“You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Because as soon as this war is over, you know I can say it now ... you know we’ve been taking out millions of barrels of oil. Nobody knows it. You know who doesn’t know about it? Iran, until right now.”

OK then.

They don't keep any kind of hedonic measure, which might be interesting. If a consumer would rather have steak, but switches to chicken when it's over $10/pound, and then switches to tofu when chicken hits $10/pound, they're considerably less happy even if they're reasonably well fed.

You could probably use that to calculate some kind of hedonic metric: "I was originally willing to pay only $1/lb for tofu because it brought me 20% of the pleasure that a $5 steak would have." But you're not 80% less happy overall, since food is only part of your total happiness, so you'd need a "basket" of happiness.

The specs call for a 20 meter "balloon", which can lift 41,000 kg. The structure itself (made with existing materials) would weigh 37,000 kg, yielding a 4 tonne payload.

I'm not competent to evaluate whether the calculations are correct. It would be really cool to see such a thing constructed. I imagine it would cost hundreds of thousands, at a minimum.

Carter's reputation only improves over time. Trump's will become worse and worse, until we're left wondering how he could possibly have been elected when everybody swears they didn't vote for him.

One was badmouthed by the media incessantly. The other has spent his term letting his friends buy the media, immediately driving out his opponents.

No. Do not even type that name in this context.

They knew exactly what they were getting when they voted for him. Maybe they could pretend innocence in 2016. They knew that they were electing a convicted criminal who will always do what he's told by the richest person in the room.

It is going to take decades to undo the damage that they did in electing him. And they will almost certainly continue to make it even worse: they threw in with a pile of incredibly obvious lies, and they will almost certainly continue to in the future.

I think this headline is supposed to be seen as some kind of good news, but I do not see it that way. This isn't an offer of help; it's not even ceasing to make it worse. All I can see is pearl-clutching now that the tigers are eating their faces.

That is the answer to your question.

The entire thing feels like it should be condensed down into a completely different format. We're doing the law the way it was designed a thousand years ago.

I hate to be the "Why does your field have a whole journal anyway?" guy from XKCD, but I feel like AI is pointing out a problem.

Frequently, it seems like we should turn some processes over to AI, then shut the AI off and see what, if anything, is actually lost. What do the lawyers here actually want the judge to know? What can be done to ease the work on both sets of lawyers and the judge by drilling down to the actual information hidden within the LLM-generated verbosity?

This comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a well-respected organization. Even if you read only the title, the presence of "nber" in the URL means that it's worth more than just a hot take.

If the link were to substack, or phys.org, or various other content mills, then the HN kneejerk reaction would be warranted. Or rather, what's warranted would be silence, but at least the kneejerk reaction wouldn't necessarily be disproportionate to the quality of the work.

And in that case you can't afford not to care.

The connection to the dodecahedron seems arbitrary. The rotation of the earth means that any alignments last only for an instrument. You'd need a specific kind of mount to make any other orientation work, and the whole point of the points is that it lies on a flat surface. If it's meant to be hung, it would have an asymmetry that suggested where up and down would be.

He's just guessing that the angles add up to something. And it wouldn't surprise me if they did -- there are plenty of stars and a dozen faces. Something probably lines up somewhere.

Meantime, government spending has gone from $6.8 trillion in 2024 to $7.4 trillion in 2026. We've gotten considerably more government.

It runs up through Tony Blair. I'd love to see a final update:

Truss: Hi, I'm Liz Truss

Elizabeth: Urkh! (dies)

Curtain

(The Audience is the basis of the TV show The Crown. The audience parts of The Crown are the most interesting. As the show goes on, it's less about British life and more about royal scandals, ho hum. Gillian Anderson gives an amazing turn as Thatcher; it's too bad the rest of that season is so tedious.)

For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)

There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.

As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.

I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.

I'm guessing that it had started with some older tech, and that it was easier to scrap it and start over.

If it's really successful, they could add it to the app and the kiosks. I'll have a double cheeseburger, onion rings and a large orange drink.

Sounds to me like they just want to skip out on a bogus meeting. Which, fair.

Personally I don't love a lot of those things; they taste spoiled to me. But I'm in a minority of "foodies", who find those flavors interesting, and find my preferred versions flat and boring. They are also very traditional flavors; that's how food was preserved before canning and leavened before baking powder and packaged yeast. De gustibus.