mhneu

The key thing is time horizon.

Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly. (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus on short-term stock prices.)

It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it does.

You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most. The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's all funded by the government.

Yes. Abrams presided over the plea on Dec 19. Now Kaplan has the case.

Abrams' husband works at Davis Polk, but Davis Polk (firm w/ ~1000 attorneys) has represented FTX in the past. It's pretty typical for these sorts of conflicts to arise, and in this case it's probably best to remove any sniff of a perceived conflict by Abrams stepping aside. Nothing here is going to be controversial -- though our federal courts are currently going through serious turmoil due to events of last few years, albeit not really SDNY and the 2nd Circuit is mostly normal too.

The maximum total is not the realistic maximum that she would get if tried. Criminal offense category, concurrent sentences, and criminal history all need to be taken into account.

Before judge Ronnie Abrams, an Obama judge.

Duopoly. Plus cost of switching away once you sign up.

Network effects and monopolistic (anti-competitive) features allow bad companies to survive today. Monopolistic practices are probably a worse problem today than in the 1920s.

In the 1920s governments used regulation to break up huge firms and defeat advantages due to cost of capital (hard to start a new railroad in the 20s because the cost of trains and tracks was just so high.) Today, cost of capital is relatively less important, and things like switching cost and bundling and people valuing their time and convenience are bigger factors. We need anti-trust/government regulation to address those.

(For example, in the case of password managers, imagine if there were laws requiring publicized security audits and seamless migration to a new service of customer's choice. A competitor to Lastpass might have arrived by now.

the improvements have come in confinement and fuel

if this approach works, you'll see laser innovation over time to improve energy per shot. You'll also see engineering to contain the released neutrons so everything in there doesn't get made radioactive.

Maximus / Squish Fido sysop here.

Long ran on a 300 baud modem (I think it was one bit per transition!.) Upgraded to a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem full-duplex (V22bis!) and eventually a 14.4k Zyxel running some strange proprietary protocol with asymmetric channels. If I remember correctly, it's been a long long time.

Did anyone else's sister intentionally pick up other phone lines regularly to ditch the modem transfers so she could talk on the phone?

PCBoard was too expensive for me at the time

This is important work, and this award choice is a good one.

Dictators lie about everything.

Modern (semi)fascism is built on lying. What we are seeing is co-option of liberal democracies by a minority of wealthy oligarchs that have to lie to voters in those democracies.

By contrast, parties that embrace rule-of-law democracy lie much less than rightwing/fascist parties. Rule-of-law democracy is based on truthful public speech and an independent press -- to reduce lying.