Ad skipping should be handled at the platform level and not left to individual advertisers to control. Regulations like this make such an outcome more likely.
Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.
Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.
Would you prefer if your phone required a trip to a dedicated refilling station once a week, even if it only took 5 minutes?
Because that's the kind of logic you're implying about your car – that it's more convenient driving somewhere once a week rather than just plugging it in at night before bed.
I'm not driving somewhere special though. I have plenty of gas stations around. I don't think this is outside the norm, most communities have gas stations along their main roads.
Now if you reframed the question and said "visit once a week to charge your phone but you wouldn't have to think of the battery or charger rest of the time".. doesn't seem half bad.
If you have a home charger, it's like having a gas station right where you park. That's where EVs win. It takes me 2 seconds to plug in the car when I get out of it and I have a full tank whenever I need to use it.
I think apartment complexes are where EVs have a bigger problem. What's needed to make EVs a lot more convenient is more L2 charger (or even L1 chargers) in a lot more locations.
Scams are our entire economy now. Do whatever you can to own a market, then squeeze your customers miserably once you have their loyalty. Cash out, kick the smoking remains of the company to the curb, use your payout to buy into another company, and repeat.
Rent seeking is the end result of capitalism as an economic system. The goal of a capitalist is to accumulate capital (wealth), and rent seeking allows you to do this without expending any effort. Any capitalist acting rationally within the system of capitalism will desire to seek rent.
Fascinating point, and one I think can definitely apply here.
Though there is a key difference – Galileo could see through his telescope the same way, every time. He also understood what the telescope did to deliver his increased knowledge.
Compare this with LLMs, which provide different answers every time, and whose internal mechanisms are poorly understood. It presents another level of uncertainty which further reduces our agency.
> Though there is a key difference – Galileo could see through his telescope the same way, every time.
Actually this is a really critical error- a core point of contention at the time was that he didn't see the same thing every time. Small variations in the lens quality, weather conditions, and user error all contributed to the discovery of what we now call "instrument noise" (not to mention natural variation in the astronomical system which we just couldn't detect with the naked eye, for example the rings of Saturn). Indeed this point was so critical that it led to the invention of least-squares curve fitting (which, ironically, is how we got to where we are today). OLS allowed us to "tame" the parts of the system that we couldn't comprehend, but it was emphatically not a given that telescopes had inter-measurement reliability when they first debuted.
LLMs can be deterministic machines, you just need to control the random seeds and run it on the same hardware to avoid numerics differences.
Gradient descent is not a total black box, although it works so well as to be unintuitive. There is ongoing "interpretability" research too, with several key results already.
Deterministic doesn't necessarily mean that can be understood by an human mind. You can think about a process entirely deterministic but so complex and with so many moving parts (and probably chaotic) that a humble human cannot comprehend.
Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair, would be unhappy if we transitioned to a system where all voters have an equal amount of political power.
This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones. Our current system is a crazy double standard, and inherently unfair.
"Of course the voters who have much more political power than is fair,"
Who determines what is fair? Why is it not fair for each state to have equal representation?
"This point is always brought up as if it's inherently bad for rural concerns to get overruled by urban ones, but TOTALLY FINE if urban concerns get overruled by rural ones."
The urban ones have more power in the house as that chamber is designed to represent the people. The rural states have equal power in the Senate. It might just happen that there are more rural states (just as in the House some states happen to have more people).
The problem with this argument is the Permanent Apportionment Act. The House is more representative of the people than the Senate, but capping the size means that as it stands lower population states still receive an outsized amount of power per capita in the House vs. more populous states. As electoral votes are based on Congressional representatives across the two chambers, this also means they have outsized impact on Presidential elections as well.
The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced. Repeal the PAA and I am much more sympathetic to the idea that the Senate as it stands is fine.
> The deck is stacked in favor of rural states in too many places for it to be balanced.
As a technical quibble, the mechanics have nothing to do with rural-vs-urban, but low-vs-high population chunks. I mention it mainly because there's a certain bloc that argues farmers deserve extra votes for dumb reasons.
One could theoretically carve up any major metropolitan area into a bunch of new states that would be the same population as Wyoming and 100% urban, and they'd still get Wyoming's disproportionate representation.
This. If we pegged the size of a congressional district to the population of the least populates state, we'd end up with more House seats, many of which would be apportioned to CA and TX (as two large states with average district sizes much larger than Wyoming's state population).
I probably need to go read the arguments at the time the 17th amendment was adopted, because my inclination is that we should repeal the 17th amendment right along with repealing the PAA. Then the senate can truly represent the States, and we can have representatives who more closely reflect their constituency.
Also perfectly fine with a repeal of the 17th alongside the PAA.
I think even with the 17th the Senate still quite closely represents the States so it's less of a priority, but the current status quo for Congress is just insane.
It could very much be gerrymandered in a way to keep the red-blue balance of power neutral. But it will never happen because the state governments would never give up any power.
Huntington-Hill is better than nothing but it is still significantly worse than getting rid of the PAA and letting the House grow based on population size. Pressing my hand down on a bullet wound will slow the bleeding more than if I didn't, but not getting shot to begin with would sure be preferable.
This argues for just an increase to 700, and shows a ~5% swing in likelihood of Democrat control, and I would argue that just increasing it to 700 is still not where we want to be - a ratio similar to the UK would put us at closer to 3k representatives, and I believe this is still within reason (and is roughly the size of the equivalent chamber in China). Ideally we get rid of gerrymandering at the same time and redistricting is done apolitically by independent groups.
At 3k seats, every state is above their 1 rep minimum, representatives have 1/7th the number of constituents, population to representation at each state is much closer to 1:1, etc. Obviously not everything will end up on clean divisible lines so there's going to be some differences, but Wyoming would be more like .96:1 instead of .75:1 like they are currently.
Ideally the size should also be set to be revisited based on population on a periodic basis
If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair.
If instead you consider our system of government to just be a bunch of hacks to come up with leaders and policy decisions, with those hacks there to satisfy people who believe that there are interests than just people, then sure, the system we have is as fair as any other.
For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ...
"If you conceive of democracy as a mechanism to allow individuals to have a role in choosing their leaders (and thus policy decisions), then any part of that mechanism that allows some individuals to have more of a role than others is inherently undemocratic, and thus (if you consider democracy to be good) unfair."
Not exactly. We are a democratic republic of states. You don't have to be an direct democracy to have benefits or be fair (under your argument, anything less than a direct democracy creates uneven power for an individual voter). To be fair to the states that joined the country, they each got equal voting rights in the senate. Again, the senate is supposed to represent states' interests and not the direct people's.
"For myself, the idea that "the state of Wyoming" deserves any sort of political representation above and beyond what the individual residents of Wyoming deserve is obviously non-sensical. But then I believe in democracy ..."
That's the first amendment right to organize - petiton for statehood, form cities, etc. You can set your own laws for your area. The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state of any size,bit nobody cares about the 10th amendment.
The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd.
Now, more commonly "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" is used to explain this, but this I find absurd. Democracies and republics are somewhat orthogonal: there are democracies that are not republics (e.g. the UK), republics that are not democracies (several African countries, for example), and systems that are both democracies and republics (the USA for example). "Republic" describes a system in which political power rests with the people who live in it; "Democracy" describes the process by which those people make political decisions.
> The federal level is not supposed to hold excessive power over any state
I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025.
"The idea that the USA is actually a democracy whose members are states is, IMO, just a post-facto rationalization by people who believe in the compromise that the Senate represents. I find it totally absurd."
Perhaps you can read the history then.
"I think you missed significant changes to the US system in the aftermath of both the civil war and the great depression. Granted these were not encoded as constitutional amendments (which would have been better). However, you seem attached to the conception of the union as it was in 1850, not as it is in 2025."
I'm not sure that I missed anything. Perhaps I just disagree with the degree that things like interstate commerce and taxes have been contorted to be, to the degree that basic logic and reading skills have been abandoned to justify whatever those with power feel like. Just as you have opinions about what you see as problems with the Senate.
The problem is that the number of house members per state is capped, which results in more-populous states having less influence per-capita than less-populous states. So, in a way, more-populous states are disadvantaged in both the house and senate.
You can't install solar panels in AZ without a permit and building plans and roof plans.
That's all well and good in the city, but here in bumfuck nowhere I built a house with no building plans or roof plans. Why exactly did the majority of city dwellers pass this law without even considering people like me in bumfuck nowhere, who have as much or higher utility for solar panels than even those in urban areas, need to have this regulation?
The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it. Now I can't install solar panels without producing a bunch of extra paperwork that city dwellers just assumed everyone already has on hand because in the city you're required to file those when you build the house. Due to that and other rules that are half-cocked consideration for rural counties that don't inspect literally anything else, they basically made it the hardest to put solar in the places where it is most practical and has the most impact.
Literally everything even vaguely construction-ish is rife with crap like this.
It would be one thing if people were actually asking for this regulation because they wanted it. They're mostly not. The trade groups, the professional organizations, the big industry players, they push it and the legislature just writes it knowing full well that the "lives somewhere with good schools" part of their electorate will go to bat for just about any regulation, the landlords can mostly afford it and tenants don't see the true cost. This just leaves the few non-wealthy homeowners (mostly in rural areas where homes are still cheap-ish) and slumlords to complain and so the legislature knows they have nothing to fear at election time.
I don't even live somewhere rural. I live in a proper city. It's just poor enough that stupid rules like that are a massive drag on everyone who wants to do anything. It's hard to amortize needless BS into whatever it is you're doing when the local populace can't afford it.
But who in bumfuck is going to stop you exactly? Are you talking about a grid-tie system, where you feedback to the power company? My experience in rural areas is that after the initial approval for utilities if needed, no one is coming back to inspect anything.
Why is your rural county spending resources to find these unpermitted installations? Sounds like you should vote for better local representatives who don't do stuff you dislike.
But even if it wasn't your local government, insurance companies do this sort of thing to deny claims even in tangentially related unapproved installations.
> The answer is they didn't even think about us, they just did it.
Asserted without evidence.
Many parts of the USA until sometime in the 1980s had no building codes. Now many of them do (some still go without). Society has made a slow and steady move towards saying, in effect "whatever and wherever you build, we want to be certain that it meets a set of minimum design and construction standards, and we justify this with both public safety (fire, for example) and the interests of anyone who may acquire what you built in the future".
You can say, if you like, that this is bullshit. But don't try to claim that they didn't even think about you.
p.s. I live in rural New Mexico and installed my own solar panels, under license from the state.
The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
Just solar panels. They simply forgot.
FYI i built the house after the solar panel law passed. So it's not like it's an old house that needs brought up to modern code or something.
Solar panels are generators that backfeed the line. Power utilities are going to take every opportunity to discourage/prevent/penalize the connection of generators to their lines.
Connecting your house to the grid poses more or less no threat to the grid or the linemen who work on it.
> The state has no law about me connecting to the electric grid without any building plans, drawings, or inspection. In fact I did so. That's more connected to others than solar panels are.
But since your house is (presumably) not a generator, no, that's still less connected to others than even a single solar panel would be.
What on earth do roof and [structural] building plans have to do with eletrical connectivity to the grid? You're losing the plot and trying to lead us down another sideshow, that is the things i called out as the specific things city dwellers forgot I dont have that they require for the solar permit. 'Society' already decided i don't need those for literally anything else residential but solar.
The most likely explanation is they simply forgot rural folks often don't have roof plans, and should have written an exception in such case that the solar permit could be issued without them.
I don't have any specific ones that would be pertinent to this conversation without causing a flame war of some kind, but we can see the general difference based on county level urbanization as it correlates to party voting in the presidential election. Those rural concerns can also vary from one state to another (a core part of why the Senate was created).
Is it not obvious why this is the case. If rural dwellers are cut off from the outputs of a city their lives are mostly unchanged and not impacted. If the city dwellers are cut off from the output of rural areas their existence is wildly constrained. How much food / energy / and raw materials do cities typically produce? Obviously there has to be a balance but you have to look at it logically and recognize that one is far more critical than the other.
But none of that justifies giving the tiny numbers of people who live in truly rural American outsize power over everyone else.
(*) but probably not ... I'm a rural dweller and my own and my neighbors' dependence on our cities is pretty absolute. Most rural dwellers these days are not subsistence farmers.
"Yes, what's more fair is for the smaller states to overpower the larger ones."
Not really. Each state has equal power in the senate. But the people in the larger states have more power in the House. It's not possible for a smaller state to overpower a larger one.
False premise. The company isn't demand limited, despite the (conspicuously implied and never actually stated) conclusion the headline desperately wanted you to reach.
I really wish people had any media literacy left. This brand of lying without lying is extremely common in modern media, and also extremely easy to spot once you know what to look for.
> KBA said Tesla sold 750 cars in Germany in October, down by 53.5% from a year earlier. The number of Teslas sold in the January-October period dropped 50.4% to 15,595 units, compared with the same period last year.
To be clear, you are suggesting that Tesla had no delivery "wave" between January and October? And that is the sign of a healthy company?
This is some suburban delusion. Do you think the people who own multimillion dollar condos in NYC would rather live in a single family home? What's stopping them?
I want to be in the heart of a bustling city where I can walk to everything and do something different every night. That's not possible in suburbia.
It succeeded in the 60s because we didn't just focus attention, we focused a LOT OF MONEY on it. In comparison, today's NASA has a meager budget which has only been further slashed by the current administration.
I would love to see the kind of investment in NASA we had during the 60s. The scientific advancements were staggering. Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
This is a common misconception. The total amount spent on the Apollo program over its 13 year time span (1960-1973) was $25.8 billion as reported in 1973, around $240 billion inflation adjusted. That's around $18.5 billion per year, distributed on a bell curve. NASA reached it's minimum post-apollo budget in 1978 at $21.3 billion per year! Their current budget is $25.4 billion. [1] So based on current (and historic spending) NASA could have been constantly doing Apollo level programs, on loop, as a 'side gig' and still have plenty of money for other things.
The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.
The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.
For what it's worth military research projects also come up with plenty of scientific advancements and the military also is doing things in space, including things they have had up there for years without explaining the purpose of.
Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper.
True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.
(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.
> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.
Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
> The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.
This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.
And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.
I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.
(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)
I don't think percent of GDP is a meaningful metric. Dollar for [inflated] dollar we're spending a lot more on defense, and it eats up near to the majority of our discretionary spending. The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending. And so now a days near to the majority of what the government has the choice of spending, is spent on war.
Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - governments can't ever control their spending, so the funds always end up getting plundered. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a great example. It was created after massive oil reserves were discovered in Alaska resulting in a huge windfall of money to the government. The government proceeded to completely waste all of that money with nothing to show for it, which made people less than happy. So the idea of the APF was to create a fund that could provide social dividends in both the present and even after the oil eventually runs out.
But as the government started, again, blowing money, they started dipping into the fund and eventually changed the law to normalize it and it's gradually turning into a joke. This years dividend was $1000, compared to $3300 (inflation adjusted) at its peak in 1999. The problem with 'well just make it where you can't do that' is that the same people that make that law, are the exact same that can unmake that law and give themselves lots of other people's money, which they will do, sooner or later.
> I don't think percent of GDP is a meaningful metric.
Why not? I think it's close to the only useful metric across time.
> The distinction between mandatory and discretionary isn't weird - mandatory is payments that the government is legally required to make, discretionary is what they have the choice of spending.
Laws aren't god given. They can be changed. The political processes are slightly different, but if the voters want it, they can get it.
> Sovereign wealth funds of the sort you're alluding to have a problem - [...]
I'm not alluding to any sovereign wealth funds. What makes you think so?
I suggested to get pension systems out of the hands of government, not into them.
A fully funded pension system that invests globally outside the government's balance sheet is essentially exactly what a sovereign wealth fund is. Even when it is managed privately (as the Alaska fund is) the government has regulatory control of the fund, which is where the looting is, probably unavoidably, introduced.
As for money vs GDP, our discussion on mandatory vs discretionary spending is already one reason why $$$ is far more informative. Dollars can, after inflation, be compared and paint a relatively clear picture. Percent of some other metric, which has often changed wildly over time, is instead more likely just to mislead.
So for instance we now spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on the war machine than we did during the Cold War when we were facing a very viable threat of nuclear annihilation. That's an extremely valuable metric that does mean a lot. Why are we spending so much on war?
The fantasy about it creating some sort of unstoppable war machine has clearly been clearly shattered. It's not even clear that would have been desirable if true. One thing this administration got completely right was renaming the Department of Defense to its old moniker of Depart of War, because that is what it really is.
This reality is completely muddled if you start trying to frame things as percent of some other metric, be that budget, GDP, or whatever else.
> Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.
Note that if you attribute interest for military-related debt to military spending(roughly 40-50% of our interest payments) then it ends up climbing in the ranking. But it’s true that we have other major expenses as well.
Apollo was much better value for money. It inspired generations to study and enter STEM fields, it gave us multitudes of technological advances, and it gave the entire world something to marvel at. It gave us the earthrise image, which fueled the environmental movement. What has "AI" inspired? What marvels will the enshittificatement of googling, or the latest deepfake garbage bestow upon us? If "AI" is our moonshot we're all well and truly fucked.
Mobile ads in the US are heinous. Each one has a different mechanism for skipping, the skip buttons are micro sized and impossible to tap, some of them don't even work.
Standardization should have been up to the platforms selling ads, but they haven't done it. It's past time for local authorities to step in and protect consumers from predatory behavior.
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