- vannevar parentYes, I think people mistakenly believe that if chargers aren't as ubiquitous as gas stations, there must not be enough of them. Range anxiety can still happen on a cross country trip, but not for the vast majority of daily driving. Now, if you live in an apartment building where it's difficult to charge at home, it's a different story. Not so much because of range anxiety, but because the cost of public fast charging rivals and sometimes exceeds the cost of gasoline.
- "...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development"
That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't that most Americans aren't benefiting from global goodwill and development, it's that they aren't benefiting from domestic development. And the minority who are benefiting disproportionately from domestic economic growth are expending significant resources to convince everybody else that the problem lies with the rest of the world.
- >...but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.
I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/11/2...
- I'm sure there are bad regulations. But the reason that there is reliance on simple one-size-fits-all rules is that we are unwilling to pay the cost of investigating each special case and having someone make an expert judgment.
Taking the trucking case as an example, it's certainly reasonable to require proof that the proposed technology solution doesn't actually make the problem worse in practice. While most people are honest, there are dishonest businesses that would claim environmental benefits for their product that simply don't exist (see the case of VW and their "clean diesel" fraud). So the regulation is a good one. The author's complaint is that it took too long and cost too much to provide the proof. Maybe he's right, but maybe he's not. Maybe he was satisfied by less evidence than the government, because he had a financial interest in believing in the technology. Just saying it was all unnecessary doesn't make it so.
- Others have pointed out how PE has degraded the medical system. The debt crisis I referred to is the private credit crisis, though no doubt private equity has played a key lobbying role in creating our national debt crisis as well. Regarding private debt, Jeffrey Gundlach sums it up:
"'This is starting to show up to be the problem that I've been referencing… that private credit and private equity, frankly, is being borrowed from private equity. It's sold on a volatility argument, primarily," Gundlach added. "Maybe there's some excess return for your illiquidity that you can get, but it's largely a volatility argument.'
Illiquidity could turn paper losses into real ones, Gundlach cautioned, pointing to the kind of liquidity squeeze that worsened the 2008 financial crisis, when investors were unable to meet capital calls."
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/jeffrey-gundlach-says-cr...
- Agreed. But these kinds of models almost always start in academia, that's one of the big reasons we have academia, to explore ideas that may (or may not) be useful. My point was that you can't prejudge the usefulness of a model simply because it doesn't fully replicate all the complexity of the phenomenon being modeled.
- "All models are wrong; but some are useful." - George Box
Even particles aren't actually particles, nor spin states actually spin states. The map is not the territory. Physics models are only useful (and "correct") to the extent that they make successful predictions. If the adaptation of these principles to social communication yields useful predictions, then however inaccurate they may be in reproducing the exact nature of what they model, they are nonetheless useful and therefore worthwhile. FTA: "In summary, we review both empirical findings based on massive data analytics and theoretical advances, highlighting the valuable insights obtained from physics-based efforts to investigate these phenomena of high societal impact."
- Nonsensical for the US, but not necessarily nonsensical for Donald Trump and his family, depending on what Altman can offer him. Maybe not a 747, but he could certainly arrange to purchase Trumpcoin, like the UAE did to invest in Binance.
When you have the most openly corrupt administration in modern US Presidential history, the interests of the nation are not the yardstick to use to measure the value of a deal.
- In this administration, government agencies are not expected to have any independence and cannot express doubts about administration goals without risking being fired. In addition, the administration has a taste for extortion and this may simply be a way to raise money from Musk and Bezos for the political and personal enrichment of the President.
- Definition and description do not necessarily include purpose. You could define a hammer very precisely without ever mentioning that its purpose is to drive nails. And since it's in the best interest of capital to minimize the original purpose of capitalism, and capital increasingly dominates public and political discourse, it's not surprising that the public interest angle would be increasingly ignored. But corporations and private property, the cornerstones of capitalism, are both purely creations of government, and both are subject to regulation in the public interest. We just need the political will to do so.
- >Believe it or not, businesses don't exist to provide you a "good service" they exist to make money.
This is a common misconception. Businesses actually exist to serve the public interest, which is why some kinds of businesses are illegal. The premise of capitalism isn't that it maximizes individual wealth, but that it maximizes the general welfare of the population.
- >Are they really, though?
Yes, if you look beyond progress within a specific model line. For instance, there is a marked difference between the range and towing capacity of a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado EV and the Ford Lightning. The Kia EV9 offered a substantial price advantage over existing 3-row EVs when it was introduced in 2023. I think you're right that actual pricing vs MSRP is probably the biggest factor, but real and rapid improvement in the products also contributes. I know I've put off buying an EV van because I know that better options will be coming within the next 18 months.
- Your tiny indirect share of the PE firm's profits will not match your direct loss of service as a customer and/or loss of compensation as an employee. Contrary to popular myth, wealth does not trickle down in any meaningful way. In an unregulated capitalist system, wealth flows toward the centers of wealth, just as surely as gravity pulls toward the centers of mass.
- >I don't like PE firms but there's no doubt that they force businesses to operate better, and ultimately that benefits people like you and me...
They do not force businesses to "operate better." They force businesses to operate at a higher EBITDA, purely for their own benefit. Sometimes by chance this results in improvements for the employees or customers, but more often it ultimately results in a worse experience for both and the eventual demise of the business after the PE firm has taken sufficient profit to generate its target returns.
- Yes, the money flows uphill. Having more wealth means being able to make more wealth, faster. It's a feedback loop. True, some of that comes from printing money. But value is actually being created all the time (which means some new money must be printed all the time), and capital will capture an ever-increasing share of the increasing pie. The rate of this increase is faster than the wealth is created. You can see this in the widening income growth gap between the top and the bottom. In turns out that a rising tide can indeed raise all boats, but it raises the boats at the top of the income curve much faster than those at the bottom, to the point where the boats at the bottom are only infinitesimally better off while the income of the rich is multiplied many times over.
- You're describing regulatory capture, which is true in unregulated capitalism. When I say "unregulated capitalism", I'm not talking about business regulation---I'm talking about regulating capital itself. In a healthy, regulated capitalist system, the political influence of individual companies is diluted and there is greater competition. Business regulation is always needed to ensure things like public safety, contract enforcement, and fair competition. But when disproportionately large players politically capture the regulatory machinery, they tilt the regulatory playing field towards themselves. This is a symptom, it is not the disease.
- "Free market" is an oxymoron. Without regulation, there is no market. Market rules were among the earliest types of law. The chief problem with our current system is that capital is largely unregulated. In capitalism, wealth flows uphill, and will naturally become more and more concentrated, eventually distorting both the markets and the political system. There has to be some active mechanism to oppose this uphill flow. The positive effect of capital regulation like progressive taxation isn't necessarily due to wealth redistribution to the poor (though there may be very valid moral reasons to do it), but rather wealth-decentralization to the less-wealthy. From a systems point of view, it's better to shift opportunity from someone whose chief qualification for it is their wealth, to several others who have less of a wealth advantage and so are more likely to be qualified on merit.
- I think what pops is the Ponzi-like financial structure underlying the huge investments. The projected profits simply don't come fast enough to justify incremental investment, and the pyramid runs out of incoming money. Yes, AI is huge. But the Internet was also huge. And it still couldn't sustain the levels of investment that were being made in 1999 and 2000, even in the big players.
- I drove both before I bought the Bolt. The Leaf does have a nicer interior. While I wouldn't say it's a huge gap, it was noticeable. But the Leaf also felt heavier and more sluggish. In the end, the extra range, the CCS charge port, and the better driving feel (at least to me) made me prefer the Bolt.
- You are 100% right. In nature, the fitness landscape is not fixed, it is dependent on the co-evolution of other organisms at every scale. So the computational model is too simple to be a reliable guide. But in this case, if you assume constant fitness over some delta-t (kind of like calculus), I think it's still a plausible explanation for the divergence phenomenon in particular. Just a hypothesis, though, for sure.