White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it's based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations

Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary

White House lackey says "Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this" and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters

Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent... the trade deficit divided by imports.

tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up

Direct from USTR.gov:

To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

He has statutory emergency authority which can be checked by Congress if abused, except, what Congress?

(Also the tariffs are enforced by CBP, an executive agency.)

Drone warfare is politically agnostic. If it can be used by a Luigi against a healthcare CEO, it can be used by far-right extremists against progressive politicians, pride parades, or Black churches. I'm not very jazzed to live in the world of Slaughterbots.

Might be your settings. When I flip the front page to "Active" most of the posts have hundreds of comments (though I prefer setting it to "Top Six Hours").

In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There's a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and "for you" pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it's too late.

To be fair, that's all they have to go on. If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many pages is a lifetime (or even a childhood) of sight and sound?

At least it's not pulling up mostly Motorhead-related content like it used to...

Yep. (Google Translate link)

I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.

It had been crossposted to TheOnion community on another instance, but the story is real.

I feel like a good test of any supposed AGI would be to hook it up to a feed of a classic 3D platformer like Mario 64, give it input control, and see how long it takes to progress through the game. We're seeing sparks of this with Claude Plays Pokemon, but any self-respecting superintelligence (or even human-equivalent) should be more than capable of learning the control scheme, navigating the 3D environment, solving puzzles, and generally playing through as competently as any 10-year-old seeing the game for the first time.

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past -- his unemployment, his wife's involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay -- would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).

In my experience, a lot of them aren't dead, just slow. If you do post something, it still gets circulated to everyone subscribed and typically gets a decent amount of votes and comments.

I feel like doing that automatically would just encourage instances to defederate if their larger communities didn't like the cut of another instance's jib. The culture clash would be harder to tolerate if content were mixed by default like that.

Maybe an easier way for end users to do it themselves? Like making a feed of multiple communities under one topic.

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All (2009):

Curt Linderman Sr., the host of “Linderman Live!” on AutismOne Radio and the editor of a blog called the Autism File, recently wrote online that it would “be nice” if [rotavirus vaccine co-inventor] Offit “was dead.”

I’d met Linderman at Autism One. He’d given his card to me as we stood outside the Westin O’Hare talking about his autistic son. “We live in a very toxic world,” he’d told me, puffing on a cigarette.

It was hard to argue with that.

something something Tiananmen Square

It's a nice sentiment, but things haven't exactly worked out for the pro-democracy movement in HK.

I could see them maybe using a custom version of Deepseek for that second tier. Could be a boon for them if the inference costs are a lot lower.