And there are no nearby habitable areas on Mars to get supplies from.

I don't know how I can spell this out for people: when Musk wakes up from a drug-addled haze and says "we're going to colonize Mars in two years" what he means is something like "I'm really high right now" or perhaps, if we grant him a little cunning, "I want my share price to stay high so I'll say some bullshit". It should not be interpreted as a factual statement.

Seems much more likely that in the US at least, fossil fuel interests will push for taxes on solar installations and usage to bring their costs up to the level of oil and gas.

What solution do you propose for the noisy child on a plane? Throw them out?

One of the reasons that people like many tourist destinations is that many tourist destinations forbid most outdoor advertising. It's subtle, probably many tourists don't even realize it, but it changes the entire feel of a place.

"The Congress shall have Power To ... regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"

How is the power to regulate commerce not an enumerated power of Congress?

The legislature (US Congress) has specifically given the FTC the legal authority to regulate and prevent unfair and anti-competitive practices by corporations, employees, etc., including by banning those practices, fining the entities involved, and so on. The FTC is acting on Congress' direct instructions to act.

Yes, the SEC and FDA and EPA and all similar regulatory agencies are headed for the chopping block too. You only need one judge to say so.

And yes, the quality of the reasoning is going to be just as bad. Sure, Congress passed a law which says in so many words "the agency has the power to do...", but here I am a duly appointed judge, and I can write a decision saying "Congress never gave the agency the power to...", with impunity, and so I shall.

Well, that ought to reduce tech worker pay another 10% or so.