But surely the people who aren't committing to not use technology for autonomous death deserve a more charitable reading.

[1] https://practicaltypography.com

[2] https://typographyforlawyers.com.

I learned the lesson that day, and I’d argue that even Obama with 365 electoral votes and control of the legislature learned it soon afterwards. Being a naïve hopeful Obama supporter, I bet 50 points on up and lost my ass.

Nate Silver came into the national spotlight after his analysis that year. There were other polling prediction models out of Princeton, but I heavily relied on Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight. I remember predicting every state correctly except North Carolina.

Interestingly in the context of this post, the University of Iowa has been hosting a market for real monetary binary options on US political outcomes for 30 years now. [1] It’s probably some small stakes fun for Midwest market makers looking for some action during off season corn futures.

Other things we learned: - The players club at Harrah’s marked the beginning of the rewards points programs available at nearly every single seller of goods today. - Casinos, in cracking down on card sharp teams playing blackjack with a mathematical edge and who had been 86’d but often returned in disguise, developed software to identify people from security camera footage by their stride. This was in 2008. - Bet the pass line, and stack the odds behind your number. It’s the best odds in the casino and nobody likes the guy betting Don’t.

[1] https://iem.uiowa.edu/iem/

Our final in 2008 consisted of two parts: predicting the electoral outcome of the Presidential election of each state where each state represented one percentage of our grade, and then a wager from 1-50 percentage points on whether the stock market would rise or fall the day after the election.

I wrote on the class message board that the only way we could possibly "win" the outcome of the stock market wager was to collude as a class. I also argued that placing a wager on the outcome of something that was inherently unpredictable shouldn't be used to calculate a grade. He agreed that collusion was a reasonable approach to the problem, but didn't budge on the unfairness of introducing wagers into a grading equation. What was a university in Nevada going to do? Sanction the founder of the field of study for the source of a large part of their revenue?

It was an excellent class, and I think a lot of the negative externalities of gambling that Nevada has reckoned with for nearly a century now are going to rapidly surface across the country as a whole unless this freight train is reined in somehow.

Growing up in Nevada, I think my relationship to gambling seems to be a lot like Europeans' relationship with alcohol - one of familiarity and temperance. We have some hard lessons ahead, and an unbelievable amount of financial incentives against putting this cat back in the bag.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_R._Eadington

Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91707.The_Land_of_Little...

Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:

the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-19/owens-v...

Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com

According to the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy [1] 130 million Americans — 54% of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 years old—lack proficiency in literacy, essentially reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

[1]https://map.barbarabush.org

I love the idea.

It's also interesting in that a local mesh doesn't necessarily need to operate using the TCP/IP/HTTP stack that has been compromised at every layer by advertising and privacy intrusions.

You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm beginning to wonder if poor data privacy could have some negative effects.

Many of them necessitate going outside, which may present an imaginative hurdle.

The last time there was an attack within the United States’ borders it notably ended with a self-owning combination of perhaps the largest bureaucratic waste of time and money in human history (DHS/TSA) and the systematic erosion of enumerated rights.