erentz

I'd go further and say that the rest of the cabinet should also be elected from the House (not just the President). This ensures a cabinet member is answerable to both the House and to an electorate. Though the two-year terms in the US House are probably too frequent for a parliamentary style system like this (perpetual campaigning).

> The CAC scan, which detects calcified plaque in the arteries, is recommended for adults with borderline or intermediate risk of coronary disease for whom the decision to start preventive therapy such as statin drugs remains uncertain.

That is such incredibly bad advice. DO NOT WAIT until a CAC tells you to start a statin. You know you need to start if your LDL is high right away.

My doctor referred me to get a self pay ($100 at the time) CAC 9 years ago. It was completely clear.

However last year I had a cardiac ultrasound and it showed calcification.

In reality the CAC caused a false sense of security. My LDL had been high the whole time and not managed with any intervention despite having been tested multiple times and showing high over that time. This was a failure by my doctors IMO. (No it’s not diet or weight related before people give advice).

I didn’t need a CAC to tell me everything was fine. I needed to be on a low dose of statin that whole time.

A clear CAC doesn’t mean you are safe. And a positive CAC is already too late and is not really telling you anything useful.

What people need to do is just watch your LDL regularly starting from any age (yes even some 20 year olds need to check this). Don’t wait to middle age. And no matter your age use whatever methods you prefer to get that down as low as possible. Think of it as cumulative exposure over time that matters.

(There are new oral PCKS9 inhibitors out now which is cool, but the reality is all the misinformation about statins has been bullshit, don’t be afraid of them.)

The differences observed are at the population level. That means there is HUGE overlap between the two populations and you can’t distinguish any data point as being a girl or a boy. Only that the populations have a different average or range. For a visual representation check out [1].

This kind of thing shows up all over the place in all fields of research. It’s why for example although you can see immune system differences at a population level between patients with disease X and healthy controls, you can’t in any way use it as a biomarker for an individual who might have disease X.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13293-026-00976-9...

> An engineer checked progress twice a day and reviewed every proposed change.

It doesn’t sound like that much changed. If one engineer can really review all the changes in under two weeks, the original estimate of 5 years of engineering work has to be waaaaaaay off.

I think the genesis was the Panama papers release way back. Turns out the US is one of the better places to launder money through.

I don’t understand though: Why would any company find it difficult to register their owners? That seems like a pretty basic thing any company should know and it’s a perfectly normal thing in most countries.

This all feels like when Enron started talking about making a market for trading /bandwidth/.

See: “benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created”

> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.

But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas.

So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else.

> Americans really do get screwed in so many ways.

Absolutely. I assumed the parent was talking about the US because that's the only place in the world I've encountered this.

It’s not your property they care about. They usually want this because it includes liability insurance if you damage their property or someone else’s, or your negligence causes harm to someone.

What is the rationale for going to the trouble of such a law but only banning sale, rather than all sharing?

What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.

How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.

You’re extremely confident about this just based on your experience of it not happening to you. It’s good that it hasn’t driven you into a house but that doesn’t mean it can’t fail in a way that does drive someone else into a house.

Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.

It’s a tax. So the government wouldn’t be buying anything. OpenAI (for example) would need to issue 100% new shares and give them to the government to hold in this new sovereign wealth fund. This the new sovereign wealth fund holds 50% of the company.

I don’t know how you decide what companies are targeted though. OpenAI/Anthropic are pure AI plays. But what about an AMZN or AAPL that have AI as only a part of their business.

This would be an incredible $1,800 from each taxpayer sent overseas to the Iranian regime. On top of what’s already been spent and the inflation caused. In any other time in history just this alone (ignoring all the other scandals) would lead to something like a landslide 100 seat swing in the house. The fact polls show we’ll be lucky to see 10 seats switch shows how incredibly broken our information environment has become.

It looks like when you sum up: the cost to generate information using an LLM + the cost to actually verify the information, the result on average is the same as not using the LLM. That does not mean some times it isn’t faster and cheaper. It just means other times it’s slower and more costly. This along with different people’s tolerance for accuracy explains why we see such diverging experiences with it.

So in order to make it pan out the forces at play are trying to make everyone believe we now have to accept wrong, even dangerous results.

NZ is even worse than Australia on the housing tax vs shares tax front. No housing taxes. Yet they have what is effectively an annual wealth tax on shares (FIF) even on their pitiful retirement savings schemes. This discourages saving in shares and encourages putting money in real estate.

But now even this is just producing more information and requires more work both of you and of the original sender.

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

> What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism.

To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.

Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.

This is where the media (or your media bubble) failed you. Trump was always this way. In his first term he significantly increased the amount of bombs dropped and number of countries bombed over previous presidents.

Democrats shouldn’t have wasted effort on trying to reduce student loans simply because the constituency (students) didn’t even give them recognition for it. They simply blamed Biden when SCOTUS blocked it.

But more generally we shouldn’t do one off things like this when we still haven’t fixed the cause of the problem. A better policy would be to start by making community college or first two years of college free or something like that.

> our politicians seem entirely unwilling to do anything about colossal expenditures on this "expedition"

Not all politicians. Most democrats have tried to do something about it with the help of just one republican. They aren't the same.

The way AI is being used feels like it is proving that, in many orgs, what has always mattered has been the appearance of work, not results of work. Will we wake up in a few years and find out we’ve fired all the doers and are now overloaded with the fakers?

Be warned though that life and disability insurance will absolutely use errors in your medical records to refuse your coverage or claims.

I rely on Medicare as a disabled person. I love it. The reduction in stress I experienced when I got to transition from my former employer plan to Medicare is pretty indescribable. I want every American to have at least this as a baseline.

Most of the complaints around Medicare come from those who get sold (conned) on takin Medicare “Advantage”, which is a privatized option for Medicare that denies a lot of coverage.

> Website operator: I do not care about serving UK citizens and am now blocking UK IP addresses. Thank you for notifying us.

Wait did 4chan actually block UK addresses? My understanding was it hadn’t which makes your story fall apart.

The idea that a router is responsible for the packets it forwards rather than the person that made the content and put that content in those packets is getting silly.

In the original example the Parisian bars sells and sends the alcohol.

You’ve modified that to introduce a proxy, DoorDash, that now sells and sends the alcohol. If DoorDash sells it they’re the ones in trouble in your example.