Why do “prediction” markets benefit from bets over nominal sums? Isn’t the power of them based on the wisdom of crowds? Wouldn’t capping bets at say $1 be better than trying to hunt down cheaters?
Seems like they actually are less predictive if you can get more votes with larger amounts of money.
If the bets on a prediction market are capped, then even if you have a better-than-average prediction (for example, if are an expert on the topic the prediction market is about), you can't bet any more than a layman. So a prediction market with capped bets will always be less accurate.
Or taking a longer timeframe: if you think you are a great forecaster but aren't, and are very stubborn, with capped bets you might get to keep trading forever. With uncapped bets you lose all your money and can't trade anymore, leaving the markets to the people who are better than you at forecasting.
> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions
The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.
You must have been misinformed, they tear down forests to grow soya to use as feedstock (mostly for beef). Nothing to do with fake meat tofu, quite the opposite actually.
"I'm not going to stop openly blaming vegan products after learning it's actually beef manufacturing that consumes all this soy" or how should one read this comment?
What was your point? My point is that if more people were vegan there would be less deforestation. Instead of eating the beef that eats the soy, you eat the soy directly, which is much more efficient. It's unclear if you think it's false or if you had a totally different point.
Why bring the vegans into that when they are the ones consuming the fewest resources?
This explicitly says "Multi-Touch trackpad for precise cursor control and support for gestures", so at most it's the clicking action that is mechanical (rather than the click being faked with haptic feedback, as it is on the current models)
A war? Of course not. It’s a major combat operation. Only congress can declare wars. We haven’t had any in decades. They should call it the Dept. of Major Combat Operations.
It's not just the US, very few wars have been formally declared after WW2, because we all learned war is bad™, so we added more and more rules (both international and national) to make it harder to do it.
But the reasons wars existed didn't go away, so this just resulted in more and more people getting killed in "special military operations" or similar things. See e.g. "Why States No Longer Declare War"[0].
That article says that nowadays countries no longer declare war, because now there are a lot of international treaties that restrict what may be done during wars.
Not declaring war provides a workaround, allowing the states to do whatever they desire, without constraints, while avoiding being accused that they do not observe their obligations assumed internationally.
As soon a country agrees to enter a conflict on a side, which the original axes declare to be a war, it's at war. You can tell the media whatever you want of course.
The US didn’t declare war since WW2 because such a declaration would give the president disruptive powers (such as the power to seize factories).
In fact, after Vietnam war congress specifically created a law to restrict hostilities without congress approval to up to 60 days, which is what the current (and prior) administrations are acting on.
The occurrence of a war is a fact whether or not it is declared, and whether or not the actor waging war does so consistent with the legal requirements their nation's laws put on doing so.
Coding is an abstraction. Your CPU knows nothing of type safety, bloom filters, dependencies, or code reuse.
Mourning the passing of one form of abstraction for another is understandable, but somewhat akin to bemoaning the passing of punch card programming. Sure, why not.
Your entire brain's model of the world is an abstraction over its sensory inputs. By this logic we might as well say you shouldn't mourn anything since all it means is a minor difference in the sensory inputs your brain receives.
Shocked to see SpaceX buy the datacenter in space meme. Where does the power come from? Where does the heat go? Why add (high) launch costs to your buildout capex? Why add radiation as another risk factor to your already-unreliable GPUs? Am I missing something fundamental here...?
Money! Also power source is just solar - not too difficult. I don't think radiation would be too much of an issue either since they're in low earth orbit. Heat is probably the biggest problem. Or manufacturing & launch costs. Pretty silly idea anyway.
Aside from Elon Musk, there are a few other people with a lot of capital aiming to do the same thing. That means, either they are all wrong (possible) or this problem has been solved somehow and the solution itself is not public.
Google and Amazon are doing the same thing. Maybe it is a moonshot (pun intended), but Musk is hardly alone in the push.
Not to mention the huge issues of cosmic rays. Sure, if the lifespan of the satellite is expected to be low, then maybe tolerable. But even then, how would this be financially viable?
I think it's far more likely that he wants to combine his businesses to roll his really expensive, debt-ridden companies into one entity with the company that actually reliably makes money.
Indeed. But it's also a hilariously Musky idea! Some moderate technical competence paired with sociopathy and an ego orders of magnitude too big, and voila, you get Cybertrucks, Hyperloops, Neuralinks, Teslabots, datacenters in space, and all the other garbage the man spews.
I cannot wait for him to one day be hit in the face by reality.
Paper checks aren't nearly so common for anything other than maybe a local tradesman or if you're renting from an individual. It's not uncommon to see high traffic places like gas stations refuse paper checks outright, or only accept them from local banks, as the onus is on the receiver if it doesn't clear.
NFC payments have been around for a bit but are only recently very widespread, COVID really pushed that forward.
The only notable big name holdout is Walmart. Somehow, they're still on either chip+pin or magnetic stripe cards only.
Walmart famously refuse to pay the extra couple of basis points that are charged by the various payment-rails-involved-entities when doing NFC payments instead of physical card.
We literally started rolling out chip-and-pin after tap-and-go was already rolled out in England (and presumably elsewhere). It made no fucking sense because it was obviously going to be replaced again, and chip-and-pin is a miserable experience. All it did was annoy everybody for several years.
> I mean the physical credit cards didn’t have tap to pay most of the time until very recently
I think a couple of years before COVID hit most cards had it, but many stores didn't support it. But once COVID came and visited, all stores got new TPVs that could read NFC very quickly.
Seems like they actually are less predictive if you can get more votes with larger amounts of money.
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