wmorgan

Not just you! Very popular position, not as popular as rule of law but we don't have to choose one or the other. Let's just go ahead and make it a crime, right away.

Religion is not at all axiomatic. Sometimes, it’s pure deontology. Sometimes, it’s a search through scripture to justify whatever are the prevailing ethics of the society it finds itself in. In either case, it's hundreds, or thousands, of rules/wisdom/guidance/???, often pairwise contradictory, and one does one's best to fit a desired course of action to them.

The world’s largest faith has racked up 2,000 years of discussion and they still can't muster more than a 60/40 split on the death penalty.

An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?

Yeah, if the hospital is part of an HMO, it wouldn't even be legal. The ACA sets a floor on medical loss ratio.

Why not? Lasker said, “when you see a good move, look for a better one.” That was tree pruning advice for an implicit search.

It’s talking about how you can type

  def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) {

And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.

Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the assertions by the author, that he has contributed in a "disciplined" way to his 401(k), and he’s 41, and he doesn’t think his savings will replace his income. The S&P 500’s total return over the past twenty years has been around 11%, annualized. That’s on track to millions, maybe even tens of millions for him by retirement age.

Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.

FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.

Illicit means maybe against the law but definitely against the rules, for example an illicit affair. The word for against the law is illegal, from Latin, or unlawful, from Germanic. I guess the Germanic cousin of "illicit" would be "forbidden."

Kalshi is in fact more strict, both defining and punishing insider trading, than CFTC/DOJ. Kalshi is perfectly happy to hand out bans and fines for activity the government doesn't care about. Every Kalshi market has a button on it, "report insider trading" which I'm sure is clicked a zillion times a day by gamblers who are upset they lost.

The reason they do these things is that their first priority is to keep the gamblers happy, and the gamblers hate to think they got cheated.

This just gestures at the meta-problem with prediction markets, who pays for the alpha? With stocks, companies generate returns to capital. With commodities, there are buyers and sellers of the underlying. But there is very little economic usefulness about most prediction markets, especially by volume. The only way to get enough users to justify the effort to figure out accurate prices, is to turn it into an entertainment product. And in an entertainment product, if the customer doesn't like X, then you crack down on X.

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

Everybody grew up among, and got their culture from, lots of different kinds of people. You are right about the culture of Massachusetts, where I live. It’s a special place, but it’s a counterexample to your point. MA has one of the highest rates of foreign-born population in the country, and it has been that way for a long time. When I was growing up, there was a big influx of people from China. Today it’s India. A couple of generations ago, Italy/Ireland/Poland. “Eat to live, don’t live to eat” my mother told me, but her mom was born in Germany and her dad was Irish. Massachusetts — by the way also consistently one of the most Catholic states — shows you can have the Puritan culture without the Puritans.