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This is inspirational, looking forward to playing with it.

Very interesting -- thanks!

blah blah irrational blah blah solvent

It's still obscenely overpriced.

edit: to nxm -- the blah blah was about it being a default response, not to trivialize your comment.


Honest is a word that can never be associated with the man, other than an antonym.

He's also a hypocrite (he wields Christianity like a weapon but is not a believer), talks about law and order but believes it doesn't apply to him, etc.

If I had to use one word in that vein it would be "clear". He makes it very clear who he is and what his values are.


He's an Honest Hypocrite - see what I did there?

> But what does that actually get us?

Who said anything about "us". Every action taken by this administration is specifically for self-enrichment (directly or to cronies/patrons), the destruction of things that they deem "woke", and the punishment and persecution of their perceived enemies and non-humans.

I wish that was hyperbole, and that I could be proven wrong.


> people can become real monsters

It's being consistently verified in real time if you track current events.


A simplistic answer would be to ensure that incentives are aligned with safety and success. Then that leads to the evergreen problem of Goodhart’s Law (when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).

Even if it can't ever be truly fixed, at least recognizing the issues and shining daylight on decisions for some form of accountability should be a base-level approach.


> Goodhart’s Law

Useful to be sure, but it's easier to game something like LOC than it is to game "product made money" and "nobody died."


Agreed. My point was that it will forever be some kind of moving target and to expect a policy framework to guarantee "good behavior" is a mistake.

I emphatically believe that understanding the incentives of all the players is paramount because that is what will ultimately determine their behavior.

It would be cool if there were ways to have a "Game Theory Toolkit" that could be plugged into an organizations communications that could automate the defining and detecting of those unwanted behaviors.


Easy, put the manager on the actual mission.

Doesn't work. Remember the Titanic? Remember the British airship R101 (the "government" ship)? Both had their designers and higher ups perish in the subsequent maiden voyage disasters, right along with many/most of the innocent passengers.

And OceanGate in recent history

We should nationalize the rail lines, ensure Positive Train Control is mandatory, invest in the rails and sidetracks to allow for faster trains and less traffic jams.

It could be structured so the current owners don't lose money on the deal but America gets a faster, better utilized train system. So much winning!


America has the best fright system in the world. The other countries you are looking at have a great humans on train system, but freight is much worse because of it. Humans and freight generally want very difference things from transportation and so they should not be mixed at all.

I am in no way suggesting that the freight traffic be diminished, in fact it should be increased. We can have both but the rail owners only care about their immediate profits and have shown to be reckless with their management via deferring maintenance, improper staffing, and not investing in improving it.

These dialogs always prompt me to chime in with my solution: make the police be self-insured, backed by their pension fund.

The police today have zero incentive to serve the public, they have zero skin in the game and can literally get away with murder.

Any time you hear the call for "law and order", that is the audience that supports the current system, because they like it like this.


Great idea, Except that this will never happen because public sector unions are important voting blocks. Public sector unions should be abolished (don’t have a problem with unions) but the conflict of interest is just too great.

Great point. Obviously can't expect them to vote against their own interests, because higher standards, higher accountability, and higher transparency will always be against those interests.

> These dialogs always prompt me to chime in with my solution: make the police be self-insured, backed by their pension fund.

I'm curious, what exactly do you mean by "self-insured"?

(Is the idea to combine literal insurance underwriting for retirement planning with a monetary incentive system for ongoing work performance)?


They mean that penalties and restitutions for wrongful prosecutions and wrongful convictions should not come from taxpayer money but private insurance. Right now, police departments feel zero pain from judgements against them so they have no reason to structurally correct their behaviour.

how is police going to pay for private insurance though? from police officer salaries (which come from taxpayers)?

Police in some states are actually self-insured, though not backed by a pension fund.

When there's an OVERproduction of energy, that really means there's an UNDER-availability of storage. Battery tech continues it's march towards cheaper prices, and alternatives such as thermal storage are making inroads as well.

It borders on criminal to have abundant energy production be disservice.


I'm no energy markets analyst, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the next major breakthrough for solar (not the slow, inevitable rollout we're seeing now) will be when somebody figures out an economical way export this periodic overproduction. There is basically never a time when humanity as a whole has an overproduction of free energy, but at present we also don't have a way to make money turning this surplus into a tradable product (like oil, coal, LNG, etc.) because all the electric-powered processes for making such products (ammonia, methane, primary aluminum production, etc) require big hunks of capital equipment that lose money unless they're operated more or less continuously. Battery, thermal, pumped hydro, etc. help here, in that enough of it can theoretically turn off-and-on solar/wind power into a continuous load to power your aluminum smelter or whatever.

Even better though, would be a cheap electrically operated methane plant that you could afford to run intermittently. This, plus a peaker natgas generating plant make, effectively, a battery of infinite size, or you can sell it to any of the many eager buyers of natgas.

Building a small, prefab, plant like this, if possible, would seem to be mainly a problem of scale, and therefore it seems likely that China will get to it pretty soon.


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