Less than 1% over 4.6 billion years, at that proximity to the sun, ain't that bad. The sun is expected to swallow Mercury in about 5 billion years, so it's going to meet a violent end long before it evaporates away into nothingness.

I'm in Europe, and here the options for home appliances are usually German (e.g. Philips), Balkan (e.g. Gorenje), or Xiaomi. Xiaomi is the best by far, and it's honestly not even close.

Their home appliances are so rock-solid that they actually still surprise me. For example: I've gone from having to replace electric water kettles every six months to buying one from Xiaomi and never replacing it. (Nigh on three years now.)

I really have a very positive impression of them.

There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.

The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:

> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach and still follows it.

The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?

I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.

I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.

Not a bad idea to set up a secondary payment processor for growth, though!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758113

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

It's hard to view it as a bad outcome next to the alternative, though.

Also the birthrate in Taiwan has absolutely cratered. TFR is 0.69.

> https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/price-of-parenth...

I believe that this is among the lowest vales ever recorded, anywhere. It's simply an objective fact that Taiwan is not a vibrant or healthy society. The status quo obviously isn't working for them.

One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.

The "respectable" political center is afraid to talk about it, though. This only pushes normal people with well-calibrated senses of justice to the extremes of left and right.

Much more action needs to be taken against Israel, and, for straightforward moral and ethical reasons, this really should be a mainstream political position. If they act as though they're a pariah state who can go it alone, they ought to be a pariah state forced to go it alone.

Interestingly, I asked it a question, and asked 3.8 Flash the same question (as I no longer have easy access to 3.7 Flash) and the answers were NOT identical, as 3.8 Flash just mindlessly repeated whatever odds were live on Polymarket.

So then I asked 3.8 Flash to disregard the prediction markets and run its own analysis, and it produced essentially the same answer as the Prior.Chat interface.

Long story short, as far as I can tell it's running 3.7 Flash with a decent custom prompt. You'd probably get materially better results if you just asked a stronger model like Fable or Astra for a prediction...

Given the state of the early solar system, it would be surprising if the Sun didn't swallow a lot of metallic and carbonaceous rocks and pebbles. But it seems unclear to me how the researchers would distinguish between one super-Earth and >10^10 smaller rocks? Chemically I feel the two would be largely the same.

Losing at war is universally bad. And long stalemated forever wars can be just as bad for both sides.

The actual headline is:

> "Far-right AfD wins vote in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state: Exit polls"

Portraying every right wing party as "Nazi" is a grave mistake. The AfD, for all their many faults, are not Nazis. Simply consider the fact that they are led by a lesbian woman married to a Sri Lankan immigrant. In the 1930s, this would have been denounced as peak Weimar degeneracy, and the pair of them would have been the very first to the camps.

The actual danger is that by calling tepid right-wingers Nazis, you get them saying, "Well, if they're going to call us Nazis anyway, maybe we ought to go harder. We have nothing to lose if we take a more radical stance."

Semantic drift ---> More political polarization. It's a real problem.

It was extremely weird... and if it was a load thing they probably would have explained it by now?

> https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/37/75/89/204db4e...

See claim 16 and "compound 102." So, unfortunately, fatal prior art exists. (On the bright side, those scientists arrived at exactly your hypothesis.)

My own hypothesis, that deuteration would be useful, is also in the patent literature: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10406155

As is the deuterated isopropoxy!

I'd suggest an alternative, but merely mentioning it here might constitute prior art. If you're interested in discussing, my email is in my profile.

Point is, there's a huge laundry list of drugs and dietary chemicals that inhibit or induce CYP enzymes. That Wikipedia list is far from complete.

These guys claim that something in goldenseal can inhibit CYP2D6 by >50%: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2562884/

...If there's a phamacological interest in CYP2D6 inhibitors, whatever goldenseal constituent is responsible (and it's assuredly a small molecule that is metabolized by CYP2D6, because that's how these things work,) can be isolated and improved upon. This is relatively simple and predictable in comparison with making new drug analogs and estimating their effect.

So if I were OP, I'd focus more on CYP2D6 inhibition as the surer thing.