Cross-posted from my substack, https://neverthesamerivertwice.substack.com. The whole family was home around christmas time. We were hanging out in the kitchen after dinner. My brother started asking me about national security law. He’d graduated from a well ranked law school about six months before, and I was about six months away...
This is a dialogue made during the online dialogues party. Phil, River, and I (Garrett) talked about the Kelly criterion. I was under the mistaken impression that it would come up in finite games, even without discount factors. This turned out to be wrong! In such betting games, you always...
Imagine that at the beginning of the pandemic, March 2020, you were given the opportunity to buy a place in the queue to get the vaccine. Imagine knowing nothing more than you actually did in March 2020. You don’t know how long it will take to develop a vaccine, or...
The argument that that post makes is very specifically about institutions involved in selecting the president - the media, some subset of nonprofits, the people who administer elections. It does not apply to bureaucrats not involved in selecting the next president. And the last time I checked, the fed chair as fed chair had no role in selecting the next president.
Sorry, to clarify, the part of Eric's comment that I agree with is that if we want a Democrat to win the 2028 election, it is much better to nominate someone from his first list than his second. Whether I actually want the Democrat to win is a question I don't yet have a position on and don't expect to form a position on until I know who the nominees are.
I'm coming at this as someone who has voted for members of both parties in recent elections and who is extremely confident that there will be a 2028 election and that Trump will not be the republican nominee in that election. And yea, this sounds right to me. If there were an election tomorrow between Vance and any of Newsom, Harris, Waltz, or AOC, I'd easily vote for Vance. If there were a Vance v Shapiro election tomorrow, it would feel much closer and I'd want to do more research, but I think I would be inclined to go for Shapiro.
Even outside of food, if there is a regulation that targets the product irrespective of what text is printed on it, printing text on it will not defeat the regulation.
Cross-posted from my substack, https://neverthesamerivertwice.substack.com.
The whole family was home around christmas time. We were hanging out in the kitchen after dinner. My brother started asking me about national security law. He’d graduated from a well ranked law school about six months before, and I was about six months away from graduating from a slightly higher ranked law school, and both our parents are lawyers, so law was not an unusual topic in our house.
Maybe twenty feet away the family dog, Biscuit, was attempting to climb the stairs. He started having a seizure. This had never happened before, and it was a bit scary. So my mother, my brother, and I piled into... (read 1380 more words →)
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Are you suggesting that printing text of some kind on cigarettes would have created some kind of Free Speech Clause barrier to regulations on cigarettes? Because I don't think that's true.
Infinite scroll could be illegal. Autoplaying videos could be illegal. Black-box algorithms that end up promoting outrage just to keep eyeballs on the screen could be illegal. Ad-funded platforms could be illegal
Seems like this would have massive free speech implications. The obvious difference between tobacco and digital content is that digital content is speech, tobacco is not, and legal restrictions on speech have a rather unpleasant history.
I'm definitely more open to your community level interventions, though I don't think I can go to no wifi and one desktop computer in the house, and I'm not sure if that is what you mean by "digital intentionality" or if you have some lesser standard that you would want everyone to pledge to? Like, I could definitely benefit from less youtube in my life.
I'm not trying to make a legal claim here, just using the word "stealing" in its colloquial sense, sorry for the confusion on that.
I think I want to taboo the phrase "price discrimination". It could refer to normal ok things like a price changing over time, or to things I want to call stealing. You seem to use it in both ways, and so I don't think it is carving reality at a joint that is useful for this conversation. I'll instead try to address the things airlines do that you pointed to individually.
The same product often does change price over time, for just about any product imaginable. So charging different prices... (read more)
No real community is going to be perfectly bimodal like that, but in the hypothetical I think that is maybe fine? The events I am thinking of where this sort of thing has really bothered me had a ticket marked as "software engineer making $200k/yr" or something like that that cost hundreds of dollars, while other tickets that get you the same seats cost tens of dollars. When price differences are that dramatic, it becomes very obviously exploitation, not a student subsidy.
I also think it is fine to do as bay solstice is doing, having a $2000k ticket marked as "patron" or something to that effect, because that makes it clear that nobody, no matter how rich, is expected to pay that, it is just an opportunity to making a charitable donation on top of the ticket price conveniently packaged in the same transaction. I don't know if they are sending such people letters documenting a $1965 tax deductible donation or not, but they probably should.
I want to strongly push back against calling this stealing from the SWE. My central example of stealing is if Bob sneaks into Carla's house, riffles through her wallet, and takes some cash from it without permission. If instead Dean honestly offers a trade like "you give me money and I give you a seat at a concert" and Eve accepts the trade, gives Dean the money, and gets the seat at the concert she wanted, that's not stealing. Eve has a real choice, she can really decide not to go to the concert.
That is certainly the most central example of stealing, but we use the word to describe a lot of... (read 435 more words →)
This is a dialogue made during the online dialogues party. Phil, River, and I (Garrett) talked about the Kelly criterion. I was under the mistaken impression that it would come up in finite games, even without discount factors. This turned out to be wrong! In such betting games, you always want to bet the maximal amount (assuming linear utility in money).
We then talked about how maybe you could save the criterion without bringing in log utility in money or discount rates in infinite games. The two conclusions were you could either have a finite utility function, or care intrinsically about not being broke/maximizing the probability of getting more money than other agents... (read 4541 more words →)
Imagine that at the beginning of the pandemic, March 2020, you were given the opportunity to buy a place in the queue to get the vaccine. Imagine knowing nothing more than you actually did in March 2020. You don’t know how long it will take to develop a vaccine, or which companies will do it, or exactly how effective it will be, or what if any side effects it will have. You don’t know what kind of pandemic rules will be in place where or for how long. How much would you pay for that place in the vaccine queue? My personal answer, given that I had not much income at the... (read 244 more words →)
I suspect trying to quantify this in a way both sides will agree on is a fool's errand, but I'll offer a couple of thoughts anyway.
Firstly, I wouldn't trust the LLMs on this. I've found the ones I've interacted with, which admittedly is mainly Claude, to be rather biased on politically charged questions like this.
Secondly, if we want to examine how often the Trump admin violates court orders as compared to previous administrations, we might look at whether judges have made formal findings that administration officials violated an order, contempt findings or something like that. I'm actually rather curious whether there has been a notable uptick under Trump.