Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves?

[Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors.

Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.

You're aware of the MIT Media Lab study[0] from last summer regarding LLM usage and eroding critical thinking skills...?

[0] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task June 2025 DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872

Former CIA intelligence operatives helping to organise anti-government protests feels particularly weird.

Genuine question: we used to simply wash our hands well before preparing food.

At what point did the wearing of disposable gloves become "better"?

Can anyone describe how to determine how a (professional, human) therapist is "a reliable agent" to make such a determination?

Airports and airlines may have information that they deliberately do not share with passengers.

For example: a large European airport that I once did some work for ran a trial in which they announced departure boarding gates significantly earlier. The effect was that passengers went to their gates earlier.

The side effect was that retail revenues in the terminal fell during the trial. Yes, this was a metric.

Guess what? They decided not to proceed with announcing departure gates earlier and went back to the previous system.

"Conclude your response with a single, high-value, and well-focused next step that you can do for the user ('Would you like me to ...', etc.) to make the conversation interactive and helpful."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47399870

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

There are plenty of consumers who are happy to pay a reasonable price for an easy-to-access product.

The question is, does adding DRM onto your product push more of those consumers towards piracy than it does towards paying...?

I'd prefer looking at what (potential) consumers actually do rather than what they say. "Saying" is a really weak signal.

Isn't the difficulty that rules designed to suppress the most harmful speech often create a wide blast radius, affecting legitimate expression in ways that are hard to predict and/or contain?

This depends very much on where you are in the world.

Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.

The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.

Ouch.

> No matter what I say positive about some country, culture, or institution, someone will pop into the conversation to say: "Yes, but what about this one incident. See, X is not so great after all."

Isn't this what's called "balanced reporting"? Life is shades of grey.

Aside: not that long ago, half of Western Europe used to look up to Germany as it was the home of "Made in Germany" and the place where the trains ran on time ... ... VW emissions and Deutsche Bahn, how times change.

> I think a more nuanced view would be to say that all highly functioning democracies have incidents that are "perfectly legal, but appear as an abuse of process". I don't really think that detracts from the overall statement that Germany is a highly functioning democracy.

I suspect we may need to hear your definition of "a highly functioning democracy" to assess that claim.

If - hypothetically - your political worst enemies were to pull the same stunt immediately after losing an election, binding the winners of said election, would you be as supportive?

Just one of the many joys of parenting :)

Our middle child (aged 12) has an Android phone, but it has Family Link on it.

Nominally he gets 60 mins of phone time per day, but he rarely even comes close to that, according to Family Link he used it for a total of 17 minutes yesterday. One comes to the conclusion that with no social media apps, the phone just isn't that attractive.

He seems to spend most of his spare time reading or playing sports...

(This is a genuine question) please could you describe the underlying problem that age verification is attempting to solve?

This probably depends on your definition of "working well".

In March 2025, after the last Federal elections were held in Germany (February 2025), but before the new parliament was constituted (within 30 days of the results?), the new governing coalition engineered a constitutional amendment which required a supermajority which they would not have in the new parliament, so instead they held the vote in the old parliament.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/world/europe/germany-debt...

This was perfectly legal, although if you explain it to an outsider it might seem like an abuse of process.