stbede

So she died of cancer

The current pope is a little more traditional, but it’s hard not to be more traditional than Francis. However, the cardinals as a whole are more or less on board with the previous pope’s agenda, American bishops a little less so, and many American priests much less so. Outside of America, you may be right (the brewing rebellion in Germany being an extreme counter example).

European Protestantism and American Protestantism differ in substantial ways. Crudely, European Protestantism went the way of Hegelian dialectics and evolving beyond the Christianity of the Bible. American (conservative) Protestantism largely reacted against that. I think both groups are largely held together by politics today though their politics differ in the expected ways.

> The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain

I think right now it’s the exact opposite.

American religions are more like American Indian tribal nations. They have independent jurisdiction and their income is not subject to taxation. Whether or not they engage in politics is completely their prerogative and has no bearing on their tax exempt status. It’s like saying the Navajo nation can’t engage in politics or else they would lose their tax exemption.

Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.

The original law (like many laws that delegated congressional authorities at the time) contained a legislative veto provision which gave the legislative final oversight of any administrative action. In the 80’s the Supreme Court found that legislative veto provisions were unconstitutional, but left all of those delegations standing. After that ruling, the administration can now do what it wanted without congressional oversight and the ability to veto any attempt to repeal the laws. In the oral arguments, Gorsuch raised the possibility that the law itself should have been found unconstitutional in the 80’s because the legislative veto was essential to its function. It looks like the court today took a minimalist approach, letting these delegations stand but minimizing the scope of the powers delegated.

But that kind of recklessness is malice

“In any statutory definition of a crime ‘malice’ must be taken not in the old vague sense of ‘wickedness’ in general, but as requiring either (i) an actual intention to do the particular kind of harm that was in fact done, or (ii) recklessness as to whether such harm should occur or not (ie the accused has foreseen that the particular kind of harm might be done, and yet has gone on to take the risk of it).” R v Cunningham

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not well established. It often doesn't reproduce.

Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40 and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers, they will believe that they are about average and guess that a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them. Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97, they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that people are actually pretty good at accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of how knowledgeable others are.

Can you elaborate?

They are about $500 on the cheap end if I'm not mistaken.

At least where I live, it's a requirement in order to operate a business. If you go anywhere and ask for their AED and they don't have one they can be shut down.

The mass of the earth dictates the acceleration of the individual masses towards the earth. However the acceleration of the earth itself towards the masses are dependent on how much mass is falling towards the earth. When more mass is falling to the earth, the earth accelerates towards the masses faster. So the thought experiment is flawed because with only one 1 kg weight falling towards earth, the gap between the weight closes slower than when there are three 1 kg weights spaced 1 m apart and dropped simultaneously.

But what prevents a human from digitally signing content generated by an AI?

Increasingly, medical history includes genetic information. Because of the nature of genetics, your private healthcare data includes data about your parents, siblings, etc.

> Dropping patient history into this thing is incredibly ill-advised.

It's illegal

In a capitalist economy with several major AI competitors, two of which already offers search for free.

> I don’t know how bank stress tests work, but...

SVB would have passed stress tests because they did what all banks were supposed to do. They invested in "safe" long term treasuries. The only economic environment hypothetical they would fail is, "what happens if there is a bank run and you are forced to realize losses". But what bank can survive a bank run? The Dodd-Frank stress tests don't try to ensure banks can survive bank runs, do they?

When banks invest in the long run, your assets can depreciate in value temporarily to get through short term business cycles. By investing long, a bank's balance sheet will be the average of both assets that aged poorly and assets that aged well. The average should reflect the long term growth of the economy.

The treasuries purchased in the last 2 years depreciated a lot in value and most of SVB's growth happened in the last two years, so there current balances are skewed heavily towards assets purchased right before the interest rate hikes began. If SVB were able to continue operating for say another 10 years, they would be fine even if interest rates never returned to near 0 levels. Additional treasuries would be purchased and the fraction of the balance sheet that consisted of 2020-2022 treasuries would shrink. The rest of the portfolio would probably increase in value. Treasuries purchased today are cheap and have a large upside as rates start coming down, even if rates don't fall all the way to 0. The gains from cheap treasuries purchased towards the end of 2022 and after have potential to dramatically grow in value.

There really isn't any evidence that SVB behaved irresponsibly nor that stricter regulation under Dodd-Frank would have made a difference. If SVB had been inclined to invest in riskier types of investments, Dodd-Frank would have pressured SVB to buy treasuries.

I don't care if SMS goes away for good, but whatever replaces it should be a different universal standard that can/will be implemented by carriers. I'm not going to purchase a smartphone just so that I can use a fancy messaging app when my current phone already has sufficient messaging abilities.

Further, if SMS is completely turned down (and not replaced) so that there is no text messaging service for non-smartphone devices then I'd rather be without messaging capabilities than have to get a smartphone.

The irony of the quoted Robert Frost poem

> Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

is that Frost's line is sarcastic. He wrote this poem about a friend that would endlessly analyze his choices, fretting about not choosing the optimal choice. He'd always be in decision paralysis. Frost was actually saying that either path would have been fine and you should just make a choice instead of wasting all your time overthinking it.