Honestly, the thing I find more interesting is the "Social Deprivation Index" where vaccinated individuals were 21% "most social" and 19% "least social" while unvaccinated individuals were 15% "most social" and 27% "least social".

There are obvious negative and positive ways to interpret this but I don't actually know the correct one.

If you're social you're more likely to care about those around you. Vaccines are also important for protecting vulnerable people in the community, so they were doubly motivated that way.

That would be an uncharitable explanation.

Surely, you aren't going to also argue that the vulnerable people don't care about others? A charitable argument is that people who cannot get the vaccine for a medical reason probably also shouldn't be around a lot of other people during a pandemic.

But with the current absence of evidence we don't actually know why the social answer is different.

Your argument is what exactly?

Covid vaccines are unnecessary because we can just infect everybody with covid and the ones that survive don't need one?

Martha Stewart was convicted of obstruction of justice. The securities fraud (inside trading) charge was thrown out by the judge.

It seems entirely reasonable to me that an individual could mis-remember their dealings of ~49k when they're worth billions.

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> And a similar question is "If we paid the dockworkers to stay home so that we could containerize, would the guys staying home consider themselves striking when we consider automating?"

Alternatively, if we went back to the optimal point of the Laffer tax curve (roughly 75% for top bracket). Then it doesn't need to be the Port of LA paying people to sit at home, it can just be the government providing paid job training and etc so the workers aren't on the streets when they're fired.

<edit>You're right. That's a bad example. Here's a better one.</edit> Michael Mindlin was making millions a year when he was convicted over an insider trade he made $60k in. Really, the idea that if you give the bank robbers more money they'll stop robbing has to be this pervasive belief.

Michael Mindlin isn't Martha Stewart. Use him in your example next time.

It's like saying you should wear a rain coat because it's 60 degrees outside. And then when I point out they're unrelated you go "it's also raining". No duh wear a raincoat but you didn't say that at the start.

People use Martha Stewart as an example because she's (1) a household name and (2) a fairly large number of people both inside the USA and outside of it are familiar with the case. Mindlin is much less well known.

But when you use person as a reference point and then make additional claims a reader doesn't know (i.e. ~100ks for insider trading) and then the reader looks up the details and finds the person wasn't convicted of insider trading and it was also ~50k the rest of your argument starts to lose support.

I think we can agree that Elon Musk is (1) a household name (2) a fairly large number of people globally know him. However, if you want to make an argument about how to move your legs while running he's not the guy to pick as an example.

Like take the original post and just remove the second sentence about Martha. It still works just fine.

Well there's 50 states so 504948 is just 117,600.

I think the associations are learned but not the feelings are learned.

Like some people feel great joy when an American flag burns while others feel upset.

If you accidentally delete a friends hard drive you'll feel sad but if you were intentionally sabotaging a company you'll feel proud at the success.

i.e. joy and happiness are innate not learned.

Not just would, DID!

And they got so fed up with eating food that make them sick that we passed the Food and Drug Act!

You can vote with both your wallet and _you actual vote_.

The entire snake oil industry was thriving and customers loved buying stuff that did nothing at all.

It took a hundred people, including young children, dying in sheer agony from a 100% preventable poisoning by a "medicine company" who's business was essentially dissolving off the shelf medicine powders in liquid and selling the result to really regulate chemicals meant for human ingestion. It took a president with a sympathetic ear and immense popular support for government in general to be a force for reigning in powerful corporations.

That company not only did not test that concoction on any living thing before bottling it up and selling to thousands of unwitting people, but the chemist in charge didn't even check the literature to see that the diethylene glycol he used was already thought to be lethal and had known kidney toxicity.

The company DID test its flavor and color and fragrance.

Why would they test anything else before selling it? You could be a hugely profitable company selling products that did nothing to the people who took it. Testing your products was a waste of effort and would not get you more business!

Your average consumer CANNOT judge accurately whether a medicine works. Your average doctor fails at the task, which is why we have to do blind studies in the first place.

What was true of consumers in the early 1900s is just as true today, and applies to all sorts of things that aren't medicine. Consumers will never be experts. Consumers will never be as equipped to evaluate something as the capital rich industry that produces it. There are inherent information asymmetries that make even idealized market theory fail.

Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup is another example. It was made around the mid 1800's and killed thousands of children. I'm sure there were others. This one just stands out.

I just have a remote control an esp8266 and it posts to the PC's webserver.

A bit convoluted I guess but it's still under 1k loc so w/e.

> This suggests that the downloader knew that the OBR was going to make this mistake, and they were polling the server waiting for the file to appear.

I think most of the tech world heard about the Nobel Peace Prize award so it doesn't seem that suspicious to me that somebody would just poll urls.

Especially since before the peace prize there have been issues with people polling US economic data.

My point is strictly, knowledge that they should poll a url is not evidence of insider activity.

How does the Nobel Peace Prize figure into this? I seem to be on the other side that didn't hear about the award. Which is not surprising as I don't follow it, but also I haven't worked out query terms to connect it with OBR.

Somebody monitored the metadata on files to figure out who the winner of the nobel prize was prior to the official announcements by the candidate that was modified. Which they used to financially profit in betting markets.

It relates to OBR because it's another scenario where people just by polling the site can figure out information that wasn't supposed to be released yet. And then use that information to profit.

Since a recent event of polling was in the news the idea of polling isn't really evidence of an insider trying to leak data versus somebody just cargo-culting a technique. Plus polling of financial data was already common.

Thank you for answering that person’s question so clearly. I was also in the dark and this really helped.

Because it was insider traded on Polymarket many hours before it was publicly announced.

Recession are a natural part of the business cycle though. Like it's good to have them, Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere.

Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...

Just because recessions do happen, does not mean that its good to have recessions, not does it make them necessary. Popping bubbles can be contained and not blow up the entire system if we have proper regulations, for instance.

> Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere.

This is honestly just horseshit. Both parties want to avoid recession, its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful; while the other one is steeped in crackpot economics which have failed repeatedly.

> Popping bubbles can be contained and not blow up the entire system if we have proper regulations, for instance.

Perhaps we have a different definition of recessions but to me you cannot pop a bubble without a recession. How does the bubble deflate without a decrease in nominal GDP? The recession doesn't need have effects lingering for years/decades but one needs to occur.

> Both parties want to avoid recession

I mean in name only. Republicans pretty consistently just cut taxes while shifting government spending from poor to wealthy which really just causes a recession since the marginal propensity to spend of the wealthy is lower (hence ballooning SNP500 while weaker retail spending; wealthy's savings goes into SNP500 while non-wealthy cut back on consumption).

> its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful

Which economic theory do the Democrats believe in? Any real theory has upsides and downsides and I just never either of the two major parties acknowledge or implement the downside (which is always required for the upside).

Large social nets are about redistributing wealth so everybody is (within a _very_ large range) equal but Democrats don't actually do this; they just give money to the bottom individuals without taking from the top which just means the future poor generations have less as they have to repay with interest to the original wealthy generations (and inheritors).

> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running.

I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.

It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.

It's not "his" thing, but he and a few early layoffs certainly made it trendy to do so. It's a small club, so seeing any "members" take any action is a sign they should follow suit.