Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we’ve seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80’s, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it’s unquestionably a lower quality product they’ve displaced.

Across the beverage industry as a whole, you’ve got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

So that’s a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

We’re angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn’t feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

The non-cynical answer is that they’re counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren’t actually employees of Microsoft.

To put it in more simple terms:

When Alice chats with Bob, Alice can’t control whether Bob feeds the conversation into a training data set to set parameters that have the effect of mimicking Alice.

“Woods family reunion” is a good one.

Big log.

Your comment missed the mark entirely.

Not sure why you’re saying that. I wasn’t disagreeing with any of your points, but adding to them another angle that answered the parent comment’s concerns about whether leaving wifi on for airplane mode drains battery. You addressed the cellular radio side, and I was adding a separate point about the WiFi radio that complements what you were saying.

No, the Florida law prohibits voting by felons convicted in other states, when that other state prohibits voting. So Florida would follow New York’s lead. And the New York law prohibits felons from voting only until they’ve served their full prison sentence.

So if Trump doesn’t get sentenced to any prison time, then he’ll be eligible to vote in New York (and therefore Florida).

Great article. It’s long, though, so to summarize the main points for those of us who don’t have a ton of time:

• State constitutions protect individual rights, just as the federal constitution does. Many of these rights are the same rights listed in the federal constitution, but state supreme courts can interpret them in a manner that is more strongly protective of those individual rights. (They can’t meaningfully interpret their state constitutions as less protective than the federal constitution, though, because if something is protected by the federal constitution, a state constitution can’t un-protect that.)
• And State constititons can protect rights that have no federal analogue, while also being relatively easy to amend. Once abortion rights got de-constitutionalized at the federal level, a lot of states have gone on to explicitly protect a right to abortion in their own state constitutions.
• This is a critical time for this strategy, as we now have a US Supreme Court that is interested in dialing back individual rights protected by the constitution. So state courts need to step up, using this “judicial federalism” idea that traces back to when the 1970’s Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Burger, started its conservative turn against the 1960’s Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Warren.
• Of course, this history of the movement attracts criticism that it is inherently a progressive/liberal doctrine, which has some kernels of truth, but many conservative legal scholars believe it to be important, too.
• Specific examples of legal issues that can be constitutionalized at the state level have been LGBT rights, election/voting rights, conditions of incarceration, and a rising movement to use state constitutions to mandate policies fighting climate change.
• But there are challenges to litigating these issues in states rather than the federal level. One issue, obviously, is that the impact is limited to a single state at a time. Other issues include the difficulty of funding that kind of litigation, as the federal rules for civil rights litigation actually can get the cases funded by the losers (which also makes it easier for nonprofits and donors to put up the up-front cost of litigation), which is an arrangement that basically doesn’t exist in state courts. Plus, state courts are much more clearly partisan and political than the federal courts (often with judges elected to fixed terms in partisan elections), staffed up with judges with life tenure appointed by past administrations, so there have been several examples of state supreme courts reversing themselves just a few years after an earlier decision.
• Still, it’s better than nothing, and successes at the state level can build momentum for national movements.

Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.

Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It’s not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It’s that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.

It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.

to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode

The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.

an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance

I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.

It makes them look weak and pitiful

To whom? Are we even the intended audience here?

Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.

I also speak post college level English. And I can recognize dumb ideas written in English. Mises was a hack.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. Who’s keeping ill gotten gains? This is like the Madoff case where the investments on paper simply didn’t exist. There are no gains, much less ill gotten gains, that aren’t being returned to victims.

That’s like telling Madoff’s victims they get paid back in 2024 the amount they invested in the 1990s.

No, people are getting paid based on the value of their investments at the time of the FTX collapse, not tracing back years to when they first deposited funds. That distinction makes a huge difference, especially in a case like Madoff (or the original Ponzi scheme by Charles Ponzi himself).

He already did argue that, and it backfired.

The FTX restructuring officer wrote a letter to the criminal court specifically arguing that SBF’s argument was bullshit for all sorts of reasons, and the court agreed: “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on his sentence.”

Plus that argument and a few other statements he made showed his lack of remorse, which denied him credit under the guidelines for acceptance of responsibility, and probably factored into his fairly harsh 25 year sentence.

Convenient for who? The people who orchestrated the theft are going to prison. The people who came in to pick up the pieces are the ones who were able to claw back the money to pay back the victims.

Yeah, FTX stole customer investments, sold them, then invested that cash in other stuff and hand out cash to executives. Some of it was traced to specific people (including SBF and his parents), and the restructuring officers clawed that back. Some of the investments paid off, some didn’t, but the end result was that there was enough to repay people based on what things were worth on the bankruptcy petition date.

I’m personally interested in seeing a direct comparison of which air pollutants are released by cooking the exact same dish in induction versus gas. I’ve seen some small studies analyzing resistive heat versus gas, but nothing that compares the actual high heat cooking discussed in this article.

Anecdotally, I’ve set off smoke detectors with electric stoves, so obviously the cooking itself can create air pollutants. I’m just interested in seeing that quantified between cooking methods.

The article specifically did ask two other people, who gave more equivocal answers, saying that the flame is part of the answer but that most of it comes from just the high temperature.

Either way, on this particular question, you can visually see the flame ignite the aerosolized droplets. Note that it’s not unique to Chinese or wok cooking, as you can see a similar phenomenon with French chefs sauteing mushrooms in butter, where the flame can flare up at the edge of the pan. The taste comes specifically from that flame above the food, not below the pan.

Gas stoves are simply much, much better to cook with than resistive heating electric stoves. You don’t need to lie, you just need to try both out and come to that conclusion on your own.

Induction stoves do address almost all of the drawbacks of resistive electric heat, but are significantly more expensive than gas at the entry level: usually about twice as much for the stove/range itself, and then operating costs and maintenance tend to cost more over time. But it also makes certain high end features much more accessible: French cooktop style flexibility, precise temperature control, easier to clean, etc., so high end induction is comparable to high end gas.