dabraham1248

I've read that the hammer was an accounting artifact (#1-3 below). In other words, someone decided not to piece out what each bit of a contract cost, they simply took the whole contract value, and divided by the number of items. So the hammer was expensive, but the custom designed engine was _cheap_.

The toilet seat was actually a panel of a plane that _included_ a toilet seat thing (technical terms here, #4 below). It evidently got press because "A Missouri toilet seat maker" thought that "toilet lavatory cover" meant "standard domestic toilet seat", and felt he could undercut Lockheed. When he got told no, he contacted his senator, and...

1. https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the... 2. https://www.ashlime.com/insights/2019/3/4/the-fallacy-of-the... 3. https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-story-behind-the... 4. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/AT+LAST+THE+TRUTH+IS+TOLD%3A+...

> Domain Validated (DV) certificates are the least-identity-validated SSL certificates and can be obtained quickly and easily—even by a malicious bot. These certificates are low-cost certificates that only require validation that a company or person can demonstrate control over a web domain for which they want to secure a certificate.

This is arguably a flaw in allowing DV certs at all, but given that it's there, LE doing this raises the bar for spoofing about as far as it can be raised.

Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.

This kind of reflexive both-sides-ism works to obfuscate the _huge_ difference in scale, _and_ the occasional, small-but-real attempts of mostly democrats to do something about it.

Now, if the democrats had more big donors than republicans, maybe they wouldn't? But that's a counterfactual that we can't know. But we do know that Bush 1 vetoed a soft money limit passed mostly by democrats, and that Clinton pushed for one, but didn't get it done.

McCain-Feingold passed the Senate with 48 out of 50 D votes (96%), and 11 of 38 R votes (29%) (and one I (100%)), the House with 198 of 210 D (94%), and house, 41 out of 217 R (19%), 1 out of 2 I (50%). Then it was a mostly R appointed Supreme Court that gutted it. Then a _more_ R appointed court that has continued to whittle it down.

For all that the Democrats don't go far enough, there is a _huge_ difference between the parties on this.

Anyway, if a company is being declared the source of a multi-state outbreak, that company _should_ be talking to the WH. And it's possible that some of those discussions would present evidence that _should_ result in a retraction.

For example, during heartbleed my grand-boss was in on calls with the WH (I don't work on openssl, at the time I worked on a product that _used_ openssl a couple of layers down). AIUI, official guidance changed because of those calls.

If we want to find proof of corruption, this is a place to start looking, not a place to stop.

Now, if the democrats had more big donors than republicans, maybe they wouldn't? But that's a counterfactual that we can't know. But we do know that Bush 1 vetoed a soft money limit passed mostly by democrats, and that Clinton pushed for one, but didn't get it done.

McCain-Feingold passed the Senate with 48 out of 50 D votes (96%), and 11 of 38 R votes (29%) (and one I (100%)), the House with 198 of 210 D (94%), and house, 41 out of 217 R (19%), 1 out of 2 I (50%). Then it was a mostly R appointed Supreme Court that gutted it. Then a _more_ R appointed court that has continued to whittle it down.

For all that the Democrats don't go far enough, there is a _huge_ difference between the parties on this.

Or, if you want to loosely define "work", Ernst Dickmanns had self driving in the 80s, and put in on the autobahn in the 90s. I'd rather define it more tightly as "statistically at least as safe to be in _and_ to be near, as a human driver".

Tesla claims to have achieved that, but I don't believe them. That's because the data they report 1) omits a fair bit of critical info, and 2) frequently changes definitions. Both serve to make comparisons difficult. If it was clearly safe, I think they'd put effort into making the comparison transparent.

Bear in mind that Musk has been claiming "Full Self-Driving" since at least 2016, and people involved have asserted that he wasn't wrong, he was lying.

"UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges" Also "The use of faulty AI is not new for the health care industry."

FWIW, I _think_ I'm not just pedantically correcting a particular number. I think I'm asserting that keeping track of n organizations is roughly O(n^2), so it's not 4 times as much work to keep track of them all, but more like 56 times as much work. I think that's a real difference that requires a different approach.

I get that _you're_ not saying anything re: approach, just terminology. But I think the number matters to this subthread.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important...

Well, among other things, if anyone makes money selling colored water, it encourages others to sell colored water. It also encourages companies that are trying to sell actual drugs to skip that expensive "testing" phase. Bad money usually chases out the good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law) so it's likely that we will devolve into a system where very few drugs are adequately tested.

I'm not saying it never happens, but if a law, policy, or agency reduces big corporation profits, then it's almost always because lots of people were dying.

I mean, I know a bunch of authors. All of them wrote because they needed to write (even the textbook authors). And almost none of them earned much of anything from it (even the textbook authors). One English prof told me that he received almost enough for his morning coffee for about three years. Then he didn't. And he drank just plain coffee.

"The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity." "Less copyright" != "piracy", but I think it has the same effect in this case (theoretically less value placed on the work of an author, but not practically).

Also, this might be coincidence, but copyright has gotten extended at the same time as most authors have received less from publishing.

All that said, I want society as a whole to be better, people to have more opportunities to grow, good ideas more of a chance to flourish. I think that overly strong copyright fights against that. And IME (ok, secondhand experience) that 99.9% of the profits added by strong copyright goes to the publishers, not the authors.

But aside from that, and the two examples above, 1. x.com (the original) 2. tesla has been killing way more people since he retroactively became a founder (there was a delay while existing products moved through the pipeline) 3. solarcity 4. optimus 5. neuralink (well, ok, it hasn't failed yet. But _I'm_ not betting on it...) 6. the Tham Luang cave rescue 7. crypto 8. his relationships with his kids / exes

TBF, spacex appears to be his baby, and it has done _much_ better than I ever thought it would. There are rumors about the existence of a whole team there preventing him from breaking things, and personally, I believe them. But I have nothing _remotely_ like proof. And even if those rumors are true, spacex appears to have been his idea, he hired the first batch of people, etc. He can definitely take loads of credit for it, even if I don't think he deserves as much of said credit as he clearly thinks he deserves.

These days they have plastic (I'm sorry "composite") gears, and do not appear to be designed to be serviced, just replaced. My ex broke three of them attempting to make bagel dough.

There is the supremacy clause, but goodness knows where that would end up here. _Everything_ involving real money or power seems to make it to the supreme court these days, and who knows what the political landscape will look like by the time it does (yes, I am asserting that the supreme court has become more political than it used to be, _and_ that it used to be pretty political...).

> “We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

"In an effort to avoid naming everything after Euler, some discoveries and theorems are attributed to the first person to have proved them _after_ Euler."

Note that the "Known for" section on his main page has 119 elements. But they're not all named after him.

For the first, MS knew what was happening, and worked to make it easier. The computer manufacturers were the MS customers, not us. MS didn't do the actual loading, but they did point to how easy it was to load up, and say "Gee it would be terrible if you did this, this, and this, to load up the machine with profitable junk the user doesn't want.".

For the second, MS had somewhere between zero and negative interest in non-MS software continuing to work. We have sworn statements in court that they actively worked to make sure that 1-2-3 wouldn't run.

Your third is the statement you're trying to prove using the first two.

Again, I don't _completely_ disagree with your third statement. But the first two do _not_ support it.

Because I have known people to buy repaired cars and blame the manufacturer for issues that might be related to the repair, not the repair place. But usually IME when people buy a car out of warranty, that's been repaired a few times, they realize what they're getting into.

For phones there would, at a minimum, be a few years for most people to adjust from "it's an iPhone, no one else even _can_ repair it" to "it's used, who knows what's inside anymore". But I'm willing to bet we'd get there. But it's just a gut feeling.

Some other comment of yours: > Obviously not true.

I think the word you're looking for is "inconceivable". And I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think the answer becomes a lot clearer then.

Miss Manners has a quote something like "School taxes are what we pay to the future in hopes that it has things like nice young geriatric doctors in it."

Also, what precisely are you claiming is "secular indoctrination"? Evolution? The separation of church and state (in the US)? People who went to religious school have confidently told me that both are myths. They also told me that their school absolutely should have gotten tax funding.

Which is to say, there may be a _reason_ people bring up gun control. As you say "You can't just hand wave it away".

Yes, we had MS support, and they looked into it, and eventually basically shrugged (I'm told. I wasn't the one working with them).

I'm not convinced that the govt bureaucrats would do a worse job than drug co bureaucrats. Current studies are poorly designed, implemented incorrectly, results are cherry-picked and gamed, p-hacking lives, ... This is an industry that can't even seem to accept pre-registration.

Also, as you say, most of these molecules come from publicly funded research. Why would the group funding the first set of research (and producing more molecules than industry) automatically be bad at the second?

In all, I'm not convinced that "Drug discovery is the easy part." If it was so easy, then why don't drug co's do it, and save the licensing fees?

Umm, was Bill Gates the only person whose mom had a personal chat with _the CEO of IBM_ about doing business with his company? Probably, yes. Did the IBM people forget to ask for an exclusive license as they had discussed internally? Definitely, yes.

I mean, Gates is smart, worked hard, and _did_ make the most of the luck he got. But pretending he just made better use of the _same sort of luck as everyone else_ is simply untrue.