ThrustVectoring

Netflix France would be able to pay nearly whatever content licensing and technical access fees it wants to Netflix. It's can make approximately zero profit and need not have any French employees, merely be a container for having a total top-line revenue equal to Netflix's revenues from France.

What's to stop Netflix from spinning out a Netflix France for the sole purpose of having all French revenue in a single corporate entity subject to the 2% of total global revenues rule?

Even if it doesn't, the effect of so much writing getting pushed out the door through default LLM settings is going to make it feel same-y and bland in short order.

Human writers also use specific constructions for definite (though not always consciously known) reasons, and mapping those correlations onto writing models is only getting done on accident. This is a big part of why LLMs doing pointless negations (it's not X, it's Y) is so jarring: people use that construction in order to preempt an expected misconception, whereas LLMs try to use linear algebra over the learning corpus to generate it in appropriate quantities and places according to RLHF/fine-tuning/etc.

In other words, it isn't just verbiage that has a "preferred" quantity, but also higher-level language features, and the appropriate contexts for those features feel like the sort of thing that will be extraordinarily difficult to replicate without a theory of mind.

edit after coming back and re-reading: the "in other words," and rephrase is because I'm trying to explain something complex enough that I'm not even sure I fully understand it, so I try typing out multiple explanations and leave the ones that make the most sense to me. This might be idiosyncratic to my writing and not a significant feature of training corpuses, but even if it wasn't it's a second example of the sort of thing I'd suspect LLMs to be bad at using appropriately.

The critique of AI systems that lives rent-free in my head is that they "hit the target but miss the point." In writing, especially technical writing, the target is conciseness, word choice, tone, etc, while the point is to effectively communicate authorial intent.

The introduction of rabbits to England post-dates the Norman conquest.

If they're losing money at market rents, what are they going to do about it? If they could raise prices, they would've raised prices before the tax because that's just leaving money on the table. If they throw an emotional fit and leave the unit empty, they're losing even more money. If they sell or go bankrupt, the new owner will have bought it at a lower price and so end up having a profitable business at market rents.

New construction is like 1-2% of total housing stock annually. It'll take a relatively long period of time for these sorts of changes to hit prices because again, low price elasticity of supply.

edit: on slightly further thought, you'd also need this effect to either increase overall vacancy or reduce total construction, since any supply shift from occupied rental units to owner-occupied condos also implies a demand shift from renting to owning.

Landlords charge what the market will bear and generally have little if any price elasticity of supply, so they bear nearly 100% of the economic incidence of the tax. This is especially true where housing supply is constrained by zoning policy rather than the price of expanding supply.

The point is that the most efficient ways to physically handle oil products happens when prices are stable and predictable. I could have just as easily talked about the expenses involved in keeping a profitable-only-at-higher-price field on operational standby as a real option on oil prices, or increased shipping costs as localized price changes shuffle trade routes, etc.

It depends on the price elasticity of demand. When it's 1 - that is, when a 1% change in price results in a -1% change in demand - then any change in supply reduces the total amount of money spent on the good. If demand is more inelastic, then increasing price will increase total spending. Oil is a particularly inelastic good.

Note that the amounts of money involved here are not equal, companies respond to price movements and expected price volatility with less efficient behavior, so the volatility itself causes economic losses.

Like, there's a trade you can do where you load up an actual tanker with oil, park it, and sell an option to buy that oil. The cost of using this tanker and holding this oil a pure waste compared to just having a market-clearing quantity available at a consistent price at all times, but if the market is scared enough it makes money.

Roko's Basilisk was never intended as a serious concern. It's a hypothetical used to verify that a decision-making algorithm does what you want it to - if it suggests that you should get blackmailed by it, you messed something up and need to go back to the drawing board.

You can safely ignore anyone concerned with Roko's Basilisk on topics related to decision theory as someone who is deeply confused about things.

Antarctica has zero permanent inhabitants