there is a exact method to get the right answer and you can easily check/prove why you’re right.

There might be many methods to get the right answer, and you might not know which ones are easy and which are really difficult (and which are tricky enough to make mistakes more likely) until you try a few different approaches and maybe hit a few dead ends.

What is the sum of every integer from 1 to 99? Well, you can manually apply the arithmetic, adding two numbers at a time, but that’s going to take forever. Better to use a particular method of summing arithmetic sequences and get an easy answer in fewer steps.

Or take this deceptively simple looking problem of trying to integrate x to the x power, where the question asker is messing up their initial approach and the answers show several different concepts that are useful for solving.

With actually difficult problems, the difference between a good approach and a bad one can be the difference between the problem being actually solvable versus not solvable using the resources to have at your disposal (computing power, actual time, etc.).

Yeah, seems like someone could pass the test by only knowing pokemon, which isn’t what we’d want in testing people on their drug knowledge.

Actually, I suppose a name being used for a drug or a Pokémon precludes it from being used for the other, so it is a very shared issue, lol.

Theoretically, unrelated trademarks can have the exact same name in different fields, owned by completely different owners, but that generally only applies to trademarks that are regular words that are already in use: Apple Computer versus Apple Music (which the Beatles owned and ended up selling to Apple Computer), Monster Energy Drink versus Monster Cable versus Monster Jobs, Dove soap versus Dove chocolate, etc.

Still, the law looks to likelihood of customer confusion, and maybe it would be too confusing to have a Pokemon named Ozempic.

Substitution bias tends to overstate inflation, because they only reweight once a year (which is much more frequently than what they used to do). And the reweighting of the components won’t change the fact that the individual components continue to be published.

Beef is getting much more expensive than it used to be. In the 90’s, ground beef used to be cheaper per pound than chicken breast. In the 30 years since, beef has gotten expensive much faster than chicken, and now ground beef costs almost 50% more than ground beef:

Ground beef

Chicken breast

To add to your comment, if anyone is interested in the data series for steaks generally:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FC3101

Wouldn’t hedonic adjustments go the other direction from what the parent comment is saying? If the quality goes down, then the adjustment should increase the stated inflation.

I read the parent comment as talking about substitution effects in consumer behavior, but the CPI doesn’t reweight month to month (it used to only adjust once every few years, but has recently switched to once a year).

So generally, substitution bias makes the CPI overstate the inflation as actually experienced by the typical household.

defend yourself criminally

Robust criminal defense

These court proceedings aren’t criminal cases. They’re more like hearings on restraining orders and things of that nature. Like I said, this is generally less than a single day’s work for a lawyer, 2-5 hours.

I’m comparing middle of the road prices for handguns ($500-$1200) to middle of the road prices for a lawyer who can handle one of these hearings ($500-$1500). I still think it’s financially irresponsible to own more than 3 guns and not have a $1000 emergency fund.

If you can’t see the difference between buying one gun every x months and paying a lawyer 4 to 5 figures all in one go that’s on you.

You’re off by an order of magnitude. I’m saying the lawyer would cost between 3 to low 4 figures, generally less than a single gun.

Time is linear and you can’t sell what was taken from you.

The ownership of the gun hasn’t changed. That owner can sell the gun even if they can’t physically possess it. Federal law requiring relinquishment of firearms (like upon conviction of a disqualifying felony or domestic violence misdemeanor) explicitly provides for selling the guns as a way to comply with the order. Each state is different in their rules on selling weapons already in the police’s possession, and states require that transfer to go through an FFL, but most do not.

Look, I’m a gun owner. And I think part of being a responsible gun owner means having the financial means to actually deal with the consequences of owning, and potentially using, that firearm. I think it’s a defect of American gun culture that there are so many people with concealed carry licenses who wouldn’t even know how to contact a lawyer if they were to actually fire a gun in a real situation, whether it’s a legitimate self defense situation or a negligent discharge. Gun ownership carries important responsibilities, and there is such a thing as someone who is too poor to responsibly own a gun (much less enough to where the phrase “all my guns” carries its own implicit meaning).

The issue with red flag laws is that they completely bypass this.

It’s my understanding that every state with a red flag law imposes a procedure similar to involuntary commitment: a court weighing evidence presented to it under penalty of perjury, with a heavy presumption that these orders are only for extremely rare situations.

Florida’s procedure, for example, requires a petition from the police to the court, and requires the police to show the court that the person is suffering from a serious mental illness, has committed acts of violence, or has credibly threatened acts of violence (to self or others). In ordinary cases the person whose guns are being taken away has an opportunity to be heard in court before the judge decides, but in emergency cases the court can order the guns be taken away for up to 14 days, and requires an opportunity for the person to be heard in court.

So in practice, in Florida, someone would have to convince the police they’re a danger, and then provide enough evidence that the police can persuade a judge. Private citizens aren’t allowed to petition the court directly, and the process requires proof of a serious enough set of facts to justify taking guns away.

Gun suicides are a huge problem, so there is a legitimate need for interventions in the appropriate circumstances. Suicidal ideation is also usually an impulsive or fleeting idea, so removing the means of suicide only temporarily can be a solution to that temporary problem.

The Swiss saw suicide rates drop with reduced access to firearms in shrinking their military, and the Israeli military has seen weekend suicide rates drop by simply having troops check in their weapons into armories over weekends, without a corresponding change in weekday suicides.

Anti-suicide nets on bridges work very well, too, because simply making a suicide more inconvenient, or require a bit more planning, is often enough to just make it so that the suicide attempt never happens.

So yeah. I’m generally against restrictions on firearm ownership or access for people who can be responsible with them, but I’m 100% on board with interventions for taking guns away for mental health crises, and restrictions on those found by a court to have engaged in domestic violence. And, like, convicted criminals, too.

Do you really believe that “all my guns, bullets and reloading material” is cheaper than a lawyer for a hearing like this? In my mind that phrase represents thousands of dollars worth of gun stuff, and a lawyer who can represent you in a TRO hearing might be about $500-1500 ($200/hour, maybe 2-8 hours of work for that first hearing).

I think the key to understanding the context is that GDP is a flow, not any kind of accumulation.

If Person A earns $100,000 this year, gets a 4% raise every year, will they be richer or poorer than Person B who earns $120,000 and gets a 5% raise every year, after 10 years? We have no idea, because we don’t know from the question what their starting wealth was, how much they save or spend, whether the stuff they buy retains its value or appreciates or depreciates, etc.

So Russia can have growing GDP, but can still be running its economy into the ground if the stuff they’re producing is getting destroyed, or has no lasting value.

About 40% of that generation was in the military. 8% were drafted, but a lot of the 32% who voluntarily joined did so in order to exercise some control over where they ended up. Even those who didn’t serve, often had to deal with the overall risk hanging over their head, or were actively committing crimes to avoid the draft. The draft might have only directly affected 8%, but the threat of the draft, and people’s decisions around that issue, was a huge part of that generation’s lived experience.

Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.

Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.

A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.

Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.

And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.

The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.

The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.

Page 45 of this PDF has a good chart. It shows that about 26.8 million men were draft eligible in that generation, and about 8.7 million enlisted, 2.2 million were drafted, and 16.0 million never served, including about 570,000 apparent draft dodgers.

About 2.1 million actually went to Vietnam, and about 1.55 million were in combat roles in Vietnam. 51,000 were killed.

So roughly:

• 41% of that generation of men were in the military
• 8% of that generation went to Vietnam
• 6% of that generation fought in Vietnam
• About 0.2% of that generation died in Vietnam

Seriously. The rhetorical shift:

Study of American men’s self-reported political affiliation shows that “moderate” aligns pretty closely with “conservative.”

Headline assigns “moderate” political affiliation to Joe Biden, to suggest that Joe Biden’s policies align closely with “conservative.”

Biden campaigned on being the most progressive president in U.S. history. Did he deliver? Not on all metrics, but whatever it is he did, he wasn’t a secret conservative pretending to be moderate. The most you can accuse him of is being a moderate pretending to be progressive.

I want one of these so bad

When you say “these,” you’re talking about a revolution, right?

Back from Yet Another Globetrotting Adventure, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers That His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied

They’re basically the proto Pacific Islanders. It’s believed that their civilizations all trace back to a group of people from the island of Taiwan/Formosa, who learned how to sail over the deep ocean and set up new communities, bringing chickens, pigs, taro, coconuts.

They settled modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, as far west as Madagascar, to Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and most of the other Pacific Islands, as far east as Easter Island. Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Guamese, etc., are all Austronesian. Most ethnic groups considered native to these islands trace back to Austronesian expansion.

There are shared linguistic and cultural ties that showed that they had recent comment ancestry, that has since been confirmed by DNA genealogy.

I ask because it’s hard for me to imagine how one individual can amass $100 million in wealth without theft from those actually producing value.

Services and intangible property.

If I write and record a song, and 100 million people like it enough to pay me a dollar for it, that’s $100 million right there. If I then tour and sell out stadiums and arenas and negotiate a cut of $10 per ticket (and make sure that the staff that actually makes the event possible gets paid fairly, and incorporate that into the ticket price), and end up selling 10 million tickets, that’s another $100 million to myself.

I’d argue that there’s no exploitation or theft there. It’s just scaling to a huge, almost unfathomable volume of sales.

The same can be true with other forms of intellectual property. A popular book may sell billions of copies. A popular piece of software might be downloaded billions of times. Even without copyright, one can imagine a patron/tip/donation model raising billions for some superstars.

Other services might not have a property model, but can still scale. There are minor celebrities making a living doing Cameos for $500 per video, who can easily do 20 a day. Nobody is getting hurt when someone does that.

So I’d argue it is possible to earn a billion without exploitation. They should still be taxed, though.