So basically it's that they believe the AI video was so off-putting that it sabotaged its own case in the judge's eyes? And that the case for leniency is stronger without the AI video so let the trial run again so the case can be heard without the AI video??
For the last time...that's not how trade works! People who say this in this context mean well, but are committing the exact same category error/misunderstanding of economics that Trump and his supporters are.
It is 100% how trade works. Free trade for both sides = good for both sides. Lopsided deals where one side gets the free flow of trade but the other side gets protectionism = exploitative.
What is the category error here? Where is the misunderstanding?
If you really believed what you wrote, why do you think trade deals exist in the first place? What function do you think they serve?
I'd guess that they're saying is, the point of trade, from a country's perspective, is to get imports. Exports are what you give up to obtain them (comparative advantage). So, when the US puts tariffs on Canadian goods, the main people who eat that cost are American consumers and firms buying those goods...basically, it's a tax Americans pay to Americans. Canada loses some export markets, however, the US isn't "extracting" anything...both sides just get less of a mutually beneficial thing.... So, In that faming, "one side gets free trade, the other gets protectionism" is in theory, a situation where the protectionist country is mostly shooting itself in the foot, not beating its partner. By the same theory, retaliating by taxing your own citizens purchases of American goods doesn't undo the damage... it adds to it. Also fwiw, a trade deal isn't a swap of comparative advantages, it's a bundling where each side concedes in sectors it can politically afford to lose in, inorder to win in sectors it cares more about. For example Canada protects dairy and gives ground on autos.
>If you really believed what you wrote, why do you think trade deals exist in the first place? What function do you think they serve?
In an ideal world, we would have free trade between nations and no trade deals. In the real world, for various reasons, we have trade barriers. But those who wish to see more trade can fight fire with fire by carving out exceptions to trade barriers in the form of trade deals and making trade more free in that way. It's all political horse trading, none of it creates new economic value that wouldn't be there in a free trade regime.
But the important thing to note is that both imports and exports are good for your country; think of them both as technologies that convert between products at a favorable exchange rate. [0] Just because another country dampens the effectiveness of this technology in one way, why would you then respond by throwing out the technology altogether?
> But the important thing to note is that both imports and exports are good for your country
Of course. I think that goes without saying.
>Just because another country dampens the effectiveness of this technology in one way
Because the costs created don't apply equally to the parties.
To put another way - peace is a technology that brings prosperity. If someone decides to shoot at you, why would you dampen this technology by shooting back? The global amount of prosperity will decline by responding in kind.
Protectionism is harmful to both sides though, not just the one being "protected". If Thailand can more efficiently produce socks, and Canada can more efficiently produce lumber, it doesn't make sense to "protect" the Canadian sock industry. It just makes socks more expensive for Canadians. Let those Canadian sock workers go produce lumber instead.
Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)
To continue to take us off topic, there is actually pretty limited evidence that this is true.
It is true that wine doesn't do anyone any good (unless you count it making people more social or something). But the effects of one glass a night is indistinguishable from zero. There are definitely statistically significant morbidity effects at 3.
I've been shocked reading public health proclamations that "anything above zero" is bad, and then reading the actual underlying paper they refer to, which clearly states exactly the opposite finding. I think it is an extension of the public policy belief that the public cannot be trusted with moderation, and so therefore must be communicated to in absolutes, and nobody will read the underlying paper anyway.
Most modern research I have seen says there is no safe levels of alcohol where you will get no negative effects on your body. 7 glasses of wine per week isn’t that low. Is it worse than sometimes eating crap food? Maybe not. But it isn’t without risks.
i don't agree, i think you are just describing a measurement problem, we have a clear mechanistic understanding of why 'anything above zero' would be bad, and are able to measure this in sufficiently large populations for larger drinkers. the effect size is smaller and thus unmeasurable above the noise floor for one glass a night, but the mechanistic story is clear.
Simple mechanistic explanations in biology are often wrong. For example, oxidative stress does not have a linear no-threshold harm.
For alcohol, almost every big study has shown either no discernible effects going from zero to 1 drink per day, or actual slight benefits going from 0 to 1 that then reverse when increasing beyond that. There is not strong consensus which of these is true, but there's definitely no real evidence that 1 drink per day is harmful as measured by all-cause mortality.
See GBD 2020 in the Lancet (which showed a slight J-curve), Wood in the Lancet 2018 (optimally low risk at 100g ethanol per week, or ~1 drink per day), Zhao in Jama (no discernible negative effects at 1 drink per day, no benefits either, no J-curve), and the latest National Acadamies review showing lowest all-cause mortality at about 1 drink per day (so, a J-curve).
Alcoholism has tons of negative effects. But these seem to start at around 2 drinks per day and rise rapidly from there.
isn't one glass a night already lack of moderation? by drinking a glass a night, or even weekly such as every friday night you're creating habit and dependency.
It works very differently for different people, I think. Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive. Risk factors like ADHD increase this.
All that said, no one I've ever met said a glass of wine on Friday nights isn't "drinking in moderation". I think the medical establishment is quite well aligned on this. One source is the CDC, which defines moderate drinking to be roughly an order of magnitude more alcohol consumption than "one drink every Friday night."
> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction.
This is the opposite of how it works, ethanol is the active ingredient for all of the fun parts of drinking, the metabolite, acetaldehyde, is the cause of all of the unfun parts (nausea, headache, flushing).
A significant percentage of East Asians have one or both of a superactive alcohol dehydrogenase (which converts ethanol to acetaldehyde) and a defective aldehyde dehydrogenase (which converts acetaldehyde to acetic acid), and they have significantly lower rates of alcoholism.
My doctor indicated it was more of a risk for me because my liver worked quickly, but your mention of acetyldehyde I know to be correct. I need to better understand this, thanks for the correction.
> Many people metabolize the alcohol more slowly, and get less of a "hit" from drinking, which makes them less susceptible to addiction. Others, like me, metabolize it very fast and that makes it quite a bit more addictive.
I never heard this theory before, but on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Is there any published literature about it?
One thing to keep in mind when discussing "drinking in moderation": I think people will surprised to learn that each country has their own (often, very different) idea of what it means. For example, healthy alcohol consumption levels are persistently higher from UK public health sources, compared to the United States (mostly CDC). My sense (that I cannot prove): If your median alcohol consumption is higher than global average, your national health agency will have higher values for "drinking in moderation". I would love to see a comparison of wealthy (primarily) Judeo-Christian countries and their recommended limits.
There's something to what I wrote, but I'm realizing I don't understand it as well as I thought.
As for what moderate is: I can absolutely believe it'cultural. I was intending to post from a US/EU perspective, as that's what I'm most familiar with, but your explanation makes sense.
According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption (1). Every molecule of alcohol is measurably bad for you physically
People want to conflate their personal desires and perceived social benefits with health benefits because mental health and physical health have overlaps
However they need to be separate to actually make a claim about alcohol as there are millions of people in functional communities that reject alcohol and have non of the negative effects
> According to the best longitudinal study from the WHO There is no safe level of alcohol consumption
This would be a misquote, but you didn't use quotes. The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.
> The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
I could see why you would say that from this:
> “We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink – the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage. The only thing that we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is – or, in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is,” explains Dr Carina Ferreira-Borges,
But that seems to be a mixture of some language difficulty and some intentional hyperbole.
>The WHO said that they "can't identify" a safe level of alcohol consumption and that there are no studies that would indicate a safe level of alcohol consumption.
How do you not then clonclude that there IS a safe amount such that you would then consume it.
What about this study would make anyone who is not an alcohol drinker become one?
The only answer here that is actually logical is that
you accept that there are risks to drinking alcohol, and that those risks are less important to you than whatever social personal benefit that you personally get out of it
That's not a study from the WHO, it's a public statement they published in Lancet. It's an opinion piece.
Moreover, the WHO never changed their stance when later big studies showed that the "lowest risk" level is not actually at zero drinks.
The timeline was this:
- In 2018, a study was published in the Lancet that was the Global Burden of Disease analysis. They claimed the modeled minimum risk exposure was zero drinks. But the magnitude effects were extremely small: moving from zero to one drink a day pushed the incidence rate of alcohol-associated health effects from 914 per 100,000 people to 918 per 100,000 people. This was the basis of the "no safe level."
- Four years later, an updated Global Burden of Disease analysis, also published in the Lancet, actually reversed course on this. After controlling for more factors, they found risk was actually slightly J-shaped, and for 40+ year olds the theoretical minimum risk was about 0.5 drinks per day. The WHO ignored this updated study when they wrote their opinion piece in 2023.
- Another big study with ~600k participants published in 2018 in the Lancet shows lowest total risk consumption levels at 1 drink per day, with mortality rising above that level. The WHO also ignored this.
- The JAMA study in 2023, with >4 million participants, showed no benefit to low-volume drinking, and also no increase in harms from low volume (1 drink daily) drinking. Again, the WHO ignored it.
Several other studies have shown either no discernible risk change between zero and 1 drink per day, or lowest possible risk at 1 drink per day.
But the WHO and much of the public health policy community ignores almost all of the actual credible science on this because it does not fit with their ideology. It's a huge problem with public health policy: the actual scientists and statisticians are doing great work, but if it's not what the policy people want to hear, they discard it and keep repeating their mantra.
>I think things like web search should probably be run on a different sandboxed AI whose task is to write a summary that is then ingested by the main agent, similar to how existing sandboxing already works, but this would diminish the usefulness quite a bit.
It also wouldn't work. You would simply mindjack the outer AI and have it mindjack the inner AI in turn with its summary. Nesting AIs can't fix the malicious input problem.
"Thou shalt have three layers of LLMs, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt have, and the number of the counting of the LLM layers shall be three."
> Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy LLM of Antioch towards thy task, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
You have always been able to pick between voices of many kinds though? Do you find them all sultry? From the British woman to the 17th century pirate soundalike?
If there was a voice that stripped away all the affectation I would be more likely to use it. It pretending to be human is extremely off-putting for me.
A decade or so ago I participated in a (data-centric) hackathon having to do with water shortages in California. The acknowledged problem was data, or lack thereof. Most of the groups whistled past the graveyard and presented woulda-coulda "if we had the data / we can get the data by" proposals / findings.
We kept looking for the pony for most of the day. We found some pony exhaust, but we didn't find the pony. The rest of the group presented a plan for future research. I chose to give the minority report: based on the information we were able to obtain, California could solve its water shortage if every household ate 16 less almonds a day; an almond taking roughly one gallon of water to produce.
A couple years later the almond industry ran some ads that the "gallon of water" meme was somehow wrong, because other useful products were produced from almond trees besides almonds... so they said. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.
One of my team members (from Montana) shared a quote from Samuel Clemens: "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over". That hasn't changed with data centers.
Yes but the point of the phrase "apples to oranges" is that they are hard to compare. But if you comparing something they both have and is easily measurable, such as sugar, then yes you should compare apples to oranges!
>One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios.
How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fairness in my eyes, if all developers were paid the same but some got to work on fun stuff like games and others worked on the scheduling software for the scheduling software for the warehouse robot repairs. So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.
To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.
I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.
A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.
I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive? My bias/priors are that the simpler and truer statement is: it can't be overstated how beneficial more permissive zoning laws are to a society.
There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.
IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).
Property taxes on land zoned for residential use are 6x more expensive if left bare. That’s why Japan has an akiya plague, because even a dilapidated building will keep taxes down.
I couldn’t find a more general article so here’s an example from a generic small town council.
Leaving aside your mistake, you raise a great point. Why are there so many empty lots in central Tokyo for sale? It makes no sense financially! Maybe they assume they can tear-down the existing structure and sell it faster than the tax penalty will hit?
I have a hard time believing that a tax code that incentives destruction in any capacity is a good thing.
If the land is more valuable without a structure the current owner has natural incentive to do that, or someone else has incentive to buy, demolish and re-list.
Not really the same thing. They're much larger already than most stores you'd see in urban Japan.
Think more in terms of small convenience stores ("Spätis" with daily necessities) everywhere. Typical distance to a store is maybe 500-1000m in Germany. In dense areas of Japanese cities it's closer to one store every 100m-200m.
So in Germany it'd be a 10 minute walk, while in Japan most of your "walk" would be getting downstairs.
The flipside of that is that selection is going to be limited compared to what you'd find in Germany.
I see. What you describe does seem to match what I experienced in NYC, Portugal, and Spain? Small supermarkets everywhere with a bit of a random selection of items
I also wonder how much the pressure filled culture of not standing out has something to do with this. My impression is Japanese are under a lot more pressure to not abuse the permissiveness of the zoning laws.
While size does matter in practical terms when we think of zoning it’s really about noise, smells, pollution etc. So when I say abuse I thinking because of cultural norms and pressure of not standing out there is greater incentive to not disturb others. The argument and question on my end is does this zoning work because folks are pressured to also not stand out. They try to not disturb others.
You will see countless threads on Reddit about bad neighbors in the US. Folks playing loud music, causing disturbances at all hours and will not stop. This applies to zoning as well. If the law allows it, people will do it so there is much more consideration in the US. I don’t know if it’s the right solution but certainly different cultures play a huge role in this.
I'm not meaning to take a dig at you, but the fact that you (and presumably many others) can genuinely ask that question serves to illustrate the parent's point quite nicely.
To spell it out, "abuse" here means to engage in behavior that is socially undesirable or disruptive or would generally be expected to upset otherwise reasonable neighbors or whatever while nonetheless falling within the bounds of the law. An alarmingly large amount of what goes on in the US falls into that category IMO.
The parent comment is specifically talking about abusing zoning laws. It’s also a very generic term and I’m interested in what would be an abuse of zoning laws specifically.
There are many kinds of zoning laws going as far as to say how tall and how open fences have to be depending on the type of yard the fence encloses. Eg a backyard can have a 7ft high 100% closed fence while a front yard is limited to 4ft and must be 50% open.
How someone can “abuse” sections of the law that can get so wildly specific as to restrict paint color is lost on me.
I don’t buy into the Japanese exceptionalism in such generic terms. Show your work.
The other responder called it out well but to add. Abuse would be anything that disturbs others and out of the norm. Smells, pollution, noise etc. Japanese culture is much more considerate than a lot of western culture because of the social pressure to not standout.
> I'm only barely familiar with it so I ask this in good faith: is it really ingenious or is it just more permissive?
Let's start from the glaring problem: The purpose of the US zoning system was institutionalized racism to keep the "undesirables" out rather than anything having to do with development management. Once you realize that, all of the misfeatures (NIMBY, excessive permitting, sclerotic bureaucracy, public participation) make obvious sense.
Practically every zoning system would be better than that.
This is a fair question. In short: Permissive. If you want to learn more, talk with any LLM about it. There are a bazillion YouTube videos and blog posts discussing the matter to no end.
Dallas-Area Rapid Transit (DART) member cities all had to develop 25-year plans for denser development around station sites as a condition of their membership, if that’s what you mean by “natural”.
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