>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se
>Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis
>They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things
>I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though?
I tried to draw upon the main central point of each comment to this point. This discussion felt reasonably solid until this point where I feel like you failed to refute their main point. Your counter-example is still apples and oranges. State run liquor stores don't have the strong financial incentives to push alcohol and they don't downplay the addictive potential of their wares using fake science and they don't have authority figures give their patients official recommendations to take alcohol as a treatment with that fake science and financial motivation. Obviously people can and do still get addicted to all kinds of things without that scheme in place but I feel your initial example is pretty uniquely evil and not something we can learn generalizable lessons from, other than "don't do super evil stuff". Surely if your initial point is strong enough you can still make your case using other more generalizable examples.
Don't put too much stock in the ENSO models until the spring unpredictability barrier is over. That said there was a huge kelvin wave a couple weeks ago which tracks with the super el nino pattern. If you look at a map of pacific equatorial ocean temps this year vs past super el ninos at this stage of the progression they do feel like they track. So I'm not saying it's not going to happen, it's just that the models are very inaccurate at predicting the winter until we're into the summer. In the past such predictions like we see now have turned to duds.
Here is an interesting paper [0] talking about ENSO models of La Nina/El Nino cycles and their correlation with geomagnetic activity during solar cycles. I know that models are leaning towards a super El Nino and that at other times the models didn't pan out. The paper goes into the data and offers an explanation and a path forward for new research to nail it down. The sea surface temperature has been the driver for the determination of cycle timings and it probably is too broad a generalization of the process.
Obviously, but their implicit point is that in your scenario you can win by bluffing as long as you can continue to credibly promise the moon and keep the bet rolling but in their scenario only the final outcome wins. Dude is famous for bluffing so it's a reasonable take.
I don't see how he's risking the future of his company by saying words that end up being false, he does that all the time and lying/exaggerating is probably an essential part of being an effective fundraiser these days. In my eyes an enforceable large bet would be much stronger evidence indeed than words.
If I'm building a warehouse and I say "this warehouse is going to house the worlds supply of x", am I risking the future of the company if that fails and I pivot to housing y instead?
Eh, they were kind of bailed out in that uninsured deposits were made whole. Not saying they shouldn't have done it (fighting contagion is like fighting fire, earlier is prob better and potentially cheaper in the end if your confidence bluff succeeds) but "bail out" is a flexible enough term that electing to cover uninsured deposits at the expense of uninvolved parties feels like it qualifies to me. Plus it has some of the same smells as other bailouts - weighing moral hazard vs systemic risk.
“They” in your sentence is not SVB. Depositors who put money in an accredited bank should not have to worry about bank runs. Risk free banking for depositors is a cornerstone of the US economy.
There’s also no moral hazard here - the shareholders, equity partners, and debt holders were correctly wiped out.
Risk free banking past FDIC limits is not explicitly a cornerstone of the US economy, it is a thing that is sometimes done and sometimes not done depending on contagion risk. If it's so essential then we should make it explicit so that everyone pays the fair share for their deposit insurance.
"The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason"
California cities still struggle with smog. The valley geography capped by inversion layers are unique factors to LA, central valley cities, and some parts of the bay that really do necessitate unique solutions if we don't want to choke. There's sources that back this claim you're welcome to Google. Lastly, based on the overall tenor of your points, I'd invite you to question whether someone with an agenda is driving the incorrect facts you receive in your media diet.
There's a site that summarizes bad air quality days in LA from 1980 to 2025 [1] and I would encourage you to compare 1985 to 2025. Note: LA numbers are skewed by wildfire too. In the 2020s, "Very Unhealthy" days was basically 1 (with 1 9 that might or might not be wildfire related). 1980-1985 had 250-290 *Very Unhealthy" days.
Here's another chart showing air quality improvements [2].
I found a 1985 LA Times article that claims technology was responsible for a massive improvement in smog [3], particularly compared to 1973. And 2020-2025 is so much ridiculously better than then.
California was among the first states to adopt stricter vehicle emissions standards and to change fuel composition (eg removing lead) but the rest of the nation las largely caught up. National emissions standards and national summer fuel blends mean the gap between what CA has and does and what the rest of the nation has and does is now pretty small. That's was my point.
And if you think smog in the last decade was comparable in any way to any period 1960-2000 then you should really educate yourself about just how bad it was.
Lastly, coming on HN and alleging some kind of political bias without demonstrating how anything someone said is wrong really does nothing but betray your own biases. I looked through your comments and you so rarely add data but way more often level accusations of bias. That's not really welcome here.
Is the problem solved by an open database license? Doesn't that make a community migration easier, putting a cap on how enshittified any given database can become?
Source? I've always thought of Tokyo as a rare example of abundant and affordable housing among major world cities. Their rent to income ratio is like 0.3 while most major global cities are 0.35-0.4
> As has been extensively discussed over the past week, hitting civilian infrastructure with rockets (or otherwise) is a war crime, and we aren't doing it.
I agree, but want to add that the threat of hitting civilian targets is itself a war crime, so there's a pretty solid case that we already did over the last few days:
"Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." -Article 51(2) AP1 to Geneva Conventions
> threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population
If Trump's tweet meets this bar, it's a meaningless rule. The purpose wasn't to scare civilians. It was to scare Iran's leadership. What it probably wound up doing was scaring American leadership into talking the President down from his ledge.
Cool that's a nice workaround of the Geneva conventions - any threat you make while negotiations are underway is actually a negotiation strategy! The law tends not to be friendly to such workarounds in my experience, especially if it's trivially easy to enact ("be in negotiations"). Or perhaps you can help me understand what distinguishes this situation in the way you suggest.
> any threat you make while negotiations are underway is actually a negotiation strategy
No, I'm saying there is no evidence the threat was made "to spread terror among the civilian population." If the threshold is just any act of war, which naturally causes some amount of terror among civilians, then the rule is meaningless. Whether it's done during negotiations is irrelevant.
I don't have a crystal ball into Trump and Hegseth's minds. But I don't get the sense the threats were aimed at the civilian population. Instead, they were aimed at leadership.
Ah. Didn't he threaten to destroy every power plant and bridge in the country? Do you not find this threat credible? I think the US military is capable of it and obviously that's a threat against the lives of civilians. But it's not a war crime if it's "aimed" at the leaders or because Trump generally bloviates something like that? Any explanation I come up with is exactly the kind of legal workaround I'm talking about.
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will,"
> "just any act of war, which naturally causes some amount of terror among civilians"
I think we just may be working with totally different perspectives on this since I'm struggling to see this the same way as you.
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by highly concentrated power, limited political pluralism, and the suppression of dissent, often enforced by a charismatic leader or elite group
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A mandate is an authoritative command, order, or authorization to act, typically given by a higher authority, such as voters, a court, or a governing body
.
So in the sense that a mandate is passed by government, and governments are sometimes authoritarian? If your logic is stronger than that you'll need to explain it to me. I'm not saying Asian countries are not authoritarian, I take no stance on that, I just genuinely don't understand how mandates imply authoritarianism.
>Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis
>They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things
>I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though?
I tried to draw upon the main central point of each comment to this point. This discussion felt reasonably solid until this point where I feel like you failed to refute their main point. Your counter-example is still apples and oranges. State run liquor stores don't have the strong financial incentives to push alcohol and they don't downplay the addictive potential of their wares using fake science and they don't have authority figures give their patients official recommendations to take alcohol as a treatment with that fake science and financial motivation. Obviously people can and do still get addicted to all kinds of things without that scheme in place but I feel your initial example is pretty uniquely evil and not something we can learn generalizable lessons from, other than "don't do super evil stuff". Surely if your initial point is strong enough you can still make your case using other more generalizable examples.
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